Tuesday 30 June 2020
Monday 29 June 2020
Thursday 25 June 2020
Trevor Watts - The Lockdown Solos - now available at Ray's Jazz at Foyles
CD copies of the critically acclaimed Lockdown Solos by Trevor Watts are now available from Ray's Jazz, part of the magnificent Foyles flagship bookshop in Charing Cross Road in central London.
Saturday 20 June 2020
New music on the way from Johnny Butler but meanwhile......
There will be new music coming soon from NYC legend, ex Beyonce arranger & Levon Helm band member Johnny Butler! Meanwhile you can grab a 12" vinyl version of the critically acclaimed HyperViolet from Rough Trade NYC. If that's a bit of a journey in these weird times you can get a CD from 
https://www.hi4headrecords.com/catalogue.html#hyper and it's available digitally everywhere!
Friday 19 June 2020
Orange Crate Art - Van Dyke Parks & Brian Wilson - Reissued!
One of our faves here at Hi4Head Towers has been reissued in deluxe formats!
Thursday 18 June 2020
Discus Music
We can recommend Discus Music! The catalogue is huge and the prog jazz of Das Rad is very cool!
Wednesday 17 June 2020
We recommend Ship Full of Bombs radio!.......
......especially Junkyard Jukebox & Sunday Jazz Lounge!
The Lockdown Solos by Trevor Watts - Editor's Choice in the July 2020 issue of Jazzwise!
We are very chuffed to tell the world that this superb album is an Editor's choice in Jazzwise! Here is the full text of Edwin Pouncey's review:
From
Jazzwise – Lockdown Solos – Editors Choice
Trevor
Watts shows his jazz roots are still a major part of his playing as he storms
through this powerful set of solo pieces that were recorded during his period
of lockdown. As the Covid-19 virus raged outside, Watts’ response was to return
to the music that originally prompted him to pick up his saxophone – and just
blow his isolation blues away. Made up of eight separate solos for alto and
soprano sax (each tagged with the title ‘I so elated’….geddit?), the exercise
rekindles his love of bebop and modern jazz forms, as well as pushing his
instinctive need to improvise to the fore. Despite his forced confinement, Watts
is in exceptionally fine voice here, letting loose warm gusts of trilling notes
that echo with the possible inspiration of an amplified dawn chorus. The
Lockdown Solos is a timely message of musical freedom with a reverberation that
will last longer than the pandemic that caused it to happen.
Tuesday 16 June 2020
Monday 15 June 2020
Friday 12 June 2020
Reunion - Peter Knight & Trevor Watts
'It's hard to catch the feel of those improvised nights when the audience knows something unique - and, in its way, perfect - is evolving as it listens, but this is a recording that does just that.' (John Fordham - The Guardian)
Thursday 11 June 2020
Johnny Butler - HyperViolet - Jazzchill Blogspot review - CD at hi4headrecords.com and available digitally everywhere
HyperViolet is a space. It is a destination. HyperViolet is the hollowness behind aching, arching light glancing off half-hidden spires and metallic mountaintops. In HyperViolet, Brooklyn-based saxophonist and electronicist Johnny Butler has found his perfect medium, his perfect space within the sound of his own life. Combining pop sensibilities with avant-garde yearnings, Butler has created a world within a world, and it is a glorious place within which to get lost."It is its own little eco-system, a forest of its own, growing with its own organic rules," explains Butler. "I hate when music is in its box and that's it. I hate conservative creative behavior. The album has an electronic angle but I want it to sound real too though. I want real people playing organic music."
The result is a forty-four minute, hard-hitting tour-de-force that explores the depths of depression, the ravages of creativity, the brilliance of overexertion, and the final serenity of embracing closure. Whirling through myriad musical environments, Butler and his band (bassist Michael Feinberg, guitarist Jeff Miles, drummer Bram Kincheloe, alto saxophonist JJ Byars, and keyboardist Dov Manski -- along with special guests including Kassa Overall, Raycee Jones, Tecla, Sister Sparrow, Todd Reynolds, and Jackson Kincheloe, and mastering from Daddy Kev) paint in strokes that cut deep, leaving the listener hanging over a precipice of musical motion, waiting for the cliff edge to crumble.
That mastery of time and timbre is no accident for the Seattle-born Butler, who as a young man found himself drawn to the tension and passion of seemingly unconnected genres of music. "Even though I grew up in the jazz world, I used to judge the quality of any band based on how many people were moshing," recollects Butler of those wild, early days. "If some band was playing and no one was moshing, I would just walk out. Maybe I'm in the wrong community, now. But at the right kind of gig I still get the occasional guy going buck wild." That wildness lies at the heart of everything Butler does. And now, after years giving himself to other people's projects -- including being a founding member of the Brooklyn-based soul rock band Sister Sparrow & the Dirty Birds, plus accruing writing and arranging credits for such artists as Beyoncé, on the Grammy Award winning Love on Top -- Butler is ready to take his biggest step yet in bringing his unique, bridge-like ideas and songs into the world.
"I have this crazy creative energy that if it is not getting used, it sort of turns inward and becomes a self-destructive feeling. I was channeling all of this emotional energy into all these songs and creating something out of it rather than having it turned inward. I have to be doing this," Butler says with a smile. "After committing myself to this music, to my own vision, I had this crazy writing period where I was writing a ton of music. I wrote, like, five hundred songs. Things for myself, chamber pieces, pieces for other people, beats, remixes..."
Butler was on a hot streak and began enlisting as many friends as he could to play and collaborate on his overflow of ideas, which culminated in HyperViolet being recorded in stages, with each musician adding their own special touch to Butler's initial vision. "It's sort of like each person came in and spilled their guts. Everyone was so honest and vulnerable. It made the record come to life in a way I'd never imagined."
"Crossing the River" and "Jump" both feature rapper Kassa Overall. The former uses immense space to support Overall's syrupy flow. Incidental chatter and Todd Reynolds' ethereal violin push and pull the listener through the former's hazy reality while the latter digs even deeper into the hip-hop realm. "I think Kassa is exploring a lot of ideas that have to do with staying and going. Don't stay or don't leave. It's all about trying to control the situation," says Butler. "He thought he knew what he was writing but there is so much more depth that I don't think he initially saw what had formed. You can hear the process very clearly. You can hear Kassa drinking. I wanted that to be part of it. That kind of stuff is my favorite: the seams of the music where you see the canvas a little bit like Monet in his old age where you can see the brushstrokes."
If there's a tune on this album that can fill the dance floor it is "What It Deserves." Butler uses beats and the charms of vocalist Tecla to provide a forum to both riff and cut loose over a rising storm of percussion. "Crake's Dream" is a pensive build-up of beeping keyboards behind the intricate twists and turns of vocalist Bridget Davis' tightly harmonized lead. The title is derived from Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake. "Flipper Wants Out" was one of Butler's first tunes for the record and features his former band-mates from Sister Sparrow. Jackson Kinechole's wheezing harmonica appears to emanate from a Martian juke joint before vocalist Arleigh Kinechole snarls a firm request for a little personal space. Butler's horns swirl with downtown attitude, chomping at the air in tight formation.
HyperViolet is an eclectic debut riddled with creative insights and original horn work with Butler hanging in the back as often as he is in the spotlight. Each pluck of a string and tap of a pad is given its own room to breathe in a space that can be brimming with ideas. Butler knows that the all encompassing vibe only makes him stronger so he is happy to share, soloing when it feels right and laying back with an embracing pillow of thick harmonies and unexpected beats for friends and band-mates.
With his roots in the Pacific Northwest, his feet firmly planted in Brooklyn, his mind turned towards strangely swirling lands, and his saxophone unsheathed and ready to slay, Johnny Butler has -- with the release of HyperViolet -- announced himself as a true force in this musical landscape.
No Fear - Stevens, Watts & Guy Music that shouts defiance!
Tuesday 9 June 2020
Crossings by Veryan Weston, reviewed by Andy Hamilton in The Wire 437, July 2020
For Crossings, Veryan Weston forgoes piano for the M-Audio keystation, a cheap dummy keyboard or trigger system, with MIDI connection for controlling virtual instruments and recording software. So it has to be connected to a sound generator such as a synthesizer, computer or sampler – in this case, an old Yamaha TG300 sound module. Weston used it for a Henry Cow reunion in 2014, which called for sounds now regarded as retro.I hadn't heard of this keyboard – though neither had Weston's old friend Steve Beresford when I asked him. “Most keyboard players don't know most keyboards. Why would you have a go on every single keyboard around? It would be mad”, he comments. The sounds that come from or through it aren't always tonally beautiful – for that quality, we have to look at Weston's partners, Hannah Marshall (cello) and Mark Sanders (drums). All of the tracks are incredibly propulsive – Sanders seems incapable of producing a less than stellar performance.
This is Weston's latest project of “rhythmic/pentatonic impro/compositions” as he calls them, that he's been developing over 30 years. Born in 1950, he is best known for partnerships with Phil Minton and Trevor Watts – his concern with polyrhythms and rhythmic modulation was apparent in recordings with Watt's Moiré Music. “Crossings refers to phrases and rhythms that cross, and often don't necessarily resolve,” says Weston, describing “the ongoing challenge of one hand doing something often different from the other”.
The pieces are generated from pentatonic scales. “Kalimba Setting” is a delightful imitation of the mbira or thumb-piano. “Kafka's Escape” is titled after a bureaucratic nightmare at the family centre where Weston's partner works. “Slow Blackwell” refers to a figure Ed Blackwell used in his solo on “T & T” from Ornette!, slowed down and turned into an isorhythm. An intriguing, idiosyncratic release from a highly inventive and innovative improviser-composer.
The Lockdown Solos by Trevor Watts, reviewed by Dan Spicer in The Wire 437, July 2020
Fortunately,
Watts has all the space he wants on The
Lockdown Solos. Recorded in April and May this year, these concise yet
searching performances – presented as ‘I so Elated’ parts one to eight –
alternate between alto and soprano and reveal just what a formidable player he
is. On alto especially, it’s clear that jazz – and be-bop in particular – still
inform his thinking. There’s an incredible Bird-like fluidity to his runs,
ideas tumbling and cascading from the horn at lightning speed and with pinpoint
precision. Elsewhere, he gleefully digs into rhythmic patterns, showing just
what a funky player he can also be – as attested by his work with outfits such
as Amalgam and Moire Music – while on soprano, he veers into more avant garde
territory, generating multiphonic overtones. To echo Picasso’s apocryphal
witticism, these improvisations don’t just take a few minutes to play; each is
the result of a lifetime of toil.
Sunday 7 June 2020
Trevor Watts featured on Freeness (BBC Radio 3) 6th June 2020
Big thanks to Corey Mwamba & team for playing a track from The Lockdown Solos https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jvbc
Trevor Watts 80th birthday celebration of his music in The Wire
For those who missed this fine selection in The Wire last year: https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/trevor-watts-celebrates-80-years
Saturday 6 June 2020
Friday 5 June 2020
Thursday 4 June 2020
Emergency - Death by Piano
Trevor Watts - The Lockdown Solos
Tuesday 2 June 2020
Monday 1 June 2020
Das Rad - Adios Al Futuro
I can recommend this! https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/adios-al-futuro-94cd
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