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Jazz CD reviews

New CDs reviewed by Chris Parker

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Lew Tabackin Quartet Jazz at Prague Castle

After an introduction from Václav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic (David Cameron please note), saxophonist/flautist Lew Tabackin proceeds to give what amounts to a master class in hard-bop/modern mainstream trio jazz (his Europe-touring band completed by Italians Giuseppe Bassi on bass and drummer Roberto Gatto, with guest trumpeter Flavio Boltro) in this concert recorded at Prague Castle in 2009.

Asaf Sirkis Trio Letting Go

Asaf Sirkis – as anyone who's heard his intense, subtle, musical drumming, either with Gilad Atzmon or fronting his own trios, will already know – is a class act, and this album, which features his working band (Tassos Spiliotopoulos on electric and acoustic guitars, Yaron Stavi on electric bass), is a treat from start to finish.

Stacey Kent Raconte-moi...

Stacey Kent's previous Blue Note album, Breakfast on the Morning Tram was apparently her most successful in terms of sales (300,000 worldwide); it also established her in France, containing as it did a couple of Serge Gainsbourg tracks, plus a song featured in Lelouche's film Un Homme et une Femme.

Jacky Terrasson Push

Pianist Jacky Terrasson describes his move to Concord (after eleven albums with Blue Note) as a chance to 'do things differently … another sound … different grooves, beats and vibe', and certainly Push (seven originals, two Monk tunes, two standards, one mixed with Michael Jackson's 'Beat It') rings the changes between the joyously funky ('Gaux Girl', 'Morning'), the hectic hurtle ('Beat Bop') and the downright poppy (two tracks featuring vocals, 'Say Yeah' and 'O Café, O Soleil').

Jon Irabagon The Observer

Saxophonist Jon Irabagon was the winner of 2008's Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and, as a consequence, has been able to assemble not only a Rolls-Royce rhythm section – pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Victor Lewis, most readily associated with the late Stan Getz – but also a world-class production team – Don Sickler and Rudy Van Gelder – for this, his Concord debut.

Tessa Souter Obsession

Biographical accounts of singer Tessa Souter always bristle with hyphens (London-born, New York-based, Anglo-Trinidadian), but perhaps the most significant one lies between 'award' and 'winning'. While her world-citizen status does seem to have opened her ears to a refreshingly wide variety of musical styles...

Barry Cleveland Hologramatron

The press release accompanying this, guitarist/sound sculptor Barry Cleveland's fifth album as leader, identifies its chief musical inspirations as 'art rock, psychedelia, metal, ambient, world music, trance and funk', and Hologramatron does indeed leave the impression that Cleveland (an influential editor with Guitar Player magazine and something of a production freak – hence his interest in UK 1960s legend Joe Meek, manifest here in a lively visit to the late man's classic 'Telstar')...

Stéphane Kerecki Trio Houria

From the opening vibrant bass solo onwards, and throughout its subsequent thirteen tracks, Houria delivers top-drawer, tough collectively improvised music from leader/main composer Stéphane Kerecki and his tight, lively band, completed by saxophonists Tony Malaby (soprano/tenor) and Matthieu Donarier (ditto), and drummer Thomas Grimmonprez.

Spin Marvel The Reluctantly Politicised Mr James

The group sound on this, drummer Martin France's Spin Marvel's second album, is described by him as 'not locked into a conventional grid of pulse or beat, but mov[ing] away from this format and out into a different space'. The resultant music's most obvious stylistic reference point is the European free/ambient music perhaps most readily associated with Scandinavia and most famously manifest (in the UK, at least) in the music of one of France's old Loose Tubes bandmates, Iain Ballamy (in his Food mode).

Anthony Braxton 19 Standards (Quartet) 2003

Taken from recordings of live concerts by Anthony Braxton's quartet (completed by guitarist Kevin O'Neil, bassist Andy Eulau and drummer Kevin Norton) all over Europe in 2003, these four CDs document the celebrated multi-instrumentalist's ongoing dialogue with both the Great American songbook (here represented by the likes of 'Body and Soul', 'It's You or No One', 'East of the Sun', 'Nancy with the Laughing Face') and jazz classics such as Monk's 'Ruby My Dear', Jackie McLean's 'Little Melonae' and Coltrane's 'Mr. P.C.'. It also contains an improvisation, 'G. Petal', recorded in Brussels.

Christine Tobin & Liam Noble Tapestry Unravelled

Regular Vortex patrons will remember the August 2009 concert, performed by Christine Tobin and pianist Liam Noble, of Carole King's seminal album Tapestry as one of the most affecting gigs of the year. I see that my own reaction to the occasion (see Christine Tobin sings Tapestry) mentioned Tobin's gift for burnishing songs to a satisfyingly rich glow, and here, on this twelve-track CD (which contains one Tobin composition as well as eleven by King and her various associates) this gift is in evidence from first to last.

Tim Richards Trio Shapeshifting

Tim Richards identifies 'the unique combination of freedom and discipline' as the most seductive feature of the jazz piano trio, and this album (his first trio recording since 2003's Twelve by Three) contains twelve good illustrations of the form's attractions. The material addressed by Richards and his rhythm section (bassist Dominic Howles, retained from the aforementioned previous recording, and drummer Jeff Lardner) is a mix of five originals (four by Richards, one by Howles), imaginative visits to standards ('You're My Everything', 'Love for Sale' intriguingly played over a descarga bassline), and lively versions of jazz classics...

Compassionate Dictatorship Cash Cows

Guitarist Jez Franks and saxophonist Tori Freestone both teach at Leeds College of Music, and their longstanding musical partnership lies at the heart of the vibrant but sophisticated approach of their band, Compassionate Dictatorship, completed on this recording (the band's second) by bassist Jasper Høiby and drummer Ben Reynolds.

Chris Biscoe Profiles of Mingus

Like his recent Trio album dedicated to the music of Eric Dolphy (Gone in the Air ­ see CD Reviews), this fourteen-track album inspired by another 20th-century jazz great, Charles Mingus, is clearly a labour of love for saxophonist Chris Biscoe. Mingus Moves, a sextet formed in 1996, is at the heart of this recording...

Jonathan Bratoëff Quartet Mindscapes

A new version of Jonathan Bratoëff's quartet finds him fronting a rhythm section comprising long-time associate Tom Mason (bass) and drumer James Maddren, and sharing front-line duties with saxophonist Mark Hanslip, but the guitarist's great strengths are still much in evidence on this, his fifth album as a leader:

Philip Clouts Quartet Sennen Cove

Philip Clouts is perhaps best known as the pianist in Zubop, a band at the heart of the so-called 'world jazz' strand within the music that manifested itself from the 1980s onwards. On this album, on which he is joined by fellow musical traveller (in this context it is important to distinguish between tourists and travellers), saxophonist Carlos Lopez-Real, bassist Alex Keen and drummer Paul Cavaciuti, Clouts has allowed the natural beauty of his home base, Charmouth in West Dorset, to inspire his ten compositions...

Food Quiet Inlet

Food (now whittled down from a quartet to a core of saxophonist Iain Ballamy and drummer/live electronics operator Thomas Strønen) have now made six albums of what might be termed freely impovised ambient music, but this is the first for a label that might seem to many to have been their natural home all along: ECM.

Stan Tracey Octet The Later Works

Two of the many special commissions that Stan Tracey has received over the years, the Hong Kong Suite and the Amandla Suite appear here (on one CD each) in versions recorded in December 2009 by a band comprising the composer on piano, Simon Allen (tenor), Mornington Lockett (tenor, soprano), Sammy Mayne (alto), Guy Barker (trumpet), Mark Nightingale (trombone), Andrew Cleyndert (bass) and Clark Tracey (drums).

Ketil Bjørnstad Remembrance

Given the long ECM track record of each participant in this session – pianist/composer Ketil Bjørnstad made Water Stories, his first album for the label, back in 1993, and subsequently made a number of ECM recordings with the Sea Quartet; saxophonist Tore Brunborg appears regularly on the label's albums, most recently on Manu Katché's Third Round; Jon Christensen is almost the ECM 'house drummer' – it is perhaps unsurprising that Remembrance at first blush seems to distil all the musical qualities frequently associated with Manfred Eicher's project: wistful lyricism, moody evocativeness, contemplative melancholy.

douBt Never Pet a Burning Dog

The musical CVs of the trio of musicians forming douBt provide an entirely reliable guide to the band's sound: keyboardist Alex Maguire has played with Hatfield and the North, Elton Dean and Michael Moore; guitarist Michel Delville with the Wrong Object and the Belgian/Dutch rock quintet the Moving Tones, as well as with Elton Dean et al.; drummer Tony Bianco with a number of free-jazz luminaries (Paul Dunmall and Alex von Schlippenbach prominent among them).

 

 

 

Chris Parker

Chris Parker was commissioning editor for Quartet Books jazz list and publisher of Wire magazine and has written on jazz forJazz Review and Jazzwise, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and The Times).

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