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Sean Khan: Palmares Fantasy
by Chris May
Palmares Fantasy is the fifth album to be released by British saxophonist Sean Khan under his own name or as the leader of SK Radicals. Like its predecessors, it is a blinder, in touch with the jazz tradition while absorbing influences from beyond it and wearing its political heart on its sleeve. The music is characteristic ...
Nicola Conte: Let Your Light Shine On
by Chris May
Italian guitarist, bandleader, crate digger and DJ Nicola Conte's journeys into musics originating from beyond Europe—be they Brazilian, Hindustani, Latin American or African—sometimes carry a touch of the touristic about them, but his work is so transparently heartfelt that it never becomes a problem. It is also, always, superbly well crafted. Conte identifies Let Your Light ...
Nat Birchall: Cosmic Language
by Chris May
Spiritual jazz resonates most deeply during times of social stress and turmoil. It was, after all, created by African American musicians who were engaged with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Later given the alternative description Afrofuturist jazz, the music had one foot planted in science fiction-inspired magical realism and the other in black consciousness-inspired ...
Emanative: Earth
by Chris May
Every so often an album comes along that is so sweeping in its cultural scope, and so far beyond the norms of critical discourse, that it almost beggars description. Such a disc is Earth, the fourth physical-release album from drummer and producer Nick Woodmansey's Emanative and the follow-up to the band's outstanding The Light Years Of ...
Alina Bzhezhinska: Inspiration
by Chris May
Among the highpoints of London's 2017 jazz diary was the Barbican Centre's A Concert for Alice and John. The event commemorated the 50th and 10th anniversaries of the passing of John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane. It was headlined by Pharoah Sanders, the most distinguished surviving member of bands led by the Coltranes, who turned in an ...
Tenderlonious featuring The 22archestra: The Shakedown
by Chris May
In Britain, the incidence of self-taught jazz musicians has declined dramatically over recent decades. Jazz-studies programmes have mushroomed in colleges and more and more young players have been signing up to them. Successful stylists of earlier eras, who may have studied informally with an older musician but who learnt most of their art on the bandstand, ...
Rodrigo Tavares: Congo
by Chris May
Guitarist Rodrigo Tavares cites his primary influences as bossa nova and tropicália pioneers João Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé. But you would not guess it from Congo, a collection of lyrical instrumentals which reference Brazil only in passing, and which consciously avoid any recognisable sense of ...
Billy Parker's Fourth World: Freedom Of Speech
by Chris May
Drummer Billy Parker's 1975 album only tangentially connects to Fourth World music, the pancultural style which was given its name five years later by Jon Hassell on Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics (Editions EG, 1980), the trumpeter's first collaboration with Brian Eno. Parker's Fourth World is the name of the band heard on Freedom Of ...
Zara McFarlane: Arise!
by Chris May
Zara McFarlane is a London-based singer and composer with a voice like an angel and a style that reflects her cultural roots in the Caribbean and in the mash-up that is modern metropolitan Britain, where jazz, grime, hip hop, reggae and other musics of black origin are hybridising and shape-shifting with joyful abandon. She is an ...
Jon Hassell: Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume one)
by Chris May
By the time even the most revolutionary musicians reach their ninth decade, few are any longer making profoundly adventurous work. Typically, conservatism has kicked in or, if not that, a younger generation has come along and moved the goal posts. But on Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), Jon Hassell, the creator of fourth-world music in ...
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