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Howard Riley and Keith Tippett at Pizza Express

by Duncan Heining
Howard Riley and Keith Tippett Pizza Express London March 9, 2015 It's been a while since two of the world's great improvising pianists played together--twenty-two years to be precise. This fact alone may have brought a goodly and appreciative turn-out to Soho's Pizza Express Jazz Club. If so, Howard ...
Kit Downes and Tom Challenger: Organ Crawling

by Duncan Heining
Pianist-organist Kit Downes is one of the brightest and most articulate talents to emerge from the British and European scenes in recent times. His refusal to be pinned down to any specific career path or musical trajectory is to his credit but even more so is his ability to produce authentic music without compromise across style, ...
Roberto Bonati: Macbeth and the Whale

by Duncan Heining
Italian bassist-composer Robert Bonati is one of the most ambitious and literate composers in contemporary jazz. Between 2000-2006, he released four ground-breaking extended works with the ParmaFrontiere Orchestra. While they attracted notice in Italy, they seemed to pass by the wider jazz audience in Europe, North America and the Far East. If at one level, the ...
Club Inégales: Where Everybody Knows Your Name...

by Duncan Heining
If Club Inégales didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it. What price a venue in the heart of London with a policy as open-minded and eclectic as this? Club Inégales welcomes jazzers and free improvisers, baroque musicians and folk singers, poets and comedians, Japanese and Bengali percussionists and even the occasional passing shaman. The ...
Barry Guy: Back to the Drawing-Board (Part 3)

by Duncan Heining
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 One of the things which may strike the listener on hearing the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra for the first time is just how much volume Guy is able to draw from just seventeen to twenty players. Some other big bands sound almost insipid in comparison. There ...
Barry Guy: Ploughs into Swordshares, Part 1-3

by Duncan Heining
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Edgar Varèse's defiant statement in the face of public and critical indifference -"The present day composer refuses to die"could so easily apply to composer-bassist Barry Guy. He has earned over the years a deep and lasting respect from certain fans and critics, though more so in ...
Barry Guy: A Prophet is Not without Honour (Part 2)

by Duncan Heining
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Barry Guy has been the artistic director and main composer of the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra throughout its now forty-five year history. Recordings and performances since Ode in 1972 have been sporadic but those forty-five years have resulted in eleven albums (including one with Anthony Braxton) ...
Mike Westbrook & Company: A Bigger Show - Live

by Duncan Heining
For the last few years, pianist-composer Mike Westbrook has been leading a very fine big band down in Devon but this is the first time they have made it on to CD. In fact, this is an expanded ensemble with three vocalists, two bass players, two guitarists and two drummers. The clue is in the title, ...
Keith Tippett: Mujician Solo IV – Live in Piacenza

by Duncan Heining
From its opening notes, it is apparent that Keith Tippett's first solo recording in fifteen years is something very special indeed. Tippett has always been a player with a talent for musical pyrotechnics, cascades of notes--triplets, trills, mordants and arpeggios-colliding with mighty tone clusters. But equally, he has also been an artist of great emotional subtlety ...
Alister Spence: Live

by Duncan Heining
Alister Spence Trio: Live is, apparently, this Australian group's sixth recording. Sadly, the others have passed me by and pianist Alister Spence only recently crossed my CD deck in the company of Scottish saxophonist / improviser Raymond MacDonald. To be honest, much contemporary piano trio jazz--EST, Brad Mehldau, The Necks--bores me. Perhaps unfairly so but to ...