Jazz Articles about Rick Simpson

About Rick Simpson

Album Review

Adding politically charged spoken-word lyrics to instrumental jazz needs to be done with care, because if sloganeering is tedious to listen to once, it becomes unbearable on repeated exposure. The record containing it drops off one's playlist. Counterproductive or what? The British saxophonist and rapper Soweto Kinch, however, has pulled the trick off many times. From Conversations With The Unseen (Dune, 2003) through to The Black Peril (Soweto Kinch Recordings, 2019), Kinch has made the combination work because of the ...

Album Review

Kristian Borring: Out of Nowhere

Read "Out of Nowhere" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 15, 2021

After coming of age in his home country, Danish-born guitarist Kristian Borring relocated to the U.K. where he became a stalwart fixture on the jazz scene and released four albums as leader of his own groups. Out of Nowhere is the fifth, recorded in 2019, shortly before the coronavirus pandemic struck, and featuring as before a rhythm section comprising three British comrades: pianist Rick Simpson, bassist Mick Coady and drummer Jon Scott. Borring wrote six of the ...

Album Review

Rick Simpson: Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited

Read "Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 26, 2021

It is one thing to cover a rock song, after all, jazz musicians have been doing that since The Beatles, but few have tackled an entire album by a rock band. The target of UK pianist/composer Rick Simpson's admiration is Radiohead's Kid A (Parlophone, 2000), an album that provoked wildly divergent critical response in its day. Some lambasted the electronic-influenced follow-up to the hugely successful, hook-laden OK Computer (Parlophone, 1997) as pretentious, incoherent and alienating. Others saw it as bold, ...