Bird Lives! The Charlie Parker Memorial Concert Songbook
Updated: 2010-09-01 21:45:53
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The press release accompanying this, guitarist/sound sculptor Barry Cleveland's fifth album as leader, identifies its chief musical inspirations as 'art rock, psychedelia, metal, ambient, world music, trance and funk', and Hologramatron does indeed leave the impression that Cleveland (an influential editor with Guitar Player magazine and something of a production freak – hence his interest in UK 1960s legend Joe Meek, manifest here in a lively visit to the late man's classic 'Telstar')...
Biographical accounts of singer Tessa Souter always bristle with hyphens (London-born, New York-based, Anglo-Trinidadian), but perhaps the most significant one lies between 'award' and 'winning'. While her world-citizen status does seem to have opened her ears to a refreshingly wide variety of musical styles
'Soulful jazz for a new generation', played by 'a group ready to redefine the boundaries of any genre' was promised in Sojourner's programme note, and leader/pianist Jonathan Geyevu, like many of his young contemporaries, is certainly open-eared enough to incorporate a wide variety of rhythms and styles into his music. 
The group sound on this, drummer Martin France's Spin Marvel's second album, is described by him as 'not locked into a conventional grid of pulse or beat, but mov[ing] away from this format and out into a different space'. The resultant music's most obvious stylistic reference point is the European free/ambient music perhaps most readily associated with Scandinavia and most famously manifest (in the UK, at least) in the music of one of France's old Loose Tubes bandmates, Iain Ballamy (in his Food mode). 
From the opening vibrant bass solo onwards, and throughout its subsequent thirteen tracks, Houria delivers top-drawer, tough collectively improvised music from leader/main composer Stéphane Kerecki and his tight, lively band, completed by saxophonists Tony Malaby (soprano/tenor) and Matthieu Donarier (ditto), and drummer Thomas Grimmonprez.