john surman
Content tagged as john surman.
John Surman: The Spaces in Between (ECM/Ode)
British saxophonist Surman's career has been a pleasure to follow: right from early ECM albums such as Upon Reflection ('79), The Amazing Adventures of Simon Simon ('81) and, especially, Private City in '87 (on all of which he played synthesizers as well as bass clarinet in addition to various saxes). Over the decades he has also worked...
JOHN SURMAN: The casually-dressed career
The European jazz label ECM rarely uses photos of musicians on its covers: usually they are blurry photos taken out a moving vehicle; monochromatic landscapes; eerily evocative imagery . . . They rarely have liner notes and cloak the music with an air of esoteric mystery. There might also be a more practical reason: most jazz artists...
CHARLES LLOYD INTERVIEWED (2010): A forest flower in full bloom
For exceptional people, we make an exception. And saxophonist Charles Lloyd is certainly exceptional. Not just because he enjoyed that rarity in jazz, a hit album (Forest Flower in 66 which anticipated the free spirit of the hippie era), or because he played bills with Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane. And not because he moved...
jazz/3077/charles-lloyd-interviewed-2010-a-forest-flower-in-full-bloom/
MANFRED EICHER OF ECM RECORDS, INTERVIEWED (1992): Art for the artists' sake
As much as a disembodied voice down a phone line can, Manfred Eicher confirms the impression he made on English journalist Richard Cook when he visited London in late ’89: “He is a slim, rather careworn-looking man, whose great energy and dedication don’t always break through a cautious temperament,” wrote Cook,...
jazz/3157/manfred-eicher-of-ecm-records-interviewed-1992-art-for-the-artists-sake/
Charles Lloyd Quartet: Mirror (ECM/Ode)
Anyone who has seen this extraordinary quartet recently -- they played in New Zealand earlier this year, Lloyd interviewed here -- will need not further prodding on this album other than to know it is released, the first studio album by this line-up. These tunes -- many of them familiar in their concert repertoire and from previous albums (I...
Ricardo Villalobos/Max Loderbauer: Re: ECM (ECM)
The usually restrained ECM isn't a risk-averse label -- how well some remember the textural noise of Lask and the guitar abuse of David Torn -- so when they open the vaults for manipulation you know the result will be nothing like the Verve and Blue Note remix albums. Here this Berlin-based electronica duo improvise with pre-existing...