The Jazz Butcher - Last of the Gentleman Adventurers - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2022 . It's not often that an artist gets to do a Bowie by consciously carving their personal epitaph into the grooves of their final LP. The Highest In The Land is that rarity of an album, and it could not have been made by a more brilliantly poetic and fearlessly sarcastic writer than Pat Fish, also known as The Jazz Butcher. There are many existentially charged moments on a record whose songs were written throughout the last seven years of Fish's life before his untimely passing in October 2021, aged only 63. Between moving personal songs like InchNever Give UpInch or InchGoodbye SweetheartInch and more opaque ones such as the title track (the mysterious InchBlack RaoulInch, by the way, is Pat and Dhiren's cat), much of this album is imbued with righteous ire at the isolationist path taken by the UK in recent times. InchRunning On FumesInch and InchSebastian's MedicationInch may be the sharpest analyses of the state of Brexit Britain yet committed to song. Meanwhile, the former stands as an angry state-of-the-nation address, drawing parallels to the Weimar Republic by evoking Hermann Hesse and Mackie Messer, musically cloaked in a Dylan reference suggesting there is indeed blood on the tracks. By contrast, InchSea MadnessInch tells the heart-warming tale of an immigrant in tribute to Turkish George, a legendary presence on the Northampton music scene. It is not without irony that a career that began in witty defiance of the Thatcher years should end under the shadow of the Johnson era. Certainly, The Highest In The Land sounds as relevant to today as A Scandal In Bohemia did to 1984. Likewise, in musical terms, it feels like the closing of a circle, based around live recordings by a core band of Fish, Dave Morgan on drums and Tim Harries on bass, augmented by an array of musicians including founder member Max Eider.

Pianist Danae Dörken is embarking on a musical journey on April 22, 2022, her new album InchOdysseeInch will be released by Berlin Classics. The repertoire is a varied selection and leads the listener through different eras. Among them are well-known classics by Franz Liszt or Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, but also works that the pianist associates with her Greek origins, for example by Manos Hatzidakis and Vangelis. InchOdysseeInch is about traveling, wandering and dreaming. InchThe Odyssey has fascinated me from a very young age. Even as a child, it was read to me as a bedtime story by my grandparents, Inch Danae Dörken says. She knows the various stages of the journey inside out. InchFor me, it's a very current story. I think we're going through a modern odyssey. That's what I want to show with this album.Inch

Spencer,Vic & Small Professor - Mudslide [VINYL LP] date 05/17/2024