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Logan Richardson: To Boldly Go Where No Jazz Has Gone Before
by Chris May
In a 2016 interview, Kansas City-born alto saxophonist Logan Richardson said: “Jazz will constantly change because there's constantly a new us, new times. There will always be a fight from the conformists--but they don't represent where the tradition is coming from." Richardson was talking not long after the release of his adventurous Blue Note album, Shift, ...
Nik Bartsch: Entendre
by Chris May
Back in 2006, Swiss composer and keyboard player Nik Bärtsch's ECM debut, Stoa, recorded with his group Ronin, sounded like the album James Brown might have made if he'd appointed Steve Reich musical director of his backing band, The J.B.'s. Simultaneously cerebral and on the good foot, it was minimalism, Jim, but not as we knew ...
Wes Montgomery: The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings
by Chris May
Recorded in spring 1965, during Wes Montgomery's sole European tour, The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings presents the guitarist as part of an all-star international octet assembled for a one-off appearance on German television station NDR. The programme was part of a series presenting musicians who did not regularly work together in informal “rehearsal" performances. Montgomery's tour, ...
Swantje Lampert: Now!
by Chris May
The Austrian tenor saxophonist Swantje Lampert caught the jazz bug relatively late, while studying for a degree in law. She took up the saxophone and, some twenty years later, after graduating from the Vienna Conservatoire and the Berklee School of Music, has matured into an assured player and a characterful composer. Lampert is ...
Logan Richardson: AfroFuturism
by Chris May
In a 2016 interview, Kansas City-born alto saxophonist Logan Richardson said: “Jazz will constantly change because there's constantly a new us, new times. There will always be a fight from the conformists--but they don't represent where the tradition is coming from." Richardson was talking not long after the release of his adventurous Blue Note album, Shift. ...
See Through 4: Permanent Moving Parts
by Chris May
Composer and bassist Pete Johnston, leader of Toronto's See Through 4, cites Lennie Tristano and Eric Dolphy as primary reference points for the quartet's music. As a listener, you may feel such connections are tenuous. Whatever his strengths, Tristano was not known for playfulness, a quality which runs through Permament Moving Parts. Plus, the contrapuntalism to ...
Andy Hague's Double Standards: Release
by Chris May
English musicians pay a price for living outside London—the country is too small to support more than one major metropolitan music hub, even in the digital age. The old adage out of sight, out of mind still applies. Trumpeter and record label director Matthew Halsall's Manchester-based Gondwana operation, and the vibrant spiritual jazz scene which is ...
Solstice: Food For Thought
by Chris May
An off-the-wall and extraordinarily beautiful album, Food For Thought is London sextet Solstice's follow-up to Alimentation (Two Rivers), a niche-jazz landmark in 2016. The album blends jazz with prog-rock and tropicalia-like psychedelia. It is intricate, lyrical and wildly inventive. It is also technically demanding and forensically arranged, yet it all sounds effortless. It is, most of ...
Saxophone Colossi: An Alternative Top Ten Banging Albums
by Chris May
Miles Davis once said you could tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker. You might want to add John Coltrane, you might even want to add Davis. But however you cut it, saxophones and trumpets have been the flag bearers of the music. Trumpets got things rolling and saxophones came into ...
Gustav Lundgren: Live At Fasching
by Chris May
If the Norway's Eivind Aarset is one side of Scandinavian fretboard virtuosity, Sweden's Gustav Lundgren is the other. Aarset works with experimentalists such as Jon Hassell and Jan Bang. Lundgren is more straight-ahead, evoking Jack Wilkins and Pat Metheny. Both guitarists, however, are lyrical players. If you enjoy the linear melodism of Lundgren's Live At Fasching, ...
