The Listening Guide
🎶 The listening guide: five albums, released during the past twelve months, chosen around a weekly theme 🎶
This week, we have five succinct EPs that capture the brilliance of five emerging artists or groups. Trombone player and bandleader Rosie Turton’s Expansions and Transformations pt. 1 and 2 follows on from her 2019 5ive for Jazz Re:freshed, but features material recorded as far back as June 2018. Contributors include Johanna Burnheart on violin, Maria Chiara Argirò on piano and synths, and Jake Long on drums, amongst others. The A-side features a dreamy two-part composition with prominent bass playing from Twm Dylan, while the B-side features a reworking of The Unknown from 5ive, plus Jitwam’s dancefloor-ready remix of Part II. Unknown To Known is a new London-based quartet featuring Ill Considered’s Idris Rahman on tenor sax and bass clarinet, Collocutor’s Tamar Osborn on baritone sax, clarinet, and flute, Jihad Darwish on basses, and Yusuf Ahmed on drums and percussion. Their debut EP, Portico, features both dark and light improvised pieces, with pulsing bass patterns and varied instrumental textures. Manchester-based singer-songwriter Marco Woolf develops the story of Francine, a fictional character who emerged from the improvised storytelling that gives flow and narrative structure to his live shows, on his second EP, Francine, i. London-based vocalist, guitarist and composer Jelly Cleaver released her debut EP Forever Presence with Gearbox Records earlier this month. It features James Akers on saxophone, Lorenz Okello-Osengor on keys and organ, Katie Moberly on cello and electric bass, Hamish Nockles-Moore on upright, and Tash Keary on drums and percussion. Harpist and producer Nala Sinephro’s Live at Real World Studios is one meditative sixteen-minute piece, featuring her own harp playing and modular synth work, drumming from Edward Wakili-Hick, and synth bass from Dwayne Kilvington. You can support all five of these releases on Bandcamp!
Rosie Turton – Expansions and Transformations pt. 1 and 2
Album of the Week
Our NQ Jazz album of the week is vocalist-composer Sara Serpa’s Intimate Strangers, a collaboration with author Emmanuel Iduma exploring the experiences of migrants, refugees, and displaced people. Serpa is joined by fellow vocalists Aubrey Johnson and SofÃa Rei, pianist Matt Mitchell, and synth player Qasim Naqvi to create evocative musical responses to stories from Iduma’s book, A Stranger’s Post. All spoken word segments in the recordings are written by Iduma, and all compositions are Serpa’s work. The project was commissioned by John Zorn and premiered at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust in 2018. You can support the album via Biophila Records on Bandcamp!
Classic Album
Our NQ Jazz classic album this week is pioneering harpist and composer Dorothy Ashby’s 1958 LP, In A Minor Groove. The quartet project was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder at his own studio Studio and hears flautist Frank Wess, bassist Herman Wright, and drummer Roy Haynes joining Ashby on a set of eight mellow, comforting tracks. The tracklist includes two of Ashby’s originals: opener Rascallity and a track echoing the album title in It's a Minor Thing, as well as pieces written by Oscar Pettiford and Cole Porter, amongst others. You can find the album on streaming services as part of a jazz harp trilogy, as well as reissued digital and physical releases on various platforms.