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Chris Biscoe
Chris Biscoe: Music Is: Chris Biscoe Plays Mike Westbrook
by Duncan Heining
Chris Biscoe can trade choruses with the best and melt the heart with the tenderest of ballads. But that is not what makes him special. Live and on record there is always a sense of quiet anticipation as he starts a solo. One knows one is about to hear something new, something different. It is more than his mastery of a range of woodwinds. It is more than the wonderful tone he achieves seemingly effortlessly on each of his instruments--powerful, ...
read moreChris Biscoe: Music Is: Chris Biscoe Plays Mike Westbrook
by Chris May
Chris Biscoe has played in the bands led by the great British composer Mike Westbrook and/or his wife, singer and lyricist Kate Westbrook, every year since 1979 bar one. He is the Westbrooks' first-call saxophonist and clarinetist and the love runs both ways. It also rings out on every track of this beautiful album. The concept is straightforward. Biscoe has taken seven Westbrook pieces out of their original, mostly big band, contexts and arranged them for a ...
read moreMike Westbrook: London Bridge Live In Zurich 1990
by Chris May
Viewed from the other side of the Atlantic, Mike Westbrook is probably Britain's best kept secret. A composer, pianist and tubaist--above all, composer--Westbrook's recording career began in the late 1960s. Since then he has released upwards of fifty albums, spanning jazz rock through jazz and contemporary-classical fusions such as the 2 x CD London Bridge Live In Zurich 1990. Westbrook's albums have been performed by lineups ranging in size from trios through to, in this case, an eleven-piece jazz orchestra ...
read moreRay Russell: Fluid Architecture
by Mark Sullivan
Veteran British guitarist and composer Ray Russell has been active in free jazz, fusion and as a session player. His whole range of experience finds a voice in the opener Escaping The Six String Cage," as he and synthesist Eric Baldwin explore a wide range of guitar sounds. Slide guitar gives way to lyrical volume pedal swells, followed by rhythmic loops leading into free playing. Lyrical delay evolves into an abstract soundscape, finally returning to slide. Several tracks ...
read moreCartoon: Change Of Meaning
by Roger Farbey
The Confront Recording's Collectors Series is distinguished by the packaging of its CDs which arrive in a DVD sized metal box. Rather than any cover art, there are instead simple stickers affixed to the front and rear denoting the artist, title and track names. The CD itself quaintly replicates the grooves and track markers of a vinyl record. These are limited edition runs of just a few hundred and sell at an attractively competitive price. But that's merely the icing ...
read moreChris Biscoe Allison Neale: Then and Now
by Duncan Heining
The idea here is a simple one. Pick a selection of tunes--five standards, two originals--and revisit them, in the style of the Gerry Mulligan/Paul Desmond Quartet. That group was a brief affair, making just two records together--Gerry Mulligan-Paul Desmond Quartet and Two of a Mind. Cleverly, Biscoe and Neale have only picked two tunes covered by Mulligan and Desmond -"Easy Living" and The Way You Look Tonight," both from Two of a Mind. This, in effect, allows them a greater ...
read moreChris Biscoe Profiles Quartet: Live At Campus West
by Bruce Lindsay
British multi-instrumentalist Chris Biscoe began playing the alto saxophone in 1963, just one year before the death of Eric Dolphy. On Live At Campus West Biscoe and his Profiles Quartet pay tribute to Dolphy's legacy with new arrangements of tunes associated with Dolphy as a composer and player, drawing on music from the American's brief but stellar career and once again placing it firmly center-stage.Live At Campus West was recorded on January 30th 2011 and features four of ...
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