“I wanted to tell the most honest and personal stories possible. The most personal stories are what I can do best and know best.”
For Sol Jang, "19-29" is more than her debut album, it's a significant milestone that captures her rich experiences and personal growth across different continents. Scheduled for release by Unit Records on October 3, 2024, this album warmly invites listeners into Sol's exploration of identity, culture, and belonging through a seamless blend of jazz.
Blending traditional jazz harmonies with elements of free improvisation and classical music, "19-29" offers listeners an immersive journey. The album features eight original compositions alongside two improvisational pieces, incorporating voice messages from Sol’s phone, adding a deeply personal layer to the musical narrative.
"19-29" is distinguished by its innovative use of sound devices to convey the layered emotions and narratives of Sol's life. Among these, ambient subway sounds from Sol’s father's phone emerge not just as background noise but as a means to give sonic experiences to the listeners. For Sol's experiences of chaos and clarity, of being lost and found, drum and bass improvisations mirror Sol's internal tumult, while the piano narrates her journey in harmonies and melodies, showcasing the album’s deep commitment to storytelling through musical metaphors.
Through this album, the trio gently encourages listeners to delve into the nuances of its stories through the beautiful complexity of music. It’s an album that hopes to resonate with those who hear it, inviting them into a shared space of contemplation and discovery.
The trio will be celebrating the release with a tour of South Korea in May and another tour of the Netherlands and Germany from October till March 2025.
The seamstress of worlds and words, Carmen Souza, returns with her eleventh album Port’Inglês (English Port). This Arts Council England supported album releases through Galileo Music Communication on 27th September 2024, with the launch concert taking place on 30th November at London’s Crazy Coqs. Port’Inglês reveals untold stories from years of British presence in Cape Verde and the decolonisation struggle under Portugal. “Port’Inglês” is Carmen Souza’s deeply personal journey exploring her roots and, in the process, exploring what alchemy arises from the dust of pain, loss and chaos of this colonised period.
“Port’Inglês” is a celebration of Cape Verdean identity. It is fascinating to accompany Carmen through this musical suite as she explores the origins of her diasporic identity through language and different voices from colonised Cape Verde. She links the UK and Cape Verdean worlds, both connections close to her heart.Jazz waltzes freedom with traditional Cape Verdean rhythms such as funaná, contradança, morna and mazurka; as well as with English folk inspired sea shanty “Francis Drum” which portrays contradictory sides of English explorer, Francis Drake. Was he a British hero sailor or a terror and pillager?
Carmen Souza and long-time collaborator Theo Pascal’s two decade, matured original Lusophone/Cape Verdean sounds, add another dimension to the music and symbolise the significant cultural exchange embodied within the album. The collaboration of prominent jazz musicians from across the globe reinforces and celebrates this interconnectedness. Musicians include Elias Kacomanolis (Mozambique), Diogo Santos (Portugal), João Oliveira (Angola), Deschanel Gordon (UK), Zoe Pascal (UK/Portugal), Mark Kavuma (UK) and Gareth Lockrane (UK). “Port’Inglês” breaks chains, journeying beyond linguistic and cultural confines. Whilst proclaiming the saga of the Islands, the music echoes a call for freedom traversing geography.
Significantly, “Port’Inglês” releases the same year Portugal celebrates 50 years of the Carnation Revolution, the military coup that overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo government in 1974. This movement paved the way for the end of Wars in colonial Africa and opened the door to Independence from Portugal. “Port’Inglês” celebrates and reclaims unheard Cape Verdean voices that shape identity today. Carmen Souza’s Master’s thesis on the British presence in Cape Verde inspired the album:
“I drew inspiration from the tales told in Cape Verde to create this musical suite. Through my research for my Master’s thesis, I sought to embody this historical period through music. The album explores themes of cultural identity, resistance, colonialism and the ongoing struggle for decolonisation, highlighting the connection between Cape Verde and the UK. Inspiration came from popular tales, tales of the sea, and even sea shanties from British folk music.”
Carmen resided in the UK for 16 years, a country that nurtured her creativity. Her research reveals a bond she hadn’t yet realised between the UK and Cape Verde. The synchronicity of Charles Darwin sailing to Cape Verde from Woolwich Arsenal, the very London town she made home for four years, all the more symbolises this shared connection. The morna “Cais D' Port’Inglês” portrays cultural assimilation through the sea waves during the British presence: “In the piers of these English ports/ There is richness/That the sea waves bring and take away…”
Whilst unravelling untold stories, Carmen unravels her identity. She explores how the British presence shaped her motherland’s culture; a culture she inherited. This new music demonstrates how intimately linked culture and language are. The track “Moringue” reflects how different languages on the same land can create misinterpretation and missed connection between individuals. Whereas, “Ariope” describes connection through the incorporation of English language into native Cape Verdean Creole and shaping a new identity. For example, “hurry up” becomes “ariope” – terms Carmen Souza heard from her parents and as part of her culture. The backdrop in “Ariope” of port workers addressed derogatorily gives insight into the abuse of power in Cape Verde.
Yes, this is personal. Yet, “Port’Inglês” reflects that things are not clear-cut. The album portrays different realities of this colonised period and suggests imprints left on future generations. Like an ink-stained fingerprint, identity does not remain the same.
The album carries angry jazz and probes: “If colonization/was such a benefit/why did you need chains and whips to make it convincing/what worth is there/in a prosperity stained with blood and pain? ...” (Track 2, “Pamodi”). However, the song “Amizadi” tells a story of friendship between two cultures based on prolific Cape Verdean writer, composer and singer B. Leza’s support and admiration for the British: “Let me tell you the Friendship story between two cultures/ This story is not in the books/ It is not taught at schools/ The British and their boats came to sail in our waters/ To make business, buying Donkeys, Salt and Anchil/… Pirates came and destroyed cities and churches… The British came defend our ports…”
Carmen Souza opens a porthole into histories. Perhaps traditional history prefers linear structure. “Port’Inglês” defies tradition by presenting authentic experiences. The album sound creation process also reflects this integrity. Composer Theo Pascal reflects: “Our priority was to allow each instrument’s acoustic ‘colours’ to shine through organically, without requiring extensive digital processing or effects. The use of analogue and other digital recording techniques is a nod to the historical nature of the stories we tell here, adding a layer of authenticity to the album.”
Carmen Souza’s music is celebrated for not fitting into a box. Now, Carmen Souza’s untold stories rise from the ashes of the past to rock the boat.
“Port’Inglês” releases internationally through Galileo MC on
September 27th 2024.
London saxophonist/composer and BBC Young Jazz Musician of the year semi-finalist Asha Parkinson has come to be known for her creative output which regularly crosses boundaries between traditions, from jazz, to Classical, to world musics and beyond. Forming her ensemble Kalpadruma in 2017 to bring together her voice as both a composer and performer, her new record ‘Possession’ is set to release on September 20th on Ubuntu Music.
The powerfully melodic, rhythmically sophisticated, sometimes groove-based material is accentuated by the compelling timbral variety of her full Kalpadruma ensemble, a 14-piece mini studio orchestra bringing together jazz quintet, string quartet, woodwind, voice and the distinctive sound of the qanun alongside her own inspired sax playing.
‘Kalpadruma’ itself meaning "tree of life" in Indian-origin religions which Parkinson considers to be a perfect metaphor for her creative process, the album is a cinematic global jazz exploration of contrasting expressions of possession, featuring tracks that combine the intensity of a symphony with the concision of a pop single.
Stylistically blurring the boundaries between Jazz, Contemporary Classical, Flamenco, Mediterranean and Arab musics to find its own unique, deeply resonant voice, ‘Possession’ delves into themes of obsessive love to urban trance to mystical inspiration to devotion and beyond, drawing on lyrical motifs from traditional fairy tales to Tolstoy, Huxley, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi and the Lord’s Prayer in the original Aramaic.
Following the ensemble’s 2022 debut release ‘Onwards’, Kalpadruma has gone on to perform regularly at a number of high profile venues such as the London Jazz Festival, Ronnie Scott’s, the Vortex, 7 Arts Jazz Leeds and more, and collaborate with the likes of the South Asian Youth Orchestra and the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians. Parkinson can also be heard performing and arranging for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, Issie Barratt’s INTERCHANGE and the Sam Eastmond Big Band, composing for the likes of Table Music and the Ligeti Quartet, and working as the founder and driving force behind Voices Beyond Divisions, a charity dedicated to peace education through music and bringing young people from different cultures together.
Visionary vibraphonist, marimbist and composer Patricia Brennan returns with an adventurous new septet exploring the extremes of rhythmic expression
Breaking Stretch, released Sept. 6, 2024 via Pyroclastic Records, features Jon Irabagon,
Mark Shim, Adam O’Farrill, Kim Cass, Marcus Gilmore and Mauricio Herrera
“The jazz world can get stuck in a battle between the head and the heart, but rarely do you find an improviser like Patricia Brennan [whose] music seems to exist in a realm outside the body, but stays loaded with feeling." Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times
"Brennan supplements her dazzling technique with two-handed independence and unexpected tonal shifts courtesy of judicious use of electronics.” John Sharpe, The New York City Jazz Record
With each new release in her still-burgeoning career, the vision of vibraphonist/marimbist/composer Patricia Brennan has grown exponentially in both scale and scope. From the nucleus of her acclaimed solo debut Maquishti she formed a singular quartet for her venturesome follow-up, More Touch, hailed as “scarily good” by All About Jazz.
On her fiercely original third album, Breaking Stretch, Brennan’s creative imagination expands yet again, supplementing its predecessor’s core band (Brennan, bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Mauricio Herrera) with an adventurous trio of horns – Jon Irabagon on alto and sopranino saxes, Mark Shim on tenor, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet and electronics. Due out September 6, 2024 via Pyroclastic Records, Breaking Stretch is an enrichment of the themes and influences that made More Touch such a memorable experience: contemporary classical and forward-searching jazz, folkloric traditions from Brennan’s native Mexico, and a wealth of rhythmic inspirations from her youth, ranging from Afro-Caribbean sounds to funk, salsa and brass-driven rock bands.
Breaking Stretch sounds like none of those precursors, exactly, but draws together Brennan’s wide- ranging interests into a dramatic, mesmerizing balance, shifting fluidly between the grooving and the strident, the ethereal and the intricate. Brennan deftly melds the distinctive voices of her collaborators into a densely layered amalgam, the palette of her own mallet instruments transfigureed through the use of electronics.
The title of Breaking Stretch is a concise representation of Brennan’s envelope-pushing ambitions. Breaking references her desire to push herself and her bandmates to their limits, to mine the transcendent results of virtuosic imaginations confronted by unexpected challenges. Stretch captures her music’s intense elasticity, its ability to stretch from the taut and minutely focused to the wide-angled and reaching. Those extremes are depicted in the album’s striking artwork, a mix of astronomical and volcanic images, placing the cosmic and the subterranean side by side – the differences between the opposing poles, as in Brennan’s work, at times nearly indistinguishable.
“I wanted to push the music and the musicians almost to the breaking point,” Brennan explains. “I wrote music that creates the illusion of width and narrowness, either with orchestration techniques or with a play on rhythmic structures.”
Rhythm remains the vital core around which Brennan’s music orbits. The inextricable combination of the percussive and the melodic is uniquely inherent in her own instruments, the vibraphone and marimba; as a composer, she has applied that blend to her ensemble as a whole. Brennan has described the band on More Touch as a percussion quartet, drawing on her classical studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Despite the addition of three instrumentalists that would normally be described as melodic voices, she continued to approach the expanded ensemble as a percussion group. In her liner notes, she cites influences ranging from the Fania All-Stars to Earth Wind & Fire to the son jarocho of her hometown in Veracruz.
Beyond the purely musical, Brennan draws profound inspiration from a variety of sources. The new album’s opener, “Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves),” seeks inward for the multifarious identities that make up a single personality; closer “Earendel” looks to the far reaches of the universe as we know it, to the oldest and most distant star yet discovered by humanity. (Brennan is a self-avowed amateur astronomist, who often travels with her own telescope.) Between these bookends are pieces derived from mathematical concepts, Aztec mythology and astrological signs, the poetry of Salvador Díaz Mirón and the visual art of Harry Bertoia.
Brennan’s past also emerges in her blurring of the lines between the mathematical and the emotional in her writing. Both of her parents were engineers, providing her with nurturing role models whose minds tended toward the cerebral and analytical. Applying such concepts to music comes naturally to Brennan, whose music is undeniably complex and heady yet brimming with fervent passion and emotion. “There's mathematics in everything,” she asserts.
“Within mathematics there's tension and release, which are very emotional qualities. For me those push and pull energies coexist, and I feel that every good rhythm strikes a balance between consonance and dissonance. If there's too much dissonance in the rhythm, then it feels tense and hard to listen to; if there's too much consonance it can become boring or stagnant. That perfect balance between tension and release translates back to those numerical combinations.”
Reflecting on her roots in Mexico has become an increasingly complex notion for Brennan. The release of Breaking Stretch marks 20 years since she moved to the States, meaning that she’s fast approaching point at which she will have spent half of her life in her adopted homeland. The nostalgia and soul- searching that the anniversary evokes lend a poignant undercurrent to her music, another instigation to search within and beyond herself.
“Where am I really from now?” she muses. “Am I not Mexican anymore? I've been asking myself those questions a lot recently. There are days when I feel super disconnected from my time in Mexico, almost like it was a distant memory or a dream that never existed. As time passes I’ll probably have to deal with those questions of identity more and more.”
Vibraphonist, marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan “has been widely feted as one of the instrument’s newer leaders,” observed The New York City Jazz Record. She was voted the top “Rising Star Vibraphonist” in DownBeat magazine’s 70th Critics Poll, and her extensive sidewoman work includes the Grammy-nominated John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus, Matt Mitchell’s Phalanx Ambassadors, the Webber/Morris Big Band, Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio, Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis and Grammy-winner Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Big Band, amongst other groups and collectives. She has also collaborated with pianist Vijay Iyer as a member of Blind Spot with writer Teju Cole, Iyer’s large ensemble project Open City and several small ensemble performances along with renowned musicians including bassist Reggie Workman and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
Patricia’s own projects include the solo project Maquishti, MOCH - a collaborative duo with percussionist, drummer and turntablist Noel Brennan (DJ Arktureye) - and More Touch, featuring an unusual quartet of mallet percussion, percussion, drums, and bass.
Paris-based, Estonian soul artist Katrin-Merili is proud to share her debut EP ‘Beautiful Things’. Releasing on Friday 30th August, the project sees her channel the soulful energy of Yebba, Moonchild and Donny Hathaway, weaving her vocal around future-facing, blues-laced instrumentals to create a distinctive brand of Nordic neo-soul.
A rising name in the Parisian soul-jazz crossover scene, Katrin has spent the last eight years in the French capital collaborating and building a name for herself, supporting the likes of Roy Ayres at the revered New Morning jazz club. Her path in Paris led to her meeting co-producer Sacha Arnaud, who was able to help Katrin bring her musical vision to life alongside the vibrant presence of talented French musicians including Noé Berne (Nine Sparks Riot) and Remi Klein (Voyou).
‘Beautiful Things’ is a project consisting of five intimate stories centred around femininity, identity, and mental health, touching upon Katrin’s experience of being split between two countries, and supporting her mother through her battle with breast cancer. Due to the deeply personal subject material, Katrin wanted to be as involved as possible across the project, creating her own visual world to accompany the music, she shares:
“I decided to self-produce the EP independently to be able to follow through with my original vision and to make something really personal. I am fully present in all the aspects of the creation, from writing the lyrics to styling, MUA, self-portraits, artworks and collages. Every song is a personal piece of my life and an invite to join me on my journey of self-discovery.”
Lead single ‘Hold My Body’ reflected on a long distance relationship, and the power of love to surpass geographical boundaries, finding widespread support from the likes of Wonderland and WordPlay magazine. Follow up ‘Overjoyed’ explored a moment of joy experienced by Katrin after helping someone else, and serves as a reminder of how rewarding helping those around us can be. Creating a joyous, old-school soul feel akin to Donny Hathaway or Marvin Gaye, complete with wurlitzer organs, grooving bass and carefully arranged choral sections, Katrin shares:
“I wanted for it to sound as warm and human as it felt when I wrote it. In the production process we worked on mixing the old school feel with more of a modern sound, and this song took us the longest production-wise to get the right feeling, as it’s all live instrumentation.”
New York City... August 20th, 2024 While in New York City for the 2023 Jazz Congress, Sylvia Brooks felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Descending into the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, she experienced a musical epiphany as “Amazing Grace” swept over her.
Turning to Grammy Award-winning arranger John Beasley to transform that aural vision into reality, Brooks has created a wrenching, arrestingly beautiful rendition of the 18th century English hymn. Available on August 26th 2024 via download and streaming services, the extraordinary arrangement recasts the song’s personal anguish into a communal lament “that at some moments verges almost on discordant,” Brooks says. “It’s a very different version that evokes the melted steel and the souls that were lost there.”
Brooks provides all of the wordless vocals, and the sumptuous four-part harmonies evoke the awe and unspeakable sadness of the space. Beasley’s expressive piano transforms the familiar theme before Daniel Rotem’s almost spectral bass clarinet introduces the melody. Joined by Cameron Stone’s cello the piece gains mass and momentum as Beasley’s arrangement expands the hymn with Edwin Livingston’s supple acoustic bass and Jonathan Pinson’s understated drum work. Lost or found, this work seems to say, we are all wretches unequal to comprehending such loss.
Possessing a sumptuous, velvet-rich tone, Brooks gained widespread attention with her first five critically acclaimed albums, which introduced her sensuous jazz-noir sound. In recent years she’s increasingly turned her attention to writing her own material with projects like 2022’s Signature, which draws on the cream of the Southland jazz scene with ace accompanists Tom Ranier and Christian Jacob.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Brooks came to jazz as a birthright. Her father, pianist/arranger Don Ippolito, wrote his own music for his Octet and Big Band which were performed in a series on PBS. As a first-call player, he worked with legendary artists such as Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Her mother, Johanna Dordick, was a conservatory-trained opera singer who also dazzled audiences singing pop tunes and standards at East Coast showrooms and resorts (she went on to found the Los Angeles Opera Theater in 1978). Initially drawn to acting, Brooks studied classical theatre at ACT in San Francisco under the tutelage of the great directors Allen Fletcher and Bill Ball. But it was the passing of her father that called her back to her jazz roots.
With “Amazing Grace,” the inimitable Brooks makes another creative leap. Instead of unraveling the mysteries of the human heart, she plunges into the ineffable, offering the succor of an aural embrace where words are insufficient.
