Articles by Chris May
Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit
by Chris May
More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with emotion and physicality. Sadly, the nonsense that has been written about his ...
read moreEmpirical: Wonder Is The Beginning
by Chris May
London's Empirical quartet, which first recorded in 2007 as a quintet, has had a steady lineup since 2009's sophomore album, Out 'n' In (Naim): Nathaniel Facey on alto saxophone, Lewis Wright on vibraphone, Tom Farmer on double bass and Shaney Forbes on drums. A stable lineup has given the group a certain consistency of sound, though a changing cast of featured guests has bounded it somewhat. That practically all the tunes the group plays are originals contributes to the consistency. ...
read moreShabaka Hutchings: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
by Chris May
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes ... Since signing with with Impulse! in 2018, Shabaka Hutchings has become best known for his incendiary work on tenor saxophone with Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming and Shabaka & The Ancestors. Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace marks the start of a gentler, more instrospective phase in his music making. The trigger came during the pandemic, when Hutchings fell in love with the Japanese shakuhachi flute. The quietly spoken instrument first edged itself ...
read moreMarion Brown: Three For Shepp To Gesprachsfetzen Revisited
by Chris May
"It is often those we hear the least that we should listen to the most." So wrote the Guadeloupean pianist Jonathan Jurion on the release of his album Le Temps Fou: The Music Of Marion Brown (Komos, 2019). Just why Marion Brown has become such a rarely acknowledged figure is unclear. He possessed all the qualifications needed to go large plus a few extras for good measure. He was a good-looking man. He dressed well (telling Dave ...
read moreLizz Wright: Shadow
by Chris May
The singer Lizz Wright made a brief stopover in London in March 2024, on a tour previewing Shadow. She appeared for one night only at Cadogan Hall, a 900-seat auditorium big enough when full to feel buzzy but small enough still to remain close to intimate. It was a perfect setting for Wright and her characteristically à la carte programme of jazz, gospel, blues and folk music from multiple traditions. Shadow is an exquisitely crafted, low-key production ...
read moreJan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett and Azimuth light up ECM Luminessence reissues
by Chris May
The spring 2024 iteration of ECM's audiophile vinyl reissue series, Luminessence, presents another trio of landmark albums: Jan Garbarek Quartet's Afric Pepperbird, from 1971, Keith Jarrett and Garbarek's Luminessence, from 1975, and Azimuth's Azimuth, from 1977. The combined scope of the music on the three discs (which come with new liner notes) is prairie wide, and chronologically proceeds from howling at the moon to walking in healing moonlight. Jan Garbarek Quartet Afric Pepperbird (1971) ...
read moreAwen Ensemble: Cadair Idris
by Chris May
Here in Britain, jazz and folk music intersections have a long history. Putting aside the US-centric fusions of the trad bands of the 1950s, as exemplified by the Chris Barber Band's blend of New Orleans jazz and Depression-era folksongs, the movement really kicked off in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Husband and wife team John and Beverley Martyn's Road To Ruin (Island, 1970), featuring South African alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana among other jazz musicians, remains a classic of its ...
read moreKjetil Mulelid: Agoja
by Chris May
Over the course of three albums with his trio between 2019 and 2022, and the exquisitely pretty solo set Piano (Rune Grammofon, 2021), keyboardist Kjetil Mulelid has emerged as a bright new star in Norwegian jazz. His playing is vivacious, his composing melodic and his overall sound consonant but full of unexpected twists and turns. Mulelid has been mentioned in the same breath as Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, and the comparisons, though excitable, have some merit.
read moreCassie Kinoshi: Letting The Sunshine In
by Chris May
Cassie Kinoshi, the acclaimed British composer and alto saxophonist, made her name as a founder member of the Afrobeat-inspired band Kokoroko and with her own ten-piece Seed Ensemble. Her work pushes social change, interrogating inequality and injustice, mainly through instrumental music, occasionally with lyrics, and always with invention and singularity. Seed's sophomore album, gratitude (International Anthem, 2024), adds mental health, and how to improve it, to Kinoshi's sources of inspiration. She addresses anxiety and depression with the benefit of personal ...
read moreThe Jazz Defenders: Memory In Motion
by Chris May
If there is one quality of first generation NYC hard bop which no twenty-first century band has succeeded in capturing it is the snarling half-valve badness which coursed through Lee Morgan's music. The absence is not surprising, for Morgan's vibe was a real-time product of the demi-monde in which he moved and that world is gone forever. Hard bop was not all about badness, however. Of equal weight towards the other end of the spectrum were Horace ...
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