Trish Clowes - My Iris

The Guardian 80

(Basho)

Composer/saxophonist Trish Clowes has focused on big-format music lately, but My Iris – a reference by this imaginative musical colour-mixer to Greek mythology’s goddess of the rainbow – foregrounds her quickwitted young quartet. Clowes’ Wayne Shorter affections steer her wraithlike soprano-sax lines over Ross Stanley’s church-organ chords on One Hour, and also her sharp-angled improv after James Maddren’s backbeat kicks in. I Can’t Find My Other Brush has the zigzagging melody and thudding bell-notes of a solo-tenor odyssey by the late Michael Brecker, Anglo-Armenian composer Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian’s ethereal Muted Lines speculates on forced-migrants’ struggles to express the inexpressible, and the playfully old-school Tap Dance has Maddren and a cannily country-rockish Chris Montague on guitar hailing proto-jazz African American drums pioneer Baby Dodds. Clowes’s emphasis on composition, and the reserved evenness of her delivery often get her a “chamber-jazz” label, but the Englishwoman’s quirky songwriter’s ear, subtly sleepy tenor sax sound and bright intensity on soprano are anything but cerebral. She’s touring the UK from this week.

Thu Jan 12 18:45:04 GMT 2017

The Guardian 80

(Basho)

Contemporary jazz nowadays rarely falls into familiar patterns, and getting the hang of something new is part of the fascination. Trish Clowes’s fourth album defines its own terms in a particularly listener-friendly way. There is, for instance, a piece dedicated to the early jazz drummer Baby Dodds that cleverly hints at the ancestral connection between jazz drumming and tap dancing. Another, In Between the Moss and Ivy, conjures the atmosphere of an English country garden. With just four players, the variety of tone colour is quite remarkable, and the playing of Clowes on tenor and soprano saxophones, Ross Stanley (piano and organ) Chris Montague (guitar) and James Maddren (drums) is impeccable.

Sun Jan 22 08:00:01 GMT 2017