Faith Brackenbury: KnifeAngel

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Oli Hayhurst (b)
Martin Speake (as)
Rob Luft (g)
Faith Brackenbury (vn)
Will Glaser (d)
Alex Maguire (p)

Label:

Lonely Duck (CD)

August/2019

Media Format:

CD

RecordDate:

12 August 2016

Brackenbury's prolific, post-motherhood output over the past decade finds inspiration here in Alfie Bradley's ‘Knife Angel’, a giant sculpture of blunted knives, some inscribed to those killed by them: “a symbol of tragic beauty, a message of hope conveyed in ominously dark material”. Familiar collaborators help her four-movement response. The first sees the dart and flow of Rob Luft's guitar meet Alex Maguire's hurtling bop piano, and the composer's lyrical, gypsy jazz violin. Late-night balladry and Oli Hayhurst's mellifluous bass then encourage mournful contemplation. Hayhurst's shadowy throb in the third movement introduces a wild piano-guitar slalom, before final elegiac resolution built on the violin's intrinsic melancholy. Such largely mainstream jazz may not be the closest language to the anti-knife cause, but it's the one Brackenbury speaks with heartfelt conviction. A quarter of proceeds go to Alison Cope's Joshua Ribera Achievement Awards to encourage art in the educationally excluded (see faithbrackenbury.com for details).

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