Gig choice - 6-12 March 23

GIG OF THE WEEK: Xhosa Cole quartet St Ives Jazz Club, Western Hotel, St Ives, Cornwall Tuesday 7 March Ace saxist Xhosa Cole out of the Birmingham scene has guitarist Steve Saunders, bassist Josh Vadiveloo and drummer Nathan England Jones with …

Published: 5 Mar 2023. Updated: 13 months.

GIG OF THE WEEK:

Ace saxist Xhosa Cole out of the Birmingham scene has guitarist Steve Saunders, bassist Josh Vadiveloo and drummer Nathan England Jones with him on tour this week.

Saxist Tori Freestone is with bassist Dave Mannington and drummer Tim Giles. Freestone last year won an Ivor Novello Composer Award in the Jazz Ensemble category for her work 'Birds of Paradise' which was premiered by pianist Alcyona Mick at the 2021 London Jazz Festival.

Bassist Simon Thorpe has mainstream icon trumpeter Enrico Tomasso with him plus Malcolm Earl Smith on trombone and vocals, Luke Annesley on reeds, the great saxist Alex Garnett, guitarist Colin Oxley, pianist John Pearce - known for his work with Scott Hamilton - drummer Matt Skelton and singer Liz Fletcher.

High profile session bass guitarist Yolanda Charles known for her work with BB King and Van Morrison presents her Project PH Instra-Mentals, a quartet bristling with guitar and keys and featuring the fine drummer Laurie Lowe perhaps best known for his work to some jazz fans with Robert Mitchell.

In the Scottish drummer's dream team of a Sun Swells band are an incredible collection of leading players: violinist-singer Alice Zawadzki, trumpeter Laura Jurd, guitarist Rob Luft, pianist Elliot Galvin and bassist Tom McCredie.

The latest helping of chunky riffs, skittering rhythms and cosmic keyboards from the futuristic trio The Comet Is Coming Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam landed in 2022 three years on from Trust In The Life Force Of the Deep Mystery and six years since their debut Channel the Spirits. Dan “Danalogue” Leavers on synths, Shabaka Hutchings on saxophone and Max “Betamax” Hallett on drums have again relied on their own sci-fi formula that crosses over into electronica and the dancefloor. Stripped down the essential sound is less maximalist than the pyrotechnics of 'Code' might suggest. And the sound is certainly strong on structure but overly reliant on the frills and furbelows of a tangled wire of synths that on album highlight 'Mystik' nonetheless gains ominous traction. If you are a Shabaka fan his best work isn't here - it's on his EP Afrikan Culture something of a miniature meisterwerk - but as a rollicking spectacle The Comet Is Coming live is where you need to be first up.

Very classy modern mainstream pianist Rob Barron is with double bassist Jeremy Brown and drummer Josh Morrison both known for their work down the years with Stacey Kent.

Xhosa Cole, photo: press

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Nick Finzer, Dreams, Visions, Illusions, Outside In Music ***1/2

It has been a while since such a stand-out trombone-led album has come along - probably the last time in our experience was a hugely contrasting release stylistically by Nathaniel Cross entitled Charge It To the Game a couple of years ago - and …

Published: 4 Mar 2023. Updated: 40 days.

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It has been a while since such a stand-out trombone-led album has come along - probably the last time in our experience was a hugely contrasting release stylistically by Nathaniel Cross entitled Charge It To the Game a couple of years ago - and before that it was live rather than on record hearing the formidable Irish trombonist Paul Dunlea in 2018 at an Irish scene showcase in Belfast.

US trombonist Nick Finzer is a closer match stylistically to Dunlea than to Cross given that both Finzer and Dunlea share a progressive rewriting of the straightahead-type traditions at the core of their approach. Other paths among top global trombone stylists attract for instance the Swiss genius Samuel Blaser who has typically choosen the avant fork in the road most satisfyingly.

A sextet affair two years on from Out of Focus released on his own label the go-ahead Outside In Music, Finzer, who has a big gutsy sound, is with tenor saxophonist/bass clarinettist Lucas Pino, guitarist Alex Wintz, pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Dave Baron and drummer Jimmy Macbride. 'Follow Your Heart,' preceded by a related introductory piece, is where the album goes into more daring territory after a less oblique, bright, easy-to-grasp slice of positivity on 'To Dream a Bigger Dream.'

Like Dunlea, Finzer is drawn to elaborate on melodic phraseology, although occasionally dourly morose passages wing their way in, measured out in gentle mid-tempo spaces. Sometimes you gain the feeling that the front line voicings block out the tenor too much in a crowd of textures. But when that passes and the album becomes increasingly hymnal - for instance on 'Vision or Mirage' - that certain yearning for the spiritual that reveals itself increasingly is much easier to latch on to and proves most rewarding. Nick Finzer, photo: Outside In Music. Dreams, Visions, Illusions is out on 24 April