Alan Barnes + Eleven - 60th Birthday Celebration

The Guardian 80

(Woodville)

It was only after thinking back to all the albums he’s made, awards he’s won and gigs he’s enlivened, that I concluded it must be true: Alan Barnes, the earthly Peter Pan of British jazz, reaches his 60th birthday this month. The great thing about him is that he just loves jazz, all of it, and the evident pleasure it gives him to play it is catching. This is his birthday album, and all 11 members of his handpicked band, he says, are of like mind and “definitely not of the gloom school”.

They’re also among the most admired players around today, most of them younger than the birthday boy himself. The tunes are from the year of his birth, 1959, an annus mirabilis, with more future jazz classics released than ever before or since. So we have pieces by Monk, Coltrane, Mulligan, Mingus and Jobim, all reimagined and arranged by Mark Nightingale.