Jazz Articles

The Geordie Approach: Inatween

by Ian Patterson
August 23, 2013

At the risk of pigeonholing The Geordie Approach's music, there's really nothing like a little Noise/skronk/experimental electro/free jazz/pounding post-rock to shake off the cobwebs. The trio's debut album, Why Eye (Bruce's Fingers, 2007) will have deterred the faint hearted with its intense free improvisations, and equally, sucked in more adventurous listeners into the all-enveloping spiral of sound. Inatween picks up where Why Eye left off, blurring the edges of musical genres and raising a standard for collective free improvisation that ...

The Geordie Approach: Why Eye

by Eyal Hareuveni
November 27, 2007

The Geordie Approach is an experimental collaboration between Norwegian alto sax/electronics player Petter Frost Fadnes, drummer Ståle Birkeland with Geordie-born Englishman guitarist/ electronics player Chris Sharkey, all proud members of the Leeds Improvised Music Association. All have collaborated with some of the most prominent figures of the fertile music scene in Leeds, UK, including pianist/composer Matthew Bourne and percussionist Paul Hession.

The group's debut album was recorded on Simon H. Fell's French label, Bruce Fingers, with ...

SFQ: Thirteen Rectangles

by Glenn Astarita
December 26, 2002

Long hailed as one of the finest bassist/composers to grace Britain’s always flourishing modern/free jazz arena, Simon H. Fell has released much of his most prolific work on his Bruce’s Fingers label. With this outing, he leads a quintet through fourteen interrelated pieces, distinguished by various degrees of momentum and complex, harmonic formations. As Fell states in the liners, “ The structure of the work is derived from the 1930 painting by Wassily Kandinsky known in English as Thirteen Rectangles. ...

Paul Hession - Simon H. Fell - Charles Wharf: Improvabilly

by Glenn Astarita
October 6, 2002

Bassist/composer Simon H. Fell represents a significant force within Britain’s generally fertile improvisational scene. Yet, the artist has worked with Americans such as John Zorn (sax), Joey Baron (drums) and others, while also venturing into mainstream jazz and chamber frameworks. With this release, recorded in what the musicians refer to as a “dark and smelly room,” the trio’s freely concocted improvisations might be analogous to an action packed cinematic thriller. Besides the division of these works into sequentially oriented compositions, ...