CD reviews featuring Oxford artists

9:12am Thursday 3rd April 2008

The four players who make up Barkingside (Emanem 4147), three of whom have strong links with Oxford, are all professionals in the world of free improvisation, a form that has grown from its beginnings in the 1960s into a musical landscape that now has extraordinary variety. Clarinettist Alex Ward is here very much a leading sound with his extraordinary leaps and scurls, closely followed by Alexander Hawkins' virtuosity on piano. Together with Dominic Lash, bass and Paul May, percussion, they create a shifting carpet of sound in which the level of response and understanding between all players makes the album such a rich and exciting example of music lying on the exuberant fringes of jazz and new music.

Nonstop Tango's Maps and Dreams (Analeptic 002, soon), the brainchild of Miles Doubleday, is a deliberate throwing together of rock music and free improvisation. With among others, the remarkable Pat Thomas on piano, the result sounds like the music Captain Beefheart might have been producing if he was still with us. With vocal acrobatics from growls to wails, often enhanced by deliberate distortions, Doubleday leads his group through a wild, multi-layered maelstrom of grooves, riffs and storms that will either sharpen your consciousness or have you leaping for the volume control. This is the sort of music, like Miles Davis's Tutu or Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica that we all have to put on once in a while.

Chris Cox is known in Oxford as a bass player, particularly with the Alvin Roy Trio, but he is also a gifted singer and songwriter. His latest album, Even the Willows are Weeping (pjccox@btinternet.com), is a wonderful showcase of his ability to write and perform his own compositions drawing on the traditions of both jazz and blues. But his songs have a delightful, slightly whimsical yet humorous edge that makes them very much his own, such as God loves the Hammond organ and Scared of Milk. On top of this Cox is also quite a multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, mandolin, bass and piano and maybe other cunning instruments at the same time on this very approachable album.

Editor's choice