Kenny Barron

Beyond this Place

Artwork Records 

Kenny Barron (p), Immanuel Wilkins (as), Steve Nelson (vb), Kiyoshi Kitagawa (b) and Johnathan Blake (d). Rec. date not stated

From the late 1950s, when he was a teenager barely out of high school, Kenny Barron was good enough to play piano for a bebop elite including James Moody, Lee Morgan and Dizzy Gillespie. Now 81, he’s as warmly at one with his materials and his partners as he’s ever been. For Beyond This Place, regular bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa and drummer Johnathan Blake are joined by vibraphonist Steve Nelson, and rising-star alto sax virtuoso Immanuel Wilkins, while the repertoire joins Barron originals going back to the 1970s (‘Innocence’) with newer pieces and standards (‘The Nearness of You’, Monk’s ‘We See’). A laconic and then springy original from Blake, ‘Blues on Stratford Road’, is a stretched blues showcasing Wilkins’ fresh phrasing even in the most familiar contexts.

Barron has observed that Wilkins first caught his ear for a spacious ballad sound that reminded him of Johnny Hodges, but coupled with a scorching freebop fire all of his own. The saxophonist is hauntingly voicelike on ‘The Nearness of You’, while his sparingly-applied fast passages barely land on each skimming sound. He hurtles off into soaring atonality on the fast-walking swing of ‘Scratch’, with Nelson’s gleaming precision sharply contrasting with his rawness. Barron’s liquid lyricism on ‘Innocence’ has a Corea-like suppleness, and ‘Softly As In A Morning Sunrise’ travels at a skipping pace that triggers the leader’s gleefulness - a quality also glittering from the jaunty stride-dance of ‘We See’. It’s hard to imagine the ageless Barron ever losing that twinkle. John Fordham

Matthew Bourne

This Is Not For You

The Leaf Label 

Matthew Bourne (p, clo, Dulcitone). Rec. date not stated

Ignore the off-putting title - this limpid album of solo piano (with occasional cello and Dulcitone embellishments) is an immediately rewarding listen that only improves with repeated plays. Apparently drawn together from notebook sketches, out-takes and experimental revisitings there is nonetheless a clear consistency to the album, largely due to Matthew Bourne’s well-established aesthetic of expressive economy. Whether improvising or playing prepared composition, the weighted timing and harmonic precision of his music generates emotional expression from quite simple elements. His use of the pause or a single note slipped in between a series of plangent chords, somehow convey an explicit human subtext.

The first half of ‘The Mirror And Its Fragments’, for example, is merely a slowly see-sawing cello part until a harshly tinkling piano scatters despairingly across it. Inspired by Andersen’s dark fairy tale The Snow Queen, itself a metaphor for depression, the short track needs nothing more to make the same point. It is followed contrastingly by the gently celebratory 'Only When It Is', dedicated to Leeds College of Music tutor Bill Kinghorn, an early mentor of Bourne’s. The album ends powerfully with a heart-wrenching tribute to his inspirational later mentor (and, all-too briefly, playing partner) Keith Tippett, appropriately titled ‘Dedicated To You Because You Were Listening’. Leaden, heavyweight chords spaced with echoing pauses emphasising the resonating strings create an achingly sad beauty that becomes angrily forceful then subsides into exhausted resolution. It’s an epitome of grieving that warrants being scored and published for wider performance, though few players could (or maybe should) attempt to match Bourne’s delicate sureness of touch. Tony Benjamin

Etienne Charles

Creole Orchestra

Cultzck 

Etienne Charles (t, arr, comp, perc), Jumaane Smith, Walter Cano, Anthony Stanco, Giveton Gelin (t), Dion Tucker, Corey Wilcox, Michael Dease (tb), Chris Glassman (btb), Michael Thomas, Godwin Louis (as, ss), Brian Hogans (as), John Ellis (ts, bcl), Seth Ebersole (ts, cl), Paul Nedzela (bs, bcl), Gina Izzo (f), Sullivan Fortner (p, ky), Alex Wintz (g), Ben Williams, Jonathan Michel (b), Obed Calvaire (d), Jorge Glem (cuatro), Pascual Landeau (maraca) plus guests René Marie, Brandon Rose (v) and DJ Logic (turntables). Rec. 28 and 29 August 2018

Trinidad-born but now US-based, trumpeter Charles makes much of his Creole antecedents and his concern for their cultural traditions and rightly so. His music infuses these varied influences, with his ‘Old School’ combining familiar big band protocols with a calypso under-pinning, while hosting crisp solos from Hogans, Ellis, Tucker, Charles himself, and Fortner. It’s busy but joyfully full-on, danceable too. ‘Poison’ is similarly multi-layered, with a stop-start solo from Hogans, percussion akimbo, plus funk guitar from Wintz and a rap by Rose.

The ensemble passages and band writing score heavily throughout even if some of the added effects don’t always add that much. ‘Think Twice’ by Monty Alexander has a neat groove, great brass attack, with Smith and Dease shouting out, Fortner comping distinctively. René Marie gives ‘I Wanna Be Evil’ an old-time vaudeville feel with Fortner pacing her brilliantly and ‘Holy City’ is a Charles showcase, with his Lee Morgan-like command, amid some chunky writing and soulful tenor from Ebersole.

In contrast comes Sweets Edison’s timeless ‘Centerpiece’ with Marie singing Hendrick’s words in bluesy fashion, aided again by Fortner’s Monk-ian piano, the theme handled in world-weary style by the reeds and ‘bones in turn. Think Carmen Bradford and the Basie band, Charles adding solo riffs. Then again, there’s such sturdy war-horses as ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’ and ‘Night Train’, each given righteous treatment. There’s so much here, such a mixture of cultural influences, rhythmic, vocal, and instrumental, that it might take the rest of this magazine to fully describe it all. Suffice to say that Charles has a whole lot to say and the right kind of players to help him say it. It’s just surprising that it’s taken him six years to get it out. Peter Vacher

Neil Cowley Trio

Entity

Hide Inside Records 

Neil Cowley (p), Rex Horan (b) and Evan Jenkins (d). Rec. date not stated

Is it really seven years since the last Cowley Trio release? Well, you can finally scratch that itch, because they’re back – and as mysterious, melancholic and mesmerising as ever.

Entity is an appropriate monicker as the 11-song album unfolds like a single piece of music, elegiac, yearning and imbued with a sense of loss as exemplified in the opening ‘Marble’. If that sounds like a downer, panic not: Cowley’s wit and melodicism remains, but the element of bombast has been filtered out.

What’s left, almost Satie-like in its minimalism and seductive hooks, is as attractive as ever. All the echoey ambience remains from earlier albums, while the tasteful use of electronics, as on ‘V and A’, persists, but is now more seamlessly integrated. We may miss impish romps like ‘She Eats Spiders’, although ‘Adam Alphabet’ has an upbeat, chunky rhythm, but it’s the very integrity of Entity, it’s singularity of mood, that is its strength. Welcome back; a must for fans. Andy Robson

Elaine Delmar

Speak Low

Ubuntu Music 

Elaine Delmar (v), Barry Green (p), Jim Mullen (g), Simon Thorpe (b) and Andy Panayi (f). Rec. January 2023

A beautiful collection of songs selected from Elaine Delmar’s 50-plus-year career, Speak Low begins with a wondrously atmospheric version of the great Fred Hersch/Norma Winstone song, ‘Stars’, with its incredibly rich harmonic palette and subtle blurring of the lines between major and minor tonalities. Although she has been performing most of the album material for many years, Delmar – Vocalist of the Year at the 2023 Parliamentary Jazz Awards – hasn’t recorded any of the songs until now.

On ‘Let Me Love You’, she adopts an intimate, understated, sotto voce whisper to great effect, while ‘Close Your Eyes’ possesses something of Shirley Horn’s exquisitely languid approach to ballads. A heart-meltingly tender take on the Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash title track sees special guest Andy Panayi join on flute, guitarist Jim Mullen peels off a gorgeous solo on ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’, and Delmar’s gorgeous, impressionistic ballad version of ‘Tea for Two’ creates a singular sense of time being suspended, a feeling bolstered by pianist Barry Green’s final unresolved chord.

Delmar considers the featured artists her musical family, and there’s a palpable feeling of musical conviviality and communion. Recorded at Red Gables Studios by Dick Hammett, produced by Delmar and Simon Thorpe (who also assumes mixing duties), the album also sounds terrific. Peter Quinn

Kit Downes

Dr Snap

Bimhuis Records 

Kit Downes (p), Ketija Ringa Karahona (f), Ben van Gelder (as), Robin Fincker (ts), Percy Pursglove (tp), Reinier Baas (g), Petter Eldh (db) Sun-Mi Hong (d), James Maddren, Veslemøy Narvesen (d, perc) and Juliane Schütz (live visuals). Rec. November 2022

I think Kit Downes did himself no harm at all relocating from London to Berlin about a decade ago; he has since become one of very few British jazz musicians in recent generations to have earned a highly credible international reputation not only as a singular pianist/keyboardist/organist, but as a consistently high quality multi-project contemporary jazz leader and collaborator.

More evidence arrives with a new release, Dr Snap, recorded live in 2022 at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis, a prestigious European concert venue that commissioned the material as a part of Bimhuis Productions’ ‘Reflex’ series.

Downes’ striking writing and arrangements are typically stimulating and inventive, and never looking to obfuscate the listener. The band sounds in high spirits, including the tenor saxophonist Robin Fincker, another ex-Loop Collective jazz artist who has grown artistically since moving base to mainland Europe, in his case returning to his native France. A Tom Challenger composition ‘Full Dress’ shows Downes’ gift of artfully merging the rhythmically unpredictable with highly engaging storyline melodies; ‘Mirror’ sounds something like a Stravinsky composition for woodwind ensemble remodelled for the 21st century; ‘Familiar’ has a Loose Tubes-ish theme and robust soloing with Petter Eldh and James Maddren, the pianist’s partners in trio Enemy, laying down a taut hiphop-inspired bass/drums combo.

Titles are meaningfully balanced between smaller chamber and larger group settings, boundaries blurred between improv and composition, and the stylistic net gradually widens from avant-funk to experimental New Music through to electronica but always organically serving the whole. Another Kit Downes recording that demands your attention. Selwyn Harris

Jihye Lee Orchestra

Infinite Connections

Motéma Music 

Jihye Lee (cond, arr, comp), Brian Pareschi, Nathan Eklund, David Smith, Stuart Mack (t, flhn), Mike Fahie, Alan Ferber, Nick Grinder, Jeff Nelson (tb), Ben Kono (as, f, picc), David Pietro (as, f), Jason Rigby, Jonathan Lowery (ts, f, cl), Carl Maraghi (bs, bcl), Alex Goodman (g), Adam Birnbaum (p), Matt Clohesy (b), Keita Ogawa (perc), Jared Schonig (d) plus Ambrose Akinmusere (t). Rec. 17 and 18 October 2023

The South Korean former pop singer and Berklee-graduated big-band composer Jihye Lee confirmed how eloquently she could balance fast-moving postbop rhythm-switches and Gil Evans-reminiscent textural clouds on 2021’s terrific Daring Mind. Its successor, Infinite Connections, is rhythmically and improvisationally bolder still, with Lee’s classy lineup augmented here by star trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and the recording once again co-produced by eclectic orchestral maestro Darcy James Argue.

Infinite Connections invokes family crises and crossroads for Lee, inspired by the life-story of her grandmother, who passed through an orphaned childhood to teenage marriage, life under 1950s Korean patriarchal strictures, and troubled last years - but it also celebrates Lee’s own triumphant journey toward finding her own voice and identity. The pieces are introduced by traditional Korean rhythms (a key role for Snarky Puppy percussionist Keita Ogawa) but quickly shift into fast-changing jazz guises.

The opening ‘Surrender’ finds Akinmusire murmuring and probing over a quietly sonorous drum pattern before surging horn riffs push him toward longer lines and then rocketing double-time figures amid breezily coaxing flutes. ‘We Are All From The Same Stream’ mixes sharply punctuated high-register riffing and graceful solos from trombonist Alan Ferber and tenorist Jason Rigby; ‘Born In 1935’ delicately develops ethereal chordal sways to a dramatic crescendo to release an exquisite alto-sax rhapsody from Maria Schneider stalwart Dave Pietro; while Akinmusire’s register-vaulting second solo spot is a standout of the album on the ghostly, echoing ‘You Are My Universe’. It’s beautiful, free-spirited music. John Fordham

Nicole McCabe

Mosaic

Ghost Note Records

Nicole McCabe (as), Julius Rodriguez (p, el p), Logan Kane (b), Tim Angulo (d), plus Jon Hatamiya (tb), Aaron Janik (t) and Jeff Parker (g). Rec. date not stated

Another month, another fast-rising US West Coast name emerges and starts making waves, here in the form of Los Angeles alto saxophonist Nicole McCabe on this, her impassioned fourth album. With the long shadows of mid-2010s titans Kamasi Washington and Thundercat, and latterly drummer Louis Cole, doing much to knock down genre-boundaries and gatecrash the mainstream, McCabe is very much part of a new breed of players happy to wear their jazz stripes but create malleable, elastic versions the likes of post-bop or even fusion, with melodies to the fore and a bristling pulse.

Mosaic is sonically acoustic, but much like fellow fire-breathing altoist Immanuel Wilkins, McCabe attacks each phrase with a gutsy power, her chewy tone cutting decisively through pianist Rodriguez’s wide voicings. It’s also good to hear bassist Logan Kane, her life and musical partner, holding his own on upright with the scatter-gun beats of Tim Angulo generating some real rhythm-section heat.

Former Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker only appears on one track, the moody ‘Tight Grip’, where he aptly shadows McCabe’s sax before soloing cooly. But it’s Parker’s hand on the production tiller throughout, and there’s a real sense of artistic maturity about the session – the inclusion of trumpet and trombone on two tracks demonstrating the altoist’s arranging ambitions are also on the up. Nifty unison bass-and-left-hand piano lines frequently add interest too, such as when the resourceful Rodriguez happily switches from an unfurling solo to spiky octave jumps to boost the leader’s jabbering lines on the shifting sensibilities of ‘Walking Statue’, that remains anything
but static.

McCabe is effusive throughout, the pensive closer, the samba-ish ‘Derschke’, featuring one of her most angular improvisations that builds to a vein-busting climax that the great Kenny Garrett would be proud of.

There’s a new alto-slinging sax player on the block, and with this album Nicole McCabe sounds like she’s truly arrived. Mike Flynn

Pat Metheny

MoonDial

BMG

Pat Metheny (acoustic baritone guitar). Rec. December 2023

Metheny places this excellent recording in a lineage preceded by One Quiet Night and What’s It All About – two solo guitar recordings – but this is something more. Using a custom-made Linda Manzer Baritone Nylon String Guitar, Metheny has come up with an unusual slant in how he tunes the instrument whereby the middle strings are tuned up an octave to the general tuning of the Baritone instrument (which is about a 4th or a 5th lower that the standard guitar). While that snippet of information may not mean a lot to the non-guitar playing fraternity, it opened up a whole new dimension of harmony that had been unavailable with the standard tuning, inspiring Metheny during the course of a 50-date plus tour to push himself deeper into the exploration of the modified sound palette now available to him.

It also provides the powerful motivating force behind this recording, where he comes up with a repertoire of 14 originals and standards he feels captured what he calls the “magic of this new sound”. Some of the finest albums in jazz somehow find a place in the listener’s life, often fulfilling a function – relaxation to stimulation, background or foreground music and so on. For Metheny, this album is a dusk-to-sunrise record, hard-core mellow – music to fill night, or as Metheny says, offering something to the insomniacs and all-night folks.

Metheny, a compelling soloist, be it electric or acoustic, hits the right mood here with performances of subtlety, nuance, warmth and humanity on The Beatles’ ‘Here There And Everywhere,’ the Matt Dennis masterpiece ‘Angel Eyes,’ and the David Raskin (he who wrote ‘Laura’) standard ‘My Love and I’. Stuart Nicholson

Jordina Milla & Barry Guy

Live In Munich

ECM 

Jordina Mills (p) and Barry Guy (b). Rec. 2022

Catalan pianist Jordina Milla and British bassist Barry Guy are highly skilled improvisers, as this Munich concert attests, but they also have fascinating individual sounds. The former’s touch on the keyboard, and the latter’s on the fretboard are both marked by subversion and invention in equal measure.

The six parts of their spontaneous conversation certainly catch the ear for timbres alone, as the 22- minute opener summarizes the richness of vocabulary that Guy has developed over 50 years. His upper register articulation is startling, to the extent that he hybridizes cello, violin and harp without pastiching any one, his needle-sharp glissando assuming a vocal quality on occasion. Most importantly, it melds to great effect with Milla’s work on the piano interior, and her stark scraping and dampening of notes make the exchanges bristle with a febrile, electric eel energy. Yet the wide dynamic range, and desire to come at tonality from exciting tangents is supplemented by the gentlest of melodies, peeking through the maelstroms of sound, bringing to the performance tenderness that offsets the turbulence, especially when Guy bows his bass so lightly it wafts and whistles in quavered melancholy.

In contrast, Milla raking the strings unleashes a thunderous power that electronic music producers would do well to analyse. Emphatically original, uncompromisingly provocative work from an outstanding duo. Kevin Le Gendre

Oded Tzur

My Prophet

ECM 

Oded Zzur (ts), Nitai Hershkovits (p), Petros Klampanis (b) and Cyrano Almeida (d). Rec. November 2023

This is the third minor masterpiece in succession from Tzur, following Here Be Dragons (2019) and Isabela (2021). Throughout the personnel has remained unchanged, so important in developing a unified group sound that evolves through learned and intuitive responses to each other's playing on the bandstand. So important too, because every musical nuance and inflection are part of a collective sound that on the one hand possess unity and depth and on the other a part of a spiritual element that permeates Tzur’s performances.

Each composition seems finely wrought, and, like medieval craftsmen, every phrase seems fashioned for the ages. This is music of simmering intensity – Tzur’s tone, arresting in its otherworldly spirituality, spans an emotional divide from confessional intimacy to authoritative clarity, as he does on ‘Renata.’ But whether it is ‘Through a Land Unsown’ or ‘Last Bike Ride in Paris,’ the unity of purpose to serve the expressive needs of the composition – either in solo or ensemble – Klampanis and Tzur add compelling expressivity that invites contemplation and meditation. Stuart Nicholson

Mike Westbrook

Band of Bands

Westbrook Records 

Mike Westbrook (p), Chris Biscoe (as, ss), Pete Whyman (as, ss, cl), Karen Street (acc, v), Marcus Vergette (b), Coach York (d) and Kate Westbrook (v). Rec. 25 November 2023

Westbrook’s Band of Bands could hardly be better titled. This is a new band comprised of master musicians that have played in many of the Westbrooks’ line ups across the decades, from the street wise Brass Band to the assembled masses of the Uncommon Orchestra.

This sumptuously recorded live show sunbursts open with a joyous post-bop ‘Glad Day’, from the Westbrook Blake album of the same name, and includes the inevitable nod to Ellington with a dazzling re-work of Strayhorn’s ‘Johnny Come Lately’. That’s not the obvious context for an accordion solo, but Street’s contributions are formidable throughout, typically reflecting that Westbrook gift for allying uncommon combinations of instruments.

The band also profits from the hard swinging, foot-to-the-floor bass/drum combo of Vergette and York. But when the band takes it down as on newer sung material like ‘Yellow Dog’, an easeful grace emerges. And only Kate Westbrook could out-Dietrich Dietrich on the wickedness of ‘Black Market’, with Street again outstanding.

There are virtues too numerous to mention herein, but the band’s spirit is summed up in the closing ‘What I Like’, a Kate lyric celebrating life’s treasure of pleasure. A band for all seasons from composers with a gift for conjuring up the gladness of hearts. Here’s to life. Andy Robson

Norma Winstone/Kit Downes

Outpost of Dreams

ECM 

Norma Winstone (v) and Kit Downes (p). Rec. 2023

Having talked to Norma and Kit about this record (see Jazzwise, May 2024) and then hearing them in concert at this year’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the arrival of the album was eagerly anticipated. And it doesn’t disappoint. The intimacy and warm acoustic of the studio in Udine, Italy works even better for their collaboration than at the small Parabola Theatre in Gloucestershire, and so Norma’s opening lyrics about winter flames reflected in windows immediately conjure up imagery that’s captured by Kit’s inventive piano.

Nine of the 10 songs have original lyrics by Norma, and they work well, not least allowing the duo to open up plenty of space in – for example – Ralph Towner’s ‘Beneath an Evening Sky’. It’s an object lesson that creativity can be subtle and spacious – never better than on the traditional song ‘Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair’. When we get to the closing ‘Rowing Home’ we have shared a journey with them through a range of repertoire, from Towner and Carla Bley to John Taylor, as well as four memorable pieces by Kit. A treasure of an album. Alyn Shipton

These reviews originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Jazzwise today