Home » Search Center » Results: Phil Barnes
Results for "Phil Barnes"
Mammal Hands: Shadow Work
by Phil Barnes
Our best musicians can soak up influences from many diverse sources, assimilate them into their own style, and allow them to emerge during improvisation. This is why, as readers of this site will surely be aware, a piece can sound different in the hands of two skilled jazz musicians even when the raw material of the ...
Zara McFarlane: Arise
by Phil Barnes
Zara McFarlane's If You Knew Her from 2014 promised much, being a wonderful, individual, mixture of jazz, reggae and soul that viewed the singer's Jamaican roots through the prism of her UK birth and London upbringing. It was an original blend that signaled the arrival of a major talent on the UK scene, setting a path ...
Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference
by Phil Barnes
Being lauded as the “saviour of jazz" would weigh heavy on the shoulders of any young artist, even one so confident as to release a 170 minute treble CD as their 2015 debut. Yet Kamasi Washington pulled it off on the appropriately titled The Epic, with its ambitious, eclectic subject matter and surface similarities to spiritual ...
New and Notable Releases
by Phil Barnes
Sometimes in summertime the living isn't quite so easy and life contrives to get in the way of finding and celebrating the great music that is out there waiting for us. This article is an attempt to distill personal favourites from the many releases that have crossed my path in the last few months--had time been ...
David Sylvian: There Is No Love
by Phil Barnes
David Sylvian has long divided opinion. For every passionate supporter there are half a dozen who will decry his every move as pretentious. Even among his fanbase there are many who want him to do something more to their taste, along the lines of some past triumphs like Japan's Quiet Life or Tin Drum, or solo ...
Dwight Trible: Inspirations (featuring Matthew Halsall)
by Phil Barnes
Having worked with the likes of the Pharoah Sanders Quartet and Kamasi Washington the musical fit between Los Angeles native Dwight Trible and Manchester's Gondwana records should be self- evident. This album was conceived as a combination of joint favourites and spiritual jazz classics chosen by Trible and Gondwana label boss Matthew Halsall, after a couple ...
Trish Clowes: My Iris
by Phil Barnes
There's an energy and a focus about this, Clowes fourth album for UK indie Basho records, that suggests a creative breakthrough. My Iris has kept that restlessness and love of music irrespective of genre apparent in Clowes earlier work, but feels a better constructed programme where the stylistic shifts are organic developments that blend naturally into ...
Phil France: The Swimmer
by Phil Barnes
When did the future get postponed? Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s it felt as if innovations that might change and improve our lives beyond recognition were tantalisingly just around the corner. Surely the science fiction utopia of a life set free from drudgery, where our preferred mode of transport would either be a teleport ...
New, Notable and Nearly Missed
by Phil Barnes
One of the great pleasures of the holiday season is taking stock of the last 12 months, comparing notes with friends, investigating their recommendations and catching up with some of those releases that you never quite got round to. The falling cost of an independent release has meant that it is easier than ever for a ...
Phil Barnes' Best Releases of 2016
by Phil Barnes
It was tempting to view the events of 2016 in apocalyptic terms--even leaving politics to one side, the succession of beloved entertainers falling to the Grim Reaper was a salutary reminder of the limits of our own mortality. Some saw this as a sign of something ending, a watershed and not in a good way, but ...
