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Jazz Articles about Jonathan Bratoeff
Jonathan Bratoeff & Chris Vatalaro: Chapters
by Chris May
Unexpectedly, a trend has been developing among musicians associated with London's F-IRE collective to revisit the standards repertoire. It's not an area this experimentally inclined body of players usually inhabits, but the results so far--all recorded by duos--make it an engaging diversion.
Saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist Liam Noble were first off the block with Let's Call This (Babel, 2006). Noble returned to similar territory with percussionist Paul Clarvis on Starry Starry Night (Village Life, 2009). And now ...
read moreJonathan Bratoeff: Points Of Perception
by Chris May
London-based guitarist Jonathan Bratoeff's Between Lines (F-IRE, 2005) was a collection of edgy small group improvisations which delivered plenty and promised more. The recording placed Bratoeff's classically rooted but adventurous electric guitar--somewhere out of Jimmy Raney, heading in a more abstract direction--alongside the leaders of Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear, respectively: Pete Wareham (tenor saxophone) and Sebastian Rochford (drums), and Tom Mason (bass). The compelling recording focused on extended real-time soloing and group interplay.
Points Of Perception paints on a ...
read moreJonathan Bratoeff Quartet: Between Lines
by Chris May
While it's most talked about right now for the thrilling fast-forward postmodernism of Pete Wareham's Acoustic Ladyland and Sebastian Rochford's Polar Bear, this album from French-born guitarist Jonathan Bratoeff is a reminder that London's F-IRE collective is neither monochrome nor monolith, but a multicoloured assembly of individuals and aesthetics. The twenty or so musicians at the collective's core are indeed all card-carrying apostles of experiment, adventure, and, to varying degrees, inclusion, but there are evolutionists as well as revolutionists amongst ...
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