Alister Spence, Tony Buck, Mythographer ****

This is easy to ''get'' immediately if you are into the freeness. Tony Buck the drummer here is the best known of the pair given his tenure in wildly successful avant piano trio The Necks. The more bang you get with your Buck in contexts other than …

Published: 13 Feb 2023. Updated: 14 months.

This is easy to ''get'' immediately if you are into the freeness. Tony Buck the drummer here is the best known of the pair given his tenure in wildly successful avant piano trio The Necks. The more bang you get with your Buck in contexts other than The Necks however heretical is possibly even more enjoyable thinking about his great showing live in London with Tony Bevan, Dom Lash and Joe Morris back in 2009. Here with fellow Australian pianist Alister Spence who is a wildly different player to The Necks' Chris Abrahams (although both are avant-gardists) Mythographer was recorded in a Sydney studio at the beginning of last year. Buck is at his best in an extraordinary passage at the beginning of 'Curious Terrain' scything and slicing with abandon, the deft deeper tones he mines becoming a lullaby to the harsher textures that live together happily just notes away. As for Spence hone in on the appealing quasi-Crispellian grandiloquence to be found on the remarkable 'Strange Luminant.'

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Shaken, not stirred: Pure Desmond to tour

Des res: this long running German band samba shimmer and generously - while intentionally or not - ladle on the extra portions of Weißlacker with much gusto. Flavoured by the sound of Lorenz Hargassner's Paul Desmond-like alto saxophone, guitarist …

Published: 13 Feb 2023. Updated: 14 months.

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Des res: this long running German band samba shimmer and generously - while intentionally or not - ladle on the extra portions of Weißlacker with much gusto. Flavoured by the sound of Lorenz Hargassner's Paul Desmond-like alto saxophone, guitarist Johann Weiss, bassist Christian Flohr and drummer Sebastian Deufel complete the sound. They're nothing like the Dave Brubeck quartet - the clue is in the occasionally Hank Marvin-like guitar solos. The James Bond stuff they play is familiar but not necessarily brilliant jazz vehicles although these plucky Germans are up for the challenge. More a James Last easy listen than the next edgiest thing ever, go on: pass the Nieheimer. Pure Desmond's upcoming dates include Matt and Phred's, Manchester on 2 March; Peggy's Skylight, Nottingham, 4 March and Komedia, Bath, 5 March.

Pure Desmond, photo: press