Jazz Articles about Mark Lockheart

Mark Lockheart & the NDR Big Band: Days Like These

by Nic Jones
March 1, 2010

Considering the instrumental forces that the big band offers, it's surprising how conservative a lot of large ensemble writing is. Days Like These isn't iconoclastically innovative, but there's enough on offer to satisfy those who find such conservatism tiresome.

Saxophonist Mark Lockheart clearly appreciates what he has at his disposal for all of the relatively conventional section scoring. NDR is a band that embraces rhythmic precision, even as it remains loose enough to avoid sounding drilled. Despite the cyclical, quasi-minimalist ...

Mark Lockheart: In Deep

by AAJ Italy Staff
August 24, 2009

Eccola ancora la Edition Records. con il suo carico di preziose registrazioni che stanno offrendo un significativo spaccato della scena improvvisativa inglese. Dopo i talenti giovanili (ne sentiremo parlare a lungo) a nome Dave Stapleton e Mattew Bourne celebrati con gli album Dismantling the Waterfall e Lost Something, tocca ad un veterano come il sassofonista Mark Lockheart rivelare la propria arte. Che parte da lontano e precisamente da Loose Tube, band di ventun elementi che giocò un ruolo fondamentale nella ...

Mark Lockheart: In Deep

by John Kelman
August 14, 2009

It's been four years since saxophonist Mark Lockheart's best-of-year Moving Air (Basho, 2005). Contrasting Moving Air's organic multi-tracking, In Deep goes for purer in-the-moment territory, with a traditional trumpet/sax/piano/bass/drums quintet that's anything but conventional.

Lockheart's ability to evoke a multiplicity of images with his music has been a marker with groups including his 11-piece Scratch Band and the Big Idea sextet that he formed to perform the more complex layering of Moving Air. On In Deep ...

Disassembler: Fear Is The Mother Of Violence

by Chris May
February 12, 2009

Disassembler Fear Is The Mother Of Violence 33 Jazz 2008

Led by guitarist and composer Trevor Warren, Disassembler brings together half a dozen outward-looking British jazz musicians in a jazz and post-rock mix with Native American, Albanian and Mongolian flourishes. The adventurous and attractively rough-edged Fear Is The Mother Of Violence is the follow-up to the group's debut, Disassembler, (33 Jazz, 2005), and is shaped conceptually around Warren's disenchantment with the politics ...

Mark Lockheart: Moving Air

by John Kelman
October 9, 2005

Jazz may be a marginalized genre, but that condition seems at odds with the wealth of outstanding artists moving it forward. And when you consider regionalization, both stylistically and geographically, it can be almost insurmountable to keep track of jazz's ongoing evolution. Consequently, most artists find themselves working in insular surroundings, working with the same circle of players and performing in the same venues, even as they fight to expand their horizons.

Britain has maintained its own jazz community for ...

Mark Lockheart: Moving Air

by Bev Stapleton
September 30, 2005

The music scene in the UK notices jazz about once every ten years and then forgets the musicians thrust into the limelight quite unforgivingly. The recent Jazz Britannia series told the tale of Keith Tippett, extravagantly flying his Centipede band to Europe in the early '70s but reduced to picking potatoes by the 1980s. In the mid-1980s a young big band called Loose Tubes gained a high enough profile to be featured in a rare jazz concert at the BBC ...