Trombonist James Greening has always been one of our most joyful and joyous players. His very choice of instrument is joyful – the whinnying, hallelujah-ing of the trombone and the jovial flatulence of the sousaphone just bring a grin to your soul.
Category: Album Releases
Felucca is: James Loughnan (tenor saxophone), Abel Cross (electrical bass), Paul Derricott (drums, cymbals, voice)
Swailing is as free as This is Always is restricted; it is as open as the quartet recording is closed. Swailing is the magpie, picking from electric Miles, Massenet and Fats; This is Always is the osprey, its eye fixed on the one prize.
And both are deliriously beautiful for all of these qualities and more.
It would be silly not to have this in your collection of music.
‘…The Acronym Orchestra and many of their contemporaries joyfully celebrate and integrate and build upon the musical language of, and beyond, the jazz tradition – blues, gospel, jump, New Orleans, and even further back to Africa and the Middle East and both West and Eastern Europe.’
Rhythm. Heat. Lines. Movement. Energy. Since 2010’s ‘The Singularity’, The Sam Bates Trio have naturally progressed into the force of nature that we hear here.
His sound is dark and it has a grain and an edge, except when he plays in a soft burble or croon. It can bark and crack with a brittle edge, yet all of it is done with tone, with timbre. His lines are full of invention, expressed in melody and in abstract shapes.
Made up of guitarist Cameron Henderson, double-bassist Elsen Price and drummer Tully Ryan, The Trio are one of the current young bands that make me jump for joy. Genre-hopping is admirably rife in the modern jazz world, but done as it is here on their debut – Dubious Blues Trio – so unselfconsciously and with a real blues wildness, is a buzz.
‘Dan Sheehan, whose conception and compositions (largely) are the reason for Infinite Ape, moves like the ocean behind all this – his playing, whether acoustic or Rhodes, is as big as the room, whether it be a sprinkling of notes or a killer riff or – yeah! – big, big chords.’
The third album, Kinetic Conversations, is an extraordinary and rare find, a heady 100%-proof concoction distilled once and only in the off-hours of a March afternoon at the University of California, San Diego, in 1986. Let loose in the lab were two electric and eclectic and eccentric maestri: the Visiting Professor, Australian Keith Humble, on piano and electronics and Bunsen burner, and the Resident Professor, American Bertram Turetzky, on mortar and pestle and contrabass.