Christine Tobin, Pelt, Trailbelle

From 2016. Paul Muldoon is one of the great Irish poets to emerge from the once benighted north, his name easily belonging to a pantheon that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Hewitt, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian. …

Published: 5 Dec 2019. Updated: 4 years.

From 2016. Paul Muldoon is one of the great Irish poets to emerge from the once benighted north, his name easily belonging to a pantheon that includes Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, John Hewitt, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian. Christine Tobin, one of the great contemporary jazz singers, has set Muldoon’s work to music on her beautiful Pelt.

It is not an exaggeration at all to say that Muldoon is a Heaney for us all globally today, Tobin, a humane protest singer caught in the fraught channel where words and music flow freely. The Muldoon style is different though to the master Heaney’s, more surreal, more attuned to popular rock and pop culture, he is less of a classicist and more of a satirist, a Flann O’Brien in sensibility, a Dylan in execution using the language of elaborate formal metatextual often anthropological dreaming if not sharing quite the same sense of modernist mischief as the author of At Swim-Two-Birds.

From near the Moy, Muldoon has long been a fan and friend of singer Christine Tobin. Her guitarist partner Phil Robson is on the album as is pianist Liam Noble among the personnel.

Like Muldoon, who has a high profile academic career running in tandem with his acclaimed work, Christine now lives in the States and was last heard interpreting the Leonard Cohen songbook. Her Yeats-themed Sailing To Byzantium of recent years was even better. And in her empathy with poetry and poets, Eva Salzman is also a favourite of the once Margate and London-based Dubliner, something that manifests itself in different contexts in her early Babel label period. SG

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Meaty motion from Cleaver

Talk about bustle, well Gerald Cleaver heard recently with Benny Golson at Cadogan Hall here with his band Violet Hour. Still I'd contend he is better playing avant best of all with the much missed Tomasz Stańko on the beautiful Wisława. Just a …

Published: 5 Dec 2019. Updated: 3 years.

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Talk about bustle, well Gerald Cleaver heard recently with Benny Golson at Cadogan Hall here with his band Violet Hour. Still I'd contend he is better playing avant best of all with the much missed Tomasz Stańko on the beautiful Wisława.

Just a track from Live at Firehouse 12: I hear quite a bit of Jimmy Cobb in his playing although Cobb wouldn't handle the ferocity of the tempo here through choice quite so easily these days.

Simply what shoots forth here flies. Trumpet rules as well. The horn players queue up to take their turn. While JD Allen is a mesmerising presence and of course impresses it is Jeremy Pelt who rules like no other since Freddie Hubbard, rest in power, in the idiom stooping to a 'woody woodpecker' type figure. Hold on to your hats, a warm wind is blowing.