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John Coltrane: Side Steps
by Chris May
John Coltrane Side Steps Prestige Records 2009 The 5-CD Side Steps follows two other Prestige box sets--the 6-CD Fearless Leader (2006) and 5-CD Interplay (2007)--which together catalogue saxophonist John Coltrane's recordings for the label 1956-58. The three boxes, each packed with extraordinary music, chronicle on parallel paths ...
Portico Quartet: Isla
by Chris May
Having created a seismic sensation in Britain with its first album, Knee Deep In The North Sea (Babel, 2007)--which was a Mercury Prize Album Of The Year in 2008--Portico Quartet now releases that “difficult" second album. Can the group better its precocious debut? Yes it can. Portico has grown, as a collective entity and as individual ...
Kornstad: Dwell Time
by Chris May
Norwegian saxophonist and flautist Håkon Kornstad began to acquire an international profile in the mid-2000s as a member of the electro-acoustic band Wibutee, and with burgeoning guest appearances with the likes of nu jazz auteur and keyboard player Bugge Wesseltoft and singers Sidsel Endresen and Anja Garbarek. What made Kornstad's playing so refreshing then, and continues ...
Vijay Iyer Trio: Historicity
by Chris May
There is much that is exciting about pianist Vijay Iyer and almost as much that is irritating. The excitement is in the music and the irritation in the miasma of cerebralization that surrounds it. The most recent instance of the latter comes with the packaging for Historicity. Any album title which requires a fairly lengthy liner ...
John Coltrane: Kulu Se Mama
by Chris May
A vibrant and accessible album from saxophonist John Coltrane's late-middle period, Kulu Se Mama has been only fitfully on catalogue since its original release in early 1967, and has tended to be overlooked in favor of near contemporaneous works like A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) and Ascension (Impulse!, 1966), elements from both of which it reprises. ...
Stan Getz: Apasionado
by Chris May
Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz's neo-big band album Apasionado has been consigned to minor league status since its original release in 1990. It does, indeed, look unpromising: recorded in fall 1989, when Getz was undergoing treatment for the cancer which would kill him less than two years later; with a pair of synthesizers replicating a string section; ...
Various Artists: Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae
by Chris May
The lovingly conceived, brilliantly executed, multi-platform Rocksteady: The Roots Of Reggae aims to achieve the same sort of museum piece-to-modernity transformation for Jamaican rocksteady that Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit, 1996) created for Cuban music of an earlier era. As with Buena Vista, there's a CD, a movie and a package tour. The CD features ...
Part 3 - Tunde Williams / Lekan Animashaun: Mr Big Mouth / Low Profile (Not For The Blacks)
by Chris May
The first two entries in the Afrobeat Diaries looked at the extraordinarily courageous albums with which Fela Kuti took on the Nigerian military regime during the mid to late 1970s. Part 3 revisits two outstanding albums made by key Afrika 70 members during the same period--trumpeter Tunde Williams' Mr Big Mouth (Afrodisia, 1977), recorded in 1975, ...
Part 2 - Fela Anikulapo Kuti and the sack of Kalakuta Republic
by Chris May
Part 1 of the Afrobeat Diaries looked at the circumstances surrounding Fela Kuti's 1974 album Alagbon Close (Jofabro), the first of Kuti's discs so explicitly to expose the brutality and injustice then, as now, rampant among the Nigerian police and judiciary. Part 2 first relates the consequences of that brave album, which began ...
Derek Nash: Snapshot
by Chris May
Despite releasing seven albums with his jazz/funk/fusion bands Sax Appeal and Protect The Beat, and a previous solo album, Setting New Standards (Jazzizit, 2000), British saxophonist Derek Nash remains something of an unsung hero. He has, perhaps, been engaged in such a diversity of projects--playing with pianist Jools Holland's Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, running his Clowns ...
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