Graham Reid | | <1 min read
There is a growing genre of Pacific-influenced jazz: the Mamaku Project (see tag) has elements of it, and this album by the New Pacific Music Ensemble is another.
With saxophones and electric guitar alongside ukelele and log drums this has all the expansiveness of a jazz group but also the warm exoticism of island life.
Very hard to tear this one out of the stereo on a summery evening.
As with the Rattle album Ancient Astronaut Theory by Dave Lisik (interviewed here) and Richard Nunns, I was invited to write the liner notes for this release on Rattle's jazz imprint. I was... > Read more
This Auckland jazz group with what looks like a personalised plate for a name, impressed mightily with its debut album The Thing two years ago. And at that time we noted the credentials of the... > Read more
Thelonious Monk said, "Jazz and freedom go hand in hand”. We can guess he meant freedom in a political sense, because jazz is about individual expression and in that regard was a... > Read more
The previous self-titled album by this (mostly) Auckland jazz quartet – a veritable supergroup of Rattle artists as we shall see – won the jazz album of the year award in 2014 . . . as... > Read more
Locating her music somewhere between the meditative sound of Laraaji in the early Eighties, ambient world music, mood-establishing electronica and the Hindustani vocal tradition, Arushi Jain... > Read more
My knowledge of Bon Jovi has always been limited, and even more so back in the early Nineties when all I could conjure up for a pub quiz would have been "New Jersey, the cover of their... > Read more
post a comment