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Amanda 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 moreNat Birchall: The Storyteller: A Musical Tribute To Yusef Lateef
by Chris May
The deification of Yusef Lateef, which began only after his passing in 2013, rests on the first decade of his long recording career, from 1957—1967, when he extended the language of jazz to include elements of Asian and Middle Eastern musics while recording for Savoy, Prestige and Impulse. After a second decade with Atlantic, where he recorded ten stonkingly good soul-jazz albums, Lateef took up with Creed Taylor's CTI and began a sad decline into noodling wallpaper music. This period ...
read moreNat Birchall: Obeah Man
by Chris May
Welcome to the latest analog-era time warp... the vinyl revival has rebirthed the 45rpm seven-inch jazz single. The format faded away in the 1960s. Even back then, chart hits such as Stan Getz's “Desafinado" (Verve, 1962) were freak events, but before the coming of album playing FM radio stations, an edited version of an album track could be powerful promo on mainstream radio--and as Bob Weinstock, founder of the Prestige label, told an interviewer in 1959, “The four best promo ...
read moreInfinite Spirit Music: Live Without Fear
by Chris May
Britain's Jazzman Records has form when it comes to spiritual jazz. Its series Spiritual Jazz: Modal, Esoteric and Deep Jazz, now one release away from its tenth volume, has made accessible again some of the most worthwhile but near-lost African American music of the 1970s. The label also supports modern day British musicians. Stand out home-grown releases during 2018 were Nat Birchall's Cosmic Language and Nick Woodmansey's Emanative's Earth. Jazzman rarely puts a foot wrong (the ninth ...
read moreVarious Artists: Spiritual Jazz 9: Blue Notes Parts 1 & 2
by Chris May
The ninth volume in Jazzman's Spiritual Jazz series is a 2 x CD (and 2 x double LP) compilation from the Blue Note catalogue. Just over half the material was recorded between 1964 and 1966, the final years during which the label was steered by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff and when the go-to engineer was still Rudy Van Gelder. Most of the remaining tracks are from 1968 and 1969. It has all been previously released. Spiritual ...
read moreDon Rendell / Ian Carr Quintet: The Complete Lansdowne Recordings 1965-1969 (Vinyl box set)
by Roger Farbey
Make no mistake, this vinyl box set reissue of the entire EMI Columbia oeuvre of the Rendell Carr Quintet is the British jazz equivalent of resurrecting the Dead Sea Scrolls(*). Although not the first time these ultra rare albums have been reissued (BGO Records obliged fans with these on CD, mostly as two-fers, in 2004) this is however a first for vinyl--legitimately that is. It took Gerald Short, owner of Jazzman Records a mere twenty years to persuade Universal Music ...
read moreNat Birchall: Cosmic Language
by Chris May
Spiritual jazz resonates most deeply during times of social stress and turmoil. It was, after all, created by African American musicians who were engaged with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Later given the alternative description Afrofuturist jazz, the music had one foot planted in science fiction-inspired magical realism and the other in black consciousness-inspired social activism. The balance varied from musician to musician, but even the most magical realist among them--a grouping which would include Alice Coltrane, Pharoah ...
read moreEmanative: Earth
by Chris May
Every so often an album comes along that is so sweeping in its cultural scope, and so far beyond the norms of critical discourse, that it almost beggars description. Such a disc is Earth, the fourth physical-release album from drummer and producer Nick Woodmansey's Emanative and the follow-up to the band's outstanding The Light Years Of The Darkness (Brownswood, 2015). Unlike the earlier album, whose source material comprised tunes written by Sun Ra, Joe Henderson, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry and ...
read moreNat Birchall: Invocations
by Phil Barnes
There is a feeling of a new beginning on this collection from Nat Birchall. Superficially the album is released on Henley-on-Thames' Jazzman records rather than Birchall's own Sound Soul and Spirit records, on which he released the wonderful World Without Form and classic Live in Larissa. More tangibly only Adam Fairhall on piano remains from those two collections, representing the last common link to the pool of musicians Birchall and Matthew Halsall drew from in their classic collaborations on Gondwana ...
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