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Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View
by Geno Thackara
Whatever view Matthew Halsall is sharing here, it is drawn from life and correspondingly picturesque--not just always changing, but always colorful and fascinating. This View comes partly from the sea-and-sky vistas he enjoyed while creating it, splitting time between England and Wales. Partly, it also comes from a couple of years collecting a trove of percussive odds-and-ends, and cheerfully playing with all the organic sounds they offered. Tinkering with those tones, with no strict framework in mind, he produces a ...
read moreMatthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View
by Chris May
Based in the northern English city of Manchester, trumpeter Matthew Halsall debuted on record in 2008 with Sending My Love (Gondwana), a stylish take on the meditative end of the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Halsall's emergence pre-dated by over half a decade that of the London alternative scene vanguarded by musicians such as Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, and his trajectory has continued to progress quite apart from it. This is unusual in England, a small ...
read moreChip Wickham: Cloud 10
by Peter Jones
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 ...
read moreAmanda Whiting: Lost In Abstraction
by Peter Jones
The revival in the fortunes of the harp has been one of the more unexpected developments in jazz: Brandee Younger's 2021 album Somewhere Different made an impact on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, the instrument has been finding favor in the hands of both Tara Minton and Alina Bzhezhinska. Now Wales' very own Amanda Whiting is coming up fast on the rails with this, her third album. Listening to Lost in Abstraction is a rich ...
read moreAmanda Whiting: Lost In Abstraction
by Gareth Thompson
Ahh, the angelic harp, a symbol of celestial beings, Biblical healing, Irish identity and a rubbish lager. In jazz terms we think of the instrument in relation to Casper Reardon, Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and more recently Deborah Henson-Conant. A noble list of names if not exactly boundless. The harp is, after all, much less portable than a sax or trumpet, not to mention a good deal quieter. Then consider that odd grasping motion of playing, that strange conjuration of ...
read moreChip Wickham: Blue To Red
by Bruce Lindsay
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 ...
read moreChip Wickham: Blue To Red
by Chris May
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. ...
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