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Alan Skidmore, Amampondo

The Call

Provocateur

Album description

This recording should be cherished for ever. Skidmore has never been a prolific recording artist, so this collaboration with the virtuoso South African percussion group Amampondo is doubly welcome.

Skidmore's earlier associates have included some of the very best jazz and blues musicians – Eric Delaney, Louie Bellson, Alexis Korner, Chick Corea, Weather Report, Gil Evans and a very long list of other household names – yet with this music he not only breaks new ground but does so with renewed passion and emotional intensity.

The first visiting jazz musician to play in South Africa at the end of the apartheid regime, Skidmore first worked with Amampondo in 1994 and was later able to return to Cape Town to record with the group. The music which resulted is surely the most successful integration of jazz and traditional African rhythms ever to be committed to ones and zeros.

Skidmore's full-throated tone, dazzling technique and sheer gut-feel musicality make it seem as if his saxophone and the group's joyful polyrhythms were made for each other and, while convenient comparisons may be made with some of the work in this area done by Steve Coleman and Trevor Watts, this superb stuff is really in a class by itself.