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Quentin Collins Sextet: Road Warrior
by Chris May
Hard-bop with a modern twist from the British trumpeter Quentin Collins, who is probably best known for his work with the Kyle Eastwood Band and who leads his own transatlantic group on Road Warrior. The frontline is completed by two British-based saxophonists, Leo Richardson on tenor and Meilana Gillard on alto. The rhythm section is out ...
Paul Booth: Travel Sketches
by Chris May
The intense media interest surrounding the rise of the British woke jazz movement is welcome, but it is increasingly monopolising local bandwidth. Great British jazz which adheres more closely to the founding American tradition is becoming sidelined. Babies and bathwater come to mind. One of the few British labels looking at the 360-degree picture ...
Donald Byrd: Ethiopian Knights
by Chris May
Donald Byrd (1932-2013) was a solid and dependable and prolifically recorded hard-bop trumpeter during the style's mid 1950s to mid 1960s heyday, though he was never an innovator, far less an auteur. He later went on to make a string of tedious disco-cum-jazz-funk albums which sold by the truckload. On the cusp of this ...
Marion Brown: Capricorn Moon To Juba Lee Revisited
by Chris May
The release of this album is an event momentous enough to warrant repeating the preamble to the previously published review of Albert Ayler's Quartets 1964: Spirits To Ghosts Revisited.... Before considering the music on this disc, something else has to be celebrated--the resurrection of Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut label (see past profiles). Founded ...
Albert Ayler: Quartets 1964: Spirits To Ghosts Revisited
by Chris May
Before considering the music on this disc, something else has to be celebrated—the resurrection of Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut label (see past profiles). Founded in 1975, the Swiss-based company's hatOLOGY series championed European and American outer-limits jazz, producing a large catalogue of newly recorded and legacy material. Sadly, in 2016, financial pressures obliged Uehlinger to ...
Maleem Mahmoud Ghania & Pharoah Sanders: The Trance Of Seven Colors
by Chris May
Producer Bill Laswell gets a bad rap in some quarters, and sometimes he deserves it. During his mid 1980s through mid 1990s purple period, Laswell tended to apply, some would say impose, a one-size-fits-all, avant-rock-and-funk formula across the board to the projects he took on. It was novel and radical and compelling and Laswell assembled a ...
Various Artists: Sunny Side Up
by Chris May
London DJ Gilles Peterson's worldwide touring produces some singular jazz and near-jazz experiences, the best of which he documents on his Brownswood Recordings label. Modern Cuban music figures prominently in the catalogue, and there have been several Japanese jazz albums, most memorably the Toshio Matsuura Group's Loveplaydance: 8 Scenes From The Floor (Brownswood, 2018). The label ...
Mark Kavuma: Celebrating Lee Krasner: Living Colour & Thelonious Monk: Brilliant Corners
by Chris May
Mark Kavuma Quintet Barbican Art Gallery Celebrating Lee Krasner: Living Colour & Thelonious Monk: Brilliant Corners London July 25, 2019 Tonight's event at the Barbican Art Gallery was a vivid audio-visual timewarp which transported the audience back to bohemian New York during the 1950s. The ...
We Out Here: The Fast-Forward Evolution of British Jazz
by Chris May
After a lifetime in the shadow of its American parent, British jazz is finally coming of age. A community of young, London-based musicians is forging a style which, while anchored in the American tradition, reflects the modern Caribbean and African cultural heritages of the majority of its vanguard players. The music also addresses the race, class ...
Mark Kavuma: The Banger Factory
by Chris May
An associate of the Tomorrow's Warriors and Kinetika Bloco community projects through whose ranks have passed practically all the leading musicians in London's woke-jazz world, trumpeter Mark Kavuma stands a little apart from many of his peers. While the new London scene is characterized by hefty infusions of modern Caribbean and African music and London club ...
