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Chris Batchelor
Laura Jurd & Paul Dunmall: Fanfares & Freedom
by John Sharpe
Well this is an entertaining premise. Free jazz maven Paul Dunmall as featured soloist in a suite composed by up- and-coming trumpeter Laura Jurd. Actually, the reality is more complex. It might be more accurate to say that the unfettered spirits of Dunmall's quartet, with bassist Caius Williams, drummer Miles Levin and pianist Liam Noble, offer the contrast with Jurd's score for a brass quintet. The unlikely combination came about as a commission from the Cheltenham Jazz Festival by promoter ...
Continue ReadingChris Batchelor's Zoetic: Telling The Tale
by Chris May
A founder member of the radical London big band Loose Tubes in 1983, trumpeter Chris Batchelor was one of the Young Turks leading the mid-to-late 1980s British jazz renaissance. While pianist and composer Django Bates emerged as perhaps the most high-profile member of the band, Batchelor is every inch his equal, both as a player and as a composer. Batchelor leads two groups in 2023. One is the Dada-esque romp Pigfoot, a quartet he founded in 2013 ...
Continue ReadingPigfoot: Pigfoot Shuffle
by Ian Patterson
Once a taste for mischief is acquired it's hard to rein it in. Pigfoot was having way, way too much fun on 21st Century Acid Trad (Village Life Records, 2014) to go straight on this, its second outing. If the former happily warped New Orleans jazz, Pigfoot Shuffle applies a similar concept to a broader pool of music, with rock 'n' roll, opera, soul, classic rock and pop coming in for some lovingly irreverent, jazzified treatment. In other hands it ...
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