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Nat Birchall

Saxophonist Nat Birchall has always been something of an enigma, a sublimely soulful saxophonist hidden from view in the Northern hills of England. His debut album Sixth Sense (1999) first announced him to the jazz world as an urgent tenor saxophonist with a feel for pulsing modal hard-bop. But it was his cult hit and now highly sought after soulful slice of spiritual jazz Akhenaten (released on trumpeter Matthew Halsall’s label, Gondwana Records, in 2009) that suggested that the spirit of Coltrane was alive and well in Northern England. Acclaimed by the critics (MOJO for one hailing its ‘spacial sunship beauty’ and ‘lyrical heat haze hypnotism’) Akhenaten together with Halsall’s own releases ‘Sending My Love’ and ‘Colour Yes’ helped create the unique sound that the Independent On Sunday described as ‘rain soaked spiritual jazz from Manchester”.

Growing up in a Northern Village, Birchall was hardly exposed to jazz but through some friends fell in love with roots reggae and dub in the early ‘70s and it was the legendary Jamaican jazz-influenced saxophonists, Cedric Brooks, Tommy McCook, that inspired him take up the saxophone and through them that he discovered the music of John Coltrane. Lessons with an enigmatic local player, Harold Salisbury, followed as well as playing with various bands including Akay Temiz’s Zaman. Birchall led a hip-hop influenced jazz band Corner Crew in the early ‘90s and started to make a name for himself on the local scene but felt unsatisfied with the music and despite some encouragement from the legendary record producer Tony Hall (Dizzy Reece, Tubby Hayes etc) Birchall resisted the call of the London scene and continued to search for the music he felt inside. Meeting trumpeter Matthew Halsall and a group of like minded players (including pianist Adam Fairhall, bassist Gavin Barras and drummer Gaz Hughes) gathered around Matt & Phreds in Manchester proved an inspiration ‘Suddenly I felt something special in the music. My music is very simple, harmonically and melodically, so you have to play with as much conviction and soul as possible because there's nothing to hide behind, just the truth of how you feel the music.” And it is this soulful elegance that illuminates both Akhenaten and Birchall’s more expansive follow-up Guiding Spirit.

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6
Album Review

Nat Birchall: Ancient Africa

Read "Ancient Africa" reviewed by Chris May


Tucked away in the rural north of England, and so doubly off the media radar, tenor saxophonist Nat Birchall is one of Britain's best kept secrets. His specialism is the strand of spiritual jazz pioneered by John Coltrane in the mid 1960s. Since the turn of the millennium, Birchall has released a string of albums ringing that bell with increasing resonance. For a few years either side of 2010, Birchall was also part of trumpeter Matthew Halsall's fellow-travelling ...

7
Album Review

Nat Birchall Sextet: Exaltation / Live In Athens Vol 1

Read "Exaltation / Live In Athens Vol 1" reviewed by Chris May


The saxophonist Nat Birchall is, alongside his friend the trumpeter Matthew Halsall, one of the instigators of the spiritual jazz scene centred around the northern British city of Manchester, two hundred miles and a lifestyle north of London. Birchall self-released his debut album, The Sixth Sense, in 1999. John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane were among his formative influences and his music continues along the trajectory they mapped out. Birchall last recorded with his ...

12
Album Review

Nat Birchall: The Storyteller: A Musical Tribute To Yusef Lateef

Read "The Storyteller: A Musical Tribute To Yusef Lateef" reviewed by Chris May


The deification of Yusef Lateef, which began only after his passing in 2013, rests on the first decade of his long recording career, from 1957—1967, when he extended the language of jazz to include elements of Asian and Middle Eastern musics while recording for Savoy, Prestige and Impulse. After a second decade with Atlantic, where he recorded ten stonkingly good soul-jazz albums, Lateef took up with Creed Taylor's CTI and began a sad decline into noodling wallpaper music. This period ...

4
Album Review

Nat Birchall: Obeah Man

Read "Obeah Man" reviewed by Chris May


Welcome to the latest analog-era time warp... the vinyl revival has rebirthed the 45rpm seven-inch jazz single. The format faded away in the 1960s. Even back then, chart hits such as Stan Getz's “Desafinado" (Verve, 1962) were freak events, but before the coming of album playing FM radio stations, an edited version of an album track could be powerful promo on mainstream radio--and as Bob Weinstock, founder of the Prestige label, told an interviewer in 1959, “The four best promo ...

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Album Review

Nat Birchall: Cosmic Language

Read "Cosmic Language" reviewed by Chris May


Spiritual jazz resonates most deeply during times of social stress and turmoil. It was, after all, created by African American musicians who were engaged with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Later given the alternative description Afrofuturist jazz, the music had one foot planted in science fiction-inspired magical realism and the other in black consciousness-inspired social activism. The balance varied from musician to musician, but even the most magical realist among them--a grouping which would include Alice Coltrane, Pharoah ...

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Extended Analysis

Nat Birchall: Creation

Read "Nat Birchall: Creation" reviewed by Phil Barnes


Coming less than a year after the 2015 release Invocations on Henley's Jazzman records, Creation finds Nat Birchall back on his own Sound Soul and Spirit label. Long term collaborator Adam Fairhall on piano, and Johnny Hunter on drums are retained from that record and we welcome back Andy Hay as a second drummer, last heard on 2011's 'Sacred Dimension' as well as saying hello to new boy Michael Bardon on bass. Whether influenced by the line-up changes ...

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Extended Analysis

Nat Birchall: Invocations

Read "Nat Birchall: Invocations" reviewed by Phil Barnes


There is a feeling of a new beginning on this collection from Nat Birchall. Superficially the album is released on Henley-on-Thames' Jazzman records rather than Birchall's own Sound Soul and Spirit records, on which he released the wonderful World Without Form and classic Live in Larissa. More tangibly only Adam Fairhall on piano remains from those two collections, representing the last common link to the pool of musicians Birchall and Matthew Halsall drew from in their classic collaborations on Gondwana ...

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Interview

Saxophonist Nat Birchall Interviewed at AAJ

Saxophonist Nat Birchall Interviewed at AAJ

Source: John Kelman

Two of the most over-used phrases in music journalism are “overnight star" and “out of nowhere," and so apologies for starting with them here. But when it comes to describing British saxophonist Nat Birchall, they have an unusual degree of exactitude. Birchall, born in 1957 in the rural seclusion of the hill country of North-West England, where he still lives in 2010, and a saxophonist since 1979, didn't make an impression on Britain's national jazz scene until 2009, when he ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Ancient Africa

Ancient Archive of Sound
2021

buy

Obeah Man

Jazzman Records
2019

buy

The Storyteller: A...

Jazzman Records
2019

buy

Cosmic Language

Jazzman Records
2018

buy

Creation

Sound Soul And Spirit
2016

buy

Speak To Us Of Love

From: World Without Form
By Nat Birchall

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