STRICTLY SWINGING (www.danbarnett.com.au/) 7.5/10 This recording has such presence as to plant you smack in the middle of Balmain’s Unity Hall Hotel, where Dan Barnett’s 13-piece band nailed these arrangements of swing classics before a live (and excited) audience. The band is choc-full of gifted improvisers above and beyond Barnett’s…
Category: Album Reviews – Archive
THE KOMEDA PROJECT (www.andreakellerpiano.com.au/) 9/10 What a treasure trove of music the great Polish composer and jazz pianist Krysztof Komeda (1931-69) left after a too-short life. Pianist Andrea Keller and trumpeter Miroslav Bukovsky have arranged the raw material of some of Komeda’s famed film scores for an improvising octet of…
OPEN WATER AS A CHILD (Woolgathering) 9/10 If ever an opening line was going to transfix you, “I followed whiskey into the country of Legionella” should do it. The Kerouac-influenced poem Open Water is graffitied through this album in three instalments, written and delivered by John Goode, whose voice is…