Clive Bell

Champagne Dub: Rainbow

by Chris May
January 30, 2024

Rainbow is not a jazz album, not in a million light years, but it is a blast, and the two core members of Champagne Dub are British jazz-and-beyond musicians who have made careers out of going off piste. Good reasons for lending an ear. The renegade twosome are Max Hallett (aka Betamax), who held down the drum chair in The Comet Is Coming until Shabaka Hutchings' decision to drop the tenor sax in favour of shakuhachi flutes ...

Taeko Kunishima: Dictionary Land

by Karl Ackermann
October 9, 2022

Known for her lyrical piano style, Japanese musician and composer Taeko Kunishima has her roots in classical music. While studying at university, she heard Miles Davis on the radio and the impact was life-altering. Kunishima was not content with simply adapting to Western jazz; her interests are far broader and have led her to Dictionary Land. The album is the culmination of influences which range from jazz to her native folklore, and Arabic music. Dictionary Land is Kunishima's ...

Clive Bell & Sylvia Hallett: The Geographers

by John Eyles
June 8, 2005

I suspect that a blindfolded listener dropped anywhere into this album would be unlikely to identify it as a product of the London improvising community. Guesses would most probably centre around ethnographic field recordings made way out east, rather than recordings made in Gateway Studios by two Brits.

Clive Bell and Sylvia Hallett have very different histories but are highly compatible. He favours exotic wind instruments, which he studied extensively in Japan and Thailand. She does use such instruments as ...