Bassist Avishai Cohen has in the last decade of his prolific, high-level 20-year career, moved from bass hero and bandleader, into the echelons of significant stylistic innovator and powerful musical mentor.
Almost 30 years and 15 albums into his career, there’s no doubting Courtney Pine’s stature as one of the greatest saxophonists this country has ever produced: his awe-inspiring technique and stage presence more than matched by his knack of creating music that immediately resonates with his audiences.
Rudresh Mahanthappa has, since his 1994 debut album Yatra, made deep in-roads into fusing his Indian heritage with an attacking, sharp-edged alto sax style.
As fiercely independent label Starta East proved in the 1970s, bold artistry from the likes of Pharaoh Sanders, Clifford Jordan, Cecil McBee and Gil Scott-Heron and potent political visions can encapsulate the signs and sounds of the times.
Chris Potter’s ascent to the top of the tenor sax tree hasn’t been as swift as his current form might suggest it should have been – more a steady 20-year burn of increasingly impressive playing and recording.
For the past two decades Israeli-born, UK-based saxophonist, author and political provocateur Gilad Atzmon has matched his incendiary playing and controversial opinions with a relentlessly questioning attitude to the establishment and his own identity.
Since their self-titled opening salvo in 2006, keyboardist Kit Downes, guitarist Chris Montague and drummer Joshua Blackmore of relentlessly progressive three-piece Troyka, have become something of a Brit-jazz supergroup.
Quite literally exploding onto the European jazz scene in just three short years since the release of his breakthrough solo album, Golden Xplosion, 29-year old Norwegian sax demon Marius Neset combines gale-force intensity with high-octane ideas for maximum impact.
Barely into her twenties, trumpeter, composer, bandleader, Chaos Collective founder and Blue-Eyed Hawk bandmember Laura Jurd is not just one of the leading instrumentalists of her generation but also a musician of great creative vision.
Should composer, bandleader, poet, pianist and visionary Sun Ra be looking back at earth from his chosen interplanetary home of Saturn at the close of this centenary year of his birth, he may not be surprised to see the seeds of his Afrofuturism flourishing anew.
