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Impulse! Records: An Alternative Top 20 Zeitgeist Seizing Albums
by Chris May
There can be little argument that a jazz label ever captured a zeitgeist more completely than Impulse! did during its original 1960s incarnation. In the US, the fight back against white racism was cresting, opposition to the Vietnam war was growing, outrage over the assassinations of figures of hope such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King ...
Drummers as Bandleaders: An Alternative Top Ten Albums
by Chris May
Drummers have been key members of every band which has changed the course of jazz history, from Max Roach with Charlie Parker to Elvin Jones with John Coltrane and onwards. Yet drummers have been the leaders of a surprisingly small proportion of landmark bands themselves. Chick Webb in the 1920s was the first of the few. ...
Chip Wickham: Blue To Red
by Chris May
The marketing thrust accompanying Chip Wickham's third album emphasises an affinity between the disc and the late 1960s / early 1970s work of Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane. Certainly, Blue To Red ticks two boxes: Wickham puts aside his saxophone to play only flute and alto flute, whose seraphic tones were favoured by Lateef and Coltrane; ...
Shabaka And The Ancestors: We Are Sent Here by History
by Karl Ackermann
Even as Shabaka Hutchings moves the evolution of jazz forward, We Are Sent Here By History laments the present-day conditions of conflict, suffering, parity, and the struggle to survive. The saxophonist's breakthrough album came with his Sons of Kemet on Your Queen Is A Reptile (Impulse! Records, 2018). He also leads the jazz/electronica hybrid The Comet ...
Dragon's Fuel: Pomorandze / Oranges
by Toj Samaz
Anyone can dance. And dance one will on this Eastern European steam ship. A cruise along the Danube with the taste of rakia (a Balkan spirit) in the mouth. Sharing an unexpected sunny day during winter with a bunch of friends. This could explain the almost childlike song titles. One might wonder whether the title was ...
Ted Poor: You Already Know
by Chris May
Breaking news 3/23/20: Impulse! is getting its mojo back. Showing definite signs of, anyway... Since its glory days in the 1960s and 1970s, Impulse! has been little more than a logo wheeled out by its parent company, Universal Music, to lend credibility to unrelated one-off projects. Until very recently, the only newly recorded ...
Shabaka & the Ancestors: We Are Sent Here By History
by Chris May
Reed player Shabaka Hutchings became the first British musician to sign to the iconic (for once the word is justified) Impulse! label when his band Sons of Kemet did so in 2018. It was a deal for which his management could rightly be proud. It was also an affirmation which Hutchings felt deeply, for in the ...
Wildflower: Season 2
by Karl Ackermann
On paper, the UK trios Wildflower and Ill Considered bear an obvious resemblance. Each features the outstanding reed player Idris Rahman and bassist Leon Brichard, and both groups are groove-oriented progressive jazz. Wildflower is the slightly more melody-driven and the less raw of the two bands, with intricate improvisations interwoven throughout. Season 2 sees Rahman altering ...
Pulled By Magnets: Rose Golden Doorways
by Chris May
After a momentous start in the mid 2000s with saxophonist Pete Wareham's Acoustic Ladyland and his own band, Polar Bear, drummer Sebastian Rochford's path through British jazz has been distinguished, though not without the odd glitch. The highs have been Himalayan. Perhaps most notably, he played a key role in reeds player Shabaka Hutchings' Sons Of ...
Byron Wallen: Portrait
by Chris May
An all too rare event, an album from Byron Wallen. The British trumpeter is part of that cohort of musicians who immediately preceded, and continue to inspire, the young London rebels who have been renewing British jazz since around 2015. So, too, is this album's drummer, Rod Youngs. Youngs was born and raised in the US, ...
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