Results for "Tamar Osborn"

Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020

by Chris May
December 7, 2020

Not the best year for live gigs in London, but Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra just made it under the wire, lighting up the Jazz Cafe in late January. Rather like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Sosimi's band has form as an incubator of young talent. A recent star in the making was trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, who has ...

Sarathy Korwar & Upaj Collective: Night Dreamer Direct-To-Disc Sessions

by Chris May
November 12, 2020

In her October 2020 interview with All About Jazz, baritone saxophonist, Collocutor bandleader, Afrobeat shaman and Upaj Collective founder member Tamar Osborn was asked to name six of her all-time favourite albums. One of them was Shakti's Natural Elements (Columbia, 1970), on which John McLaughlin plays a guitar customised to sound like a sitar. “To me, ...

Tamar Osborn: From Kalakuta To Collocutor: New Directions In Jazz

by Chris May
October 12, 2020

She has been likened to Gil Evans, Fela Kuti, Pharoah Sanders, Bismillah Khan and Mulatu Astatke, and the traditions represented by those musicians are all to be heard in the music of baritone saxophonist and composer Tamar Osborn. Osborn's aesthetic, however, is her own, and her band, Collocutor, is among the most distinctive on the British ...

Collocutor: Continuation

by Gareth Thompson
May 13, 2020

Viewing the CV of musician-composer Tamar Osborn is like watching a tapestry unfurl in bewildering detail. Having started out on clarinet and saxophone, performing mostly classical works, she later studied rhythms and ragas in India, then collaborated with a vast array of talents, often fusing Afrobeat and Ethio-funk into jazzy paradigms. She was part of the ...

Tamar Osborn

Since graduating from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2000 I’ve been working as a freelance saxophonist (order of preference: Baritone, Soprano, Tenor, Alto) and multi-wind specialist (clarinet, flute and related instruments such as alto flute, piccolo, bass clarinet). I work in a wide range of fields including pop/soul (Kelis UK & Europe tour 2014), theatre/dance (such as Akram Khan’s XENOS worldwide tour and the acclaimed production of FELA! at Sadler’s Wells and the National Theatre, London), TV (Jools Holland, Chris Moyles Quiz night house band, X Factor Big Band Special), world music (Afrobeat and related genres in particular, taking part in Africa Express in 2012 and 2013), improvisation with djs (using tenor sax and occasionally flute), jazz and classical groups, session recording, arranging, teaching, functions… and to keep the creative side of things fresh I’m involved in a number of on-going projects: – COLLOCUTOR (my own project – instrumental modal music with jazz and global influences) -DELE SOSIMI AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA (check out the Afrobeat Vibration nights for one of the best live music experiences in London!) -SARATHY KORWAR (jazz with Indian and electronic influences) -THE FONTANELLES (an afrobeat-ethio-funk-dub offshoot from the Fela! production) -EMANATIVE (space jazz) -JESSICA LAUREN (jazz groove) -1201_ALARM (science-inspired!) -ELIA & THE LOW TEARS (soulful funky pop) Other guest, occasional and past projects include Hackney Colliery Band, Yuriy Galkin Nonet, The Soothsayers, Lokkhi Terra (Cuba meets Bangladesh), the John Bennett Band (jazz funk big band), Oddjob (afro-latin-funk), Mezzowave (electronica-soul), Kita Steuer’s Samba Soul Transatlantico (Brazilian Samba-Rock), Stadtpark (folk-jazz), Lisa Lore (nu-blues and spoken word), Chagall Illuminated (animation and live & electronic music collaboration with Max Reinhardt and Sophie Solomon) and Vent Saxophone Quartet (contemporary classical). I have been lucky enough to travel all over the world thanks to music, including performing with the fantastic German/Indian group Taal Tantra with table maestro Tanmoy Bose in Kolkata in 2005, playing at Cheick Tidiane Seck’s Jam’Sahel 2007 (www.jamsahel.org) in Paris (thanks to Roy with Chameleoneye), and improvising with fire-dancers in Bangladesh.

Sarathy Korwar & The UPAJ Collective: My East Is Your West

by Chris May
October 25, 2018

Indo-jazz fusion has distinguished ancestry in Britain. The music took shape in the mid to late 1960s, when a string of extraordinary albums, each with one foot in Indian classical music and the other in post-bop jazz, were recorded by guitarist Amancio D'Silva and violinist John Mayer. Both featured empathetic jazz musicians (Joe Harriott, Don Rendell, ...