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Content by tag "Duncan Heining"
Grand Union Orchestra at Wilton's Music Hall
Grand Union Orchestra
Wilton's Music Hall
London
June 14, 2017
Song of Contagion, Grand Union Orchestra's latest show, would be a strange subject indeed for any other ensemble. But for leader/composer Tony Haynes and his comrades, it sits perfectly within the orchestra's progressive dialogue between the musics and ...
Mike Westbrook at Bury St. Edmunds Festival
Mike Westbrook and Kate Westbrook
Bury St. Edmunds Festival
The Church of St. John the Evangelist
May 19, 2017
Of all his many achievements, Mike Westbrook's The Westbrook Blake is one of his finest. Few works in jazz have combined music and text, voices and instrumentation, to such profound effect. The ...
Paul Anka: Rock Swings!
A while ago, me and Mrs. O'Groove were at the Diamante Dance Academy, Chelmsford --I kid you not--for our regular lesson, when our teacher, Natasha Fellowes, put on this big band version of Van Halen's “Jump." Turned out it was off Paul Anka's Rock Swings album (2005). No particular reason but I've always had a soft ...
read moreMalcolm Griffiths: A Man For All Seasons
We talk often of the stars, like 'Trane and Miles. We remember the bandleaders, such as Basie and Duke. We even recall the composers and arrangers, Ellington again, Gil Evans and Monk. And we never forget those star soloists like Johnny Hodges or Lester Young. But the guys in the machine room, the guys who make ...
read moreJan Garbarek: Popofoni
Popofoni was originally issued as a double LP in the early seventies. It was both a reaction and a response by a number of Norwegian composers to a spurious debate that had taken place on Norwegian television in 1969. The debate pitted proponents of popular culture against spokespeople for European Art Music. Popofoni was intended an ...
read moreChris Biscoe Allison Neale: Then and Now
The idea here is a simple one. Pick a selection of tunes--five standards, two originals--and revisit them, in the style of the Gerry Mulligan/Paul Desmond Quartet. That group was a brief affair, making just two records together--Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet and Two of a Mind. Cleverly, Biscoe and Neale have only picked two tunes covered by ...
read moreTom Challenger's Brass Mask: Brass Mask Live
You need a truly modern street band in your musical life. That's a statement. Period. No “buts," no “maybes." You might not know it but it's just what you've been lacking and here it is with Brass Mask's second CD, Live.
I enjoyed their first record, Spy Boy a lot. Here was a band ...
Roberto Bonati: Nor Sea, nor Land, nor Salty Waves
Italian composer and bassist is a master of the musical journey. Rêve de Jongleur (2000) with the ParmaFrontiere Orchestra took the listener along the pilgrim routes of medieval Europe that carried the song of the troubadour, as well as the faithful and goods to trade. A Silvery Silence--fragments from Moby Dick (2006) followed the whalers of ...
read moreMartin Speake: The Thinking Fan's Saxophonist
British alto saxophonist, Martin Speake, is one of the most adventurous and articulate musicians in a music peppered with creative artists. That he is not a household name--even within the proscribed and marginalised world of jazz--says more about the times than it does about Speake or his single-minded approach to his art.
Speake combines ...
Julie Tippetts: Didn't You Used To Be Julie Driscoll?
The respect in which Julie Tippetts is held by her fellow musicians and fans is truly heartening--and truly deserved. Back in the late sixties, then Julie Driscoll, she gave up a very different career trajectory in music, one that had begun with Steampacket and continued with Brian Auger & The Trinity, to follow a journey characterised ...
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