Jazz Articles about Simon Houghton

About Simon Houghton

Album Review

Is it OK for music to be background? In other words, does all music have to be listened to with the same degree of concentration and freedom from distraction? It may be a moot question in these greatly distracted times. Here's another, related question: is the music you want on in the background necessarily inferior to the stuff you need to pay attention to? This new album from flutist/tenor saxophonist Chip Wickham is in the genre of spiritual ...

Album Review

Chip Wickham: Blue To Red

Read "Blue To Red" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
April 29, 2020

It's not always easy to feel uplifted and optimistic these days, when reasons to be downhearted seem to overwhelm the reasons to be cheerful. When an album's title refers to a planet's descent from life-giving blue to the deadness of red (Mars, in this context, but British flautist Chris Wickham fears that Earth may be heading in the same direction) it hardly appears likely that it's one for the “cheerful" pile: and yet Blue To Red, from Wickham, is one ...

Album Review

Chip Wickham: Blue To Red

Read "Blue To Red" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
April 20, 2020

The marketing thrust accompanying Chip Wickham's third album emphasises an affinity between the disc and the late 1960s / early 1970s work of Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane. Certainly, Blue To Red ticks two boxes: Wickham puts aside his saxophone to play only flute and alto flute, whose seraphic tones were favoured by Lateef and Coltrane; and there are plenty of Coltrane-like harp glisses, played by Amanda Whiting, like Wickham a graduate of Manchester-based spiritual-jazz trumpeter Matthew Halsall's Gondwana Orchestra. ...