Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
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Swell time with a jazz maestro
Improviser: Steve Swell
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
Steve Swell Quartet
The Vortex, London
IF FREE, improvising trombonism is the sonics of outrageous breath, the shivering slide work of Steve Swell that opens his quartet's gig at the Vortex is its epitome.
With the open-spirited US hornman are three powerful British musicians. The artist on drums is Mark Sanders, the arch-bassist John Edwards and pianist the protean Liam Noble. Free musical spirits indeed.
Edwards saws at his bass with the phenomenal energy of a jazz lumberjack and plucks his strings with a powerful resonance next to the endless inventive subtlety of Sanders's percussion, his sticks, brushes and mallets caressing and striking all the surfaces of his drum set and other nearby objects.
More from this author
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CHRIS SEARLE speaks to drummer Steve Noble
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CHRIS SEARLE speaks to Rwanda-born jazz vocalist INEZA
