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Dave Whitford
Josephine Davies & The Ensō Ensemble: The Celtic Wheel Of The Year Suite
by Angelo Leonardi
Sassofonista e compositrice britannica, nota per il trio Satori, Josephine Davies debutta con un ricco e raffinato progetto orchestrale, che presenta la sua suite in otto parti ispirata alle feste stagionali celtiche delle isole Shetland. “Dopo aver composto diversi pezzi per orchestra jazz" --ha detto Josephine--"ispirata da un trasferimento in campagna durante il lockdown, ho sentito l'urgenza di approfondire il mio legame con la natura e rivisitare una mia precedente composizione. (...) Ogni movimento della suite è ispirato ...
Continue ReadingJosephine Davies: Satori: Weatherwards
by Chris May
From an international perspective, the best kept secret in British jazz could be tenor and soprano saxophonist Josephine Davies. She first recorded in 2000 as a member of Crissy Lee's Jazz Orchestra, a fifteen piece all-woman band who made one album, the self-produced ...With Body And Soul. (Actually, there was one male in the lineup, trumpeter Craig Wild, and the joke in the boys' club that British jazz pretty much still was at the time, was that he had the ...
Continue ReadingRichard Fairhurst: Inside Out
by Neil Duggan
Richard Fairhurst was 19 when he released the first of three albums as the leader of The Hungry Ants. Approaching his 50th birthday in 2024, he has gone on to become one of the most distinctive pianists and composers in the UK. He presents his ideas on Inside Out in a piano trio arrangement. This is a format he began exploring when he formed Richard Fairhurst's Triptych with Danish bassist Jasper Hoiby and New York drummer Chris Vatalaro and released ...
Continue ReadingChris Biscoe: Music Is: Chris Biscoe Plays Mike Westbrook
by Duncan Heining
Chris Biscoe can trade choruses with the best and melt the heart with the tenderest of ballads. But that is not what makes him special. Live and on record there is always a sense of quiet anticipation as he starts a solo. One knows one is about to hear something new, something different. It is more than his mastery of a range of woodwinds. It is more than the wonderful tone he achieves seemingly effortlessly on each of his instruments--powerful, ...
Continue ReadingChris Biscoe: Music Is: Chris Biscoe Plays Mike Westbrook
by Chris May
Chris Biscoe has played in the bands led by the great British composer Mike Westbrook and/or his wife, singer and lyricist Kate Westbrook, every year since 1979 bar one. He is the Westbrooks' first-call saxophonist and clarinetist and the love runs both ways. It also rings out on every track of this beautiful album. The concept is straightforward. Biscoe has taken seven Westbrook pieces out of their original, mostly big band, contexts and arranged them for a ...
Continue ReadingRick Simpson: Everything All Of The Time: Kid A Revisited
by Ian Patterson
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, ...
Continue ReadingJosephine Davies: How Can We Wake?
by Friedrich Kunzmann
Straight out of Europe's hippest jazz-scene, London-based saxophonist Josephine Davie's third effort with her trio, Satori, offers a collage of melodic meditations that simultaneously defy and conform to their rhythmic and harmonic frames. As All About Jazz's Chris May very fittingly puts it in an extensive conversation with the saxophonist, unlike many of her UK-based contemporaries, Davies' brand of jazz isn't made up of dancefloor grooves or Afro-infused beats, but instead searches for innovation in the Far East, ...
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