Jazz Articles about Denys Baptiste

Denys Baptiste at the 606 Club

by Neil Duggan
October 3, 2023

Denys Baptiste 606 Club on Oh! JazzLondon August 24, 2023 There is something about jazz and basements, they just seem to work so well together. Maybe it is the intimacy the low lights and low ceilings confer. The 606 Club is a quintessential example of the cellar music venue. It is tucked away down an alley in the Chelsea area of London. Find the door below an unassuming sign, down the dim staircase and you ...

Sultan Stevenson: Faithful One

by Chris May
March 14, 2023

It is rare for a debut album by a young musician to merit four stars, but Faithful One, by the 22 year old London pianist and composer Sultan Stevenson, deserves every shining one of them. An alumnus of the community programme Tomorrow's Warriors, in his liner note he singles out the Warriors' founders, Gary Crosby and Janine Irons, and one of its tutors, tenor saxophonist Binker Golding, for special thanks. Stevenson has been a fast study. For confirmation of that, ...

Denys Baptiste: Pathfinder For The New London Jazz

by Chris May
June 30, 2020

Bandleader, composer and educator Denys Baptiste is among the generation of musicians, many of them of Caribbean or African heritage, who pointed the way for the younger players who have emerged on the London jazz scene since around 2015. Baptiste's contemporaries include saxophonists Jason Yarde, Soweto Kinch, Steve Williamson and Courtney Pine, and trumpeter Byron Wallen, and they were the first wave of British players purposefully to include their cultural heritages in the jazz they played. Unlike earlier generations of ...

Denys Baptiste: Making the Late Trane Accessible

by David Burke
October 10, 2017

Even the most avowed John Coltrane disciples among us would admit to grappling with some of the albums he released in the couple of years before his death--the likes of Ascension, Sun Ship and Om. And we weren't alone. His long-time drummer, Elvin Jones, told Downbeat magazine, “At times I couldn't hear what I was doing--matter of fact, I couldn't hear what anybody was doing. All I could hear was a lot of noise." Evidently British saxophonist Denys ...

Denys Baptiste: The Late Trane

by Roger Farbey
June 27, 2017

When a church is named after a jazz musician you know there's something more than music involved here. The spirituality with which John Coltrane immersed himself as exemplified by A Love Supreme, was just one of the drivers that helped make the saxophonist one of the greatest innovators of jazz. His later works were even more iconoclastic, embracing abstract themes and a conscious move towards free jazz, but still utilising time as propelled by the rhythmic powerhouse that was Elvin ...

Denys Baptiste: Jazz Missionary, Part 2-2

by Paul Olson
May 3, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2

London saxophonist Denys Baptiste made a huge splash in the U.K. when his debut 1999 CD Be Where You Are was shortlisted as a prestigious Mercury Prize Album of the Year. Jazz fans were perhaps less surprised, as Baptiste had apprenticed for years on record and in concert with the likes of tenor player Courtney Pine and bassist/Dune Records patriarch Gary Crosby's Nu Troop. I spoke with Baptiste in London about his musicial career, his ...

Denys Baptiste: Jazz Missionary, Part 1-2

by Paul Olson
May 2, 2005

Part 1 | Part 2

London saxophonist Denys Baptiste made a huge splash in the U.K. when his debut 1999 CD Be Where You Are was shortlisted as a prestigious Mercury Prize Album of the Year. Jazz fans were perhaps less surprised, as Baptiste had apprenticed for years on record and in concert with the likes of tenor player Courtney Pine and bassist/Dune Records patriarch Gary Crosby's Nu Troop. I spoke with Baptiste in London about his musicial career, his ...