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Huw Warren & Peter Herbert: Everything We Love And More
by Chris May
He may be best known for his work with Perfect Houseplants and June Tabor, but pianist/composer Huw Warren's own albums are amongst the most precious treasures of the British jazz scene. Last autumn, Warren gave us one of 2005's highlights with Duw A Wyr. A characteristically free-spirited and well-realised set, the album featured ...
Cecil Taylor Unit: The Eighth
by Chris May
Half man and half force of nature, pianist Cecil Taylor has made his music a mass of opposites and contradictions. Simultaneously exhausting and liberating, primeval and space age, visceral and intellectually rigorous, it's like nothing that went before it and precious little that came afterward. As revolutionary a stylist as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane combined, ...
Various Artists: Righteousness
by Chris May
When founder/producer Alfred Lion retired from Blue Note in 1967, the label was plunged into a creative decline from which it never recovered. If that proposition was put to the critics, chances are most of them would agree. Lion was such a massively influential figure, and the various strands of hard bop he fostered on Blue ...
John Ettinger: Kissinger In Space
by Chris May
Rarely the ringmaster and more often the performing seal, the violin has never been a member of the jazz lineup's inner circle. From Stuff Smith's congenial swing through Ornette Coleman's excruciating scratchings, it has instead orbited colourfully around the margins, at best providing exoticism, at worst attention-seeking novelty. The closest the fiddle ever got to the ...
Oliver Nelson: Screamin' The Blues
by Chris May
A gutsy, down-home, blues-drenched saxophonist who could make flames burst out of the bell of his horn, Oliver Nelson is probably best remembered for his back-room chores on other musicians' records. He arranged Jimmy Smith's biggest chart hit, “Walk On The Wild Side," and an even bigger one for Louis Armstrong, “What A Wonderful World." He ...
Soweto Kinch: A Life In The Day Of B19: Tales Of The Towerblock
by Chris May
British saxophonist Soweto Kinch polarised opinion to the max in 2003, with his jazz 'n' hip-hop debut, Conversations With The Unseen (Dune). Many older listeners hated it, regarding it as a betrayal of tradition of Judas-like proportions. Younger, more inclusive listeners loved it, welcoming it as, simultaneously, a reconnection with jazz's long-lost roots in urban street ...
Various Artists: Pure Fire! A Gilles Peterson Impulse! Collection
by Chris May
Despite including two jaw-droppingly featherweight and disposable tracks--Michael White's “The Blessing Song" and Dave Mackay & Vicky Hamilton's “See You Later"--Pure Fire! is a welcome and timely compilation. Not only because of the other nine tracks, most of which are outstanding, but also because of the two offending pieces of la-la land muzak. The album presents, ...
Dennis Rollins' Badbone & Co.: Big Night Out
by Chris May
Standing on the verge of getting it on? Shit, trombonist Dennis Rollins' Badbone & Co. are getting it on. The dancefloor-centred Big Night Out is a mess of primo, back-in-the-day, fatback funk--a romping, party hard, on-the-one celebration of Funkadelic, General Caine, Mandrill, Prince Charles, Earth Wind & Fire and all those other US brothers--reignited with love, ...
Tomasz Stanko Quartet: Lontano
by Chris May
The Beatles got it wrong. When you're 64, Lennon & McCartney predicted, you'll be ready for the knackers yard. But the lovable moptops were only in their twenties then, like Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, and each had already changed the shape of things, the Beatles with “She Loves You" (1963), Stanko on Astigmatic (1965). It was ...
Ike Quebec: It Might As Well Be Spring
by Chris May
A generation older than the tenor saxophone young Turks who helped define Blue Note during its 1955-65 heyday, Ike Quebec's style was fully formed a decade before the innovations of Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson--and his legacy has been consistently overshadowed as a result. But while Quebec may not have been storming any barricades, ...
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