Home » Search Center » Results: Chris May
Results for "Chris May"
Sun Ra: Ten Great AfroFuturist Albums
by Chris May
With one hundred and twenty five albums to his name, not including reissues, any attempt to compile a Sun Ra Top Ten is a pretty ludicrous endeavour. There is simply too much great music from which to choose and way too much to put to one side. So the honour roll which follows should be regarded ...
Viktor Haraszti: Equanimity: A Futuristic Jazz Tale
by Chris May
Equanimity: A Futuristic Jazz Tale is the debut album from Viktor Haraszti, a Hungarian-born, Dutch-based tenor saxophonist and composer. It is a solo project, recorded in isolation in 2021, on which Haraszti also plays clarinet, EWI, flute and keyboards. Bad Plus drummer Dave King helps out on one track, drummer Marshall Curtly on another three, and ...
Estraven: Ignored Advice
by Chris May
South London band Estraven's debut album is a pleasure and a breath of fresh air: a novel chunk of acoustic jazz which avoids what has become, in 2022, the South London scene's default focus on grooves and dancefloors. Ignored Advice ploughs its own furrow. The young piano-less quartet is led by bassist and ...
Joe Henderson, Bill Evans, Jim Hall: Buried Treasure from Germany's MPS Label
by Chris May
Between its founding in 1968 and sale in 1983, the original incarnation of the recently revived German label MPS—the initials stand for Musik Produktion Schwarzwald (Music Production Black Forest)—notched up around five hundred releases. Some were recorded in the US by American musicians, many more were recorded in Europe and featured bands made up of European ...
Binker & Moses: Feeding The Machine
by Chris May
Many of us who are fully paid-up intravenous-feed junkies for Binker and Moses would be happy if the semi-free London duo stuck to their well-honed paradigm of acoustic visceralism until The Time Of The Last Persecution. Tenor saxophonist Binker Golding and drummer Moses Boyd, however, have been restless for a while, wanting to reconfigure their music. ...
Sun Ra: Lanquidity (2 x CD Edition)
by Chris May
When it comes to Sun Ra, the elephant in the room--or perhaps the intergalactic space frigate orbiting your sound system--is how many musicians in the band were bombed out on acid during a typical recording session? By all accounts, Ra ran a tight spaceship and drugs, mind expanding or numbing, were strictly off limits. Then again, ...
Tubby Hayes Quartet: The Complete Hopbine '69
by Chris May
Of all the many talented jazz musicians who blazed trails in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s, tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes in 2022 stands among the tallest. Hayes, too, is one of a handful of British musicians of his generation who have been practically deified by some of the emergent young players who are currently ...
Albert Ayler: La Cave Live-Cleveland 1966-Revisited
by Chris May
Cleveland club La Cave, a grungy cellar which could accommodate around two hundred people, opened as a folk venue in 1962, transitioned into rock mid-decade, and closed in 1969. Along the way, in amongst such counterculture flagbearers as the Velvet Underground and The Fugs, La Cave booked a few of the bad boys of so-called “new ...
Stan Tracey Trio: The 1959 Sessions
by Chris May
Sonny Rollins summed up the outsize talent of British pianist Stan Tracey in a remark he made sometime in the early 1960s. Tracey was then the house pianist at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, where Rollins was playing a season. “Does anyone over here realise how good this guy is?" Rollins asked the audience. ...
Ilaria Capalbo: Karthago
by Chris May
Bassist and composer Ilaria Capalbo was born and brought up in Italy but spends much of her time in Sweden, where she recorded Karthago and assembled the band which performs on it. It is always a joy to encounter for the first time a musician who sounds so fresh and original and whose music is such ...
