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Enrico Pieranunzi: Live In Paris
by Chris May
Gorgeously lyrical but unpredictable and open to free jazz, Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi always delights. His recordings, which are now frequent going on prolific, move the scenery around so that he rarely plays in the same context twice running. Highlights from the last year or so have ranged from the spare and spacey explorations of Doorways ...
Super Rail Band Of The Buffet Hotel De La Gare De Bamako: Super Rail Band (aka New Dimensions In Rail Culture)
by Chris May
Despite recent forays onto the North American concert stage under the leadership of guitarist Djelima Dytounkara, the Super Rail Band's seminal role in the development of modern Malian music is today largely forgotten. They may be credited as an early launchpad for the careers of Salif Keita and Mory Kante, but their importance is deeper than ...
Iro Haarla: Northbound
by Chris May
During the 1980s and '90s, Iro Haarla was content to keep away from the limelight and act as the generally unacknowledged inner architect of the music of her husband, drummer Edward Vesala, and his Sound & Fury group. Haarla met Vesala shortly after leaving Helsinki's Sibelius Academy in 1978, and until his death in 1999 she ...
Jimmy Smith: Softly As A Summer Breeze
by Chris May
An oddity and supporting cast player in the Jimmy Smith canon, Softly As A Summer Breeze is nonetheless a welcome addition to Blue Note's Rudy Van Gelder remasters programme, bringing together three distinct sessions with partially overlapping personnel. All the evidence suggests the first four tracks were originally recorded for a Kenny Burrell album which was ...
Mina Agossi: Well You Needn't
by Chris May
Since her emergence on the Parisian music scene in the late 1990s, French/Beninoise singer Mina Agossi has polarised opinion sharply. Her style, a startling one-off which combines the caned and the languid with the intensely dramatic, infuriates as many people as it excites. Agossi is to jazz singing something of what Diamanda Galas is to torch ...
Soothsayers: Tangled Roots
by Chris May
In the years since Fela Anikulapo Kuti's death--and truth be told, for longer than that, because Kuti's music was increasingly overwhelmed by personal problems from the late-1980s on--it has seemed more and more unlikely that we would ever hear top-dollar, flowering-top, kick-the-door-in Afrobeat again. The golden age of the music was roughly 1973-76, when Kuti recorded ...
Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio: Bright Side
by Chris May
Like the earlier guitar master Johnny Smith, whose extraordinary melodicism and dazzling technique he shares, Wolfgang Muthspiel offers a rare combination of accessibility and sophistication. And with Bright Side he's created an album as lyrical, elegant and poised as Smith's 1953 masterpiece, Moonlight In Vermont (reissued by Roulette, 2004). It's heart-stoppingly beautiful music, and I haven't ...
Samo Salamon: Two Hours
by Chris May
Slovenian guitarist Samo Salamon has generated a good degree of heat over the last couple of years, first with his self-published '03 album Ornethology, then with last year's Ela's Dream. Both discs suggested the emergence of a young guitarist well on the way to finding a distinctive personal voice. The early promise is fulfilled on Two ...
Quadricromia: Quadricromia
by Chris May
An astonishingly compelling debut album from four Italian musicians in their early to mid-twenties, one of them just out of the conservatoire, three of them still studying, Quadricromia is full of the daring and enthusiasm of youth, but it has a depth and substance way beyond its years. Such is the commonality of conservatoire training among ...
Amancio D'Silva: Konkan Dance
by Chris May
After decades of neglect, the work of Goan-born guitarist Amancio D'Silva (1936-96) edged back towards the mic last summer with the re-release of his 1969 cross-cultural masterpiece, Integration. A pioneering blend of Indian raga, hard bop and early electric Miles, plus fainter traces of ska, rembetika, Link Wray, Ennio Morricone and more, Integration featured the recently ...
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