Home » Search Center » Results: Chris May
Results for "Chris May"
Shabaka Hutchings At Barbican Hall
by Chris May
Shabaka Hutchings Barbican HallPerceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its GraceLondon May 9, 2024 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ... London's Shabaka Hutchings has become best known for his incendiary open-the-gates work on tenor saxophone with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and the South African-based Shabaka & The Ancestors. But ...
Moving Music: The Memoirs Of Rikki Stein
by Chris May
Moving Music: The Memoirs Of Rikki Stein Rikki Stein 304 Pages ISBN: 9781739103095 Wordville Press2024 The autobiography of Rikki Stein--longtime friend and manager of Afrobeat creator Fela Kuti, and a key player in the historic meeting between Ornette Coleman and the Master Musicians of Joujouka, among much, much ...
Fred Hersch: Silent, Listening
by Chris May
It took Fred Hersch a long time to begin recording for ECM--four decades and 17 Grammy nominations since his first own-name album--but when he arrived he did so in style. The Song Is You (ECM, 2022), a duo recording with flugelhornist Enrico Rava, reviewed here, was quietly sensational. The word “recalibration" is often wheeled out when ...
Elephant9: Mythical River
by Chris May
Although Elephant9's plugged-in lineage includes the usual suspects--Miles Davis' electric bands and Soft Machine--the Norwegian organ trio's tap root is unmistakably planted in the work of the late British musician Keith Emerson, keyboards player with the Nice in the late 1960s and Emerson Lake & Palmer from 1970. For his own snarling jazz-rock oeuvre, Emerson's favoured ...
Tomeka Reid Quartet: 3+3
by Chris May
Jazz cello has come a long way since Fred Katz's pioneering work with Chico Hamilton in the 1950s. Back then, the instrument was looked on as a novelty turn. In 2024, while still relatively avant-garde, its presence in a lineup is less exceptional. A pivotal point was American cellist Adbul Wadud's By Myself (Bishara, 1977), an ...
Alina Bzhezhinska & Tony Kofi: Altera Vita
by Chris May
Harpist Alina Bzhezhinska and saxophonist Tony Kofi's musical partnership began in 2015 and two years later made the main stage of the London Jazz Festival, opening the bill of A Concert For Alice And John at the Barbican concert hall. Also appearing, saxophonist Denys Baptiste's quartet and, top of the bill, Pharoah Sanders' quartet. It was ...
Jake Long: City Swamp
by Chris May
Drummer, composer and producer Jake Long's house-rocking City Swamp is part of a trilogy of post-2022 albums out of London's underground jazz scene which are connected by adjacent sources of inspiration, identical creative processes, and crossovers of personnel. Synchronicity and zeitgeist are writ large and, much of the time, in neon. The other two albums are ...
Lori Bell: Recorda Me - Remembering Joe Henderson
by Chris May
The exceptional tenor saxophonist and composer Joe Henderson, who passed in 2001, recorded three premium-grade tribute albums: Lush Life: The Music Of Billy Stayhorn (1992), So Near, So Far (Musings For Miles) (1993) and Double Rainbow: The Music Of Antonio Carlos Jobim (1995), all on Verve. But in the decades since Henderson left us, tributes to ...
Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit
by Chris May
More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It ...
Empirical: Wonder Is The Beginning
by Chris May
London's Empirical quartet, which first recorded in 2007 as a quintet, has had a steady lineup since 2009's sophomore album, Out 'n' In (Naim): Nathaniel Facey on alto saxophone, Lewis Wright on vibraphone, Tom Farmer on double bass and Shaney Forbes on drums. A stable lineup has given the group a certain consistency of sound, though ...
