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Chip Wickham

Chip Wickham started out in the highly influential UK breakbeat, hip-hop and drum & bass scene that was Manchester’s Grand Central Records, working and playing with the likes of Rae & Christian, Fingathing, The Pharcyde, Jimpster, Nightmares On Wax, Jenna G and Graham Massey. It wasn’t long before he found himself touring all over the world, and began working with more mainstream artists like Badly Drawn Boy and Roy Ayers. He also played on the soundtrack to the Guy Ritchie’s Snatch.

The following years were spent writing, producing and remixing tracks for a wide range of artists, including his own electro-Latin project Malena, releasing the Fried Samba album on Freestyle in 2007.

However, jazz has always been his first love, and soon he found himself working with award winning UK trumpeter Matthew Halsall, playing live and eventually appearing on Halsall’s critically acclaimed breakthrough album Sending My Love. This scene enabled Chip to work with some of the best UK jazz musicians, such as Nat Birchall and Rob Turner, who went on to form Blue Note act Go Go Penguin. This highly influential group of musicians had a long lasting influence on Chip, which can clearly be heard in his own album.

Always a restless soul and keen to travel, Chip relocated to the late night scene of Madrid in Spain in 2007, and immediately became part of the explosion of the city’s soul-jazz scene. Bringing together his UK and Spanish musician friends led to the formation of The Fire Eaters. While the original idea was to be the backing band for his old friend Eddie Roberts (from UK’s number one funk outfit The New Mastersounds), they eventually became a ‘proper’ band, releasing music on different labels.

Meanwhile, he also released a couple of 45s on the Madrid-based Lovemonk imprint – a mixture of raw funk and heavy Latin beats, which directed him towards the world of soul-jazz and hard funk.

He remained active outside Spain as well, playing and recording with The New Mastersounds, which led to a guest appearance on the Japanese tour following the success of the single ‘Chocolate Chip’. More big names in the soul scene started calling, and soon he was writing and recording session work for groups such as Lack Of Afro and Deep Street Soul.

This all culminated in an invitation to play for the prestigious Craig Charles Fantasy Funk Band. Based on a poll from Craig Charles’ top rated BBC6 radio show, Chip was chosen to play alongside the cream of the UK funk & soul scene: James Taylor (JTQ), Snowboy, The Haggis Horns (Mark Ronson), John Turrell (Smooth & Turrell), and Mick Talbot (The Style Council).

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7
Album Review

Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View

Read "An Ever Changing View" reviewed by Geno Thackara


Whatever view Matthew Halsall is sharing here, it is drawn from life and correspondingly picturesque--not just always changing, but always colorful and fascinating. This View comes partly from the sea-and-sky vistas he enjoyed while creating it, splitting time between England and Wales. Partly, it also comes from a couple of years collecting a trove of percussive odds-and-ends, and cheerfully playing with all the organic sounds they offered. Tinkering with those tones, with no strict framework in mind, he produces a ...

4
Album Review

Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View

Read "An Ever Changing View" reviewed by Chris May


Based in the northern English city of Manchester, trumpeter Matthew Halsall debuted on record in 2008 with Sending My Love (Gondwana), a stylish take on the meditative end of the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Halsall's emergence pre-dated by over half a decade that of the London alternative scene vanguarded by musicians such as Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, and his trajectory has continued to progress quite apart from it. This is unusual in England, a small ...

15
Album Review

Chip Wickham: Cloud 10

Read "Cloud 10" reviewed by Peter Jones


Is it OK for music to be background? In other words, does all music have to be listened to with the same degree of concentration and freedom from distraction? It may be a moot question in these greatly distracted times. Here's another, related question: is the music you want on in the background necessarily inferior to the stuff you need to pay attention to? This new album from flutist/tenor saxophonist Chip Wickham is in the genre of spiritual ...

8
Album Review

Amanda Whiting: Lost In Abstraction

Read "Lost In Abstraction" reviewed by Peter Jones


The revival in the fortunes of the harp has been one of the more unexpected developments in jazz: Brandee Younger's 2021 album Somewhere Different made an impact on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, the instrument has been finding favor in the hands of both Tara Minton and Alina Bzhezhinska. Now Wales' very own Amanda Whiting is coming up fast on the rails with this, her third album. Listening to Lost in Abstraction is a rich ...

2
Album Review

Amanda Whiting: Lost In Abstraction

Read "Lost In Abstraction" reviewed by Gareth Thompson


Ahh, the angelic harp, a symbol of celestial beings, Biblical healing, Irish identity and a rubbish lager. In jazz terms we think of the instrument in relation to Casper Reardon, Dorothy Ashby, Alice Coltrane and more recently Deborah Henson-Conant. A noble list of names if not exactly boundless. The harp is, after all, much less portable than a sax or trumpet, not to mention a good deal quieter. Then consider that odd grasping motion of playing, that strange conjuration of ...

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Album Review

Chip Wickham: Blue To Red

Read "Blue To Red" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay


It's not always easy to feel uplifted and optimistic these days, when reasons to be downhearted seem to overwhelm the reasons to be cheerful. When an album's title refers to a planet's descent from life-giving blue to the deadness of red (Mars, in this context, but British flautist Chris Wickham fears that Earth may be heading in the same direction) it hardly appears likely that it's one for the “cheerful" pile: and yet Blue To Red, from Wickham, is one ...

5
Album Review

Chip Wickham: Blue To Red

Read "Blue To Red" reviewed by Chris May


The marketing thrust accompanying Chip Wickham's third album emphasises an affinity between the disc and the late 1960s / early 1970s work of Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane. Certainly, Blue To Red ticks two boxes: Wickham puts aside his saxophone to play only flute and alto flute, whose seraphic tones were favoured by Lateef and Coltrane; and there are plenty of Coltrane-like harp glisses, played by Amanda Whiting, like Wickham a graduate of Manchester-based spiritual-jazz trumpeter Matthew Halsall's Gondwana Orchestra. ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

An Ever Changing View

Gondwana Records
2023

buy

Lost In Abstraction

Jazzman Records
2022

buy

Cloud 10

Gondwana Records
2022

buy

Blue To Red

LoveMonk Records
2020

buy

Shamal Wind

LoveMonk Records
2018

buy

La Sombra

LoveMonk Records
2017

buy

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