The third offering from idiosyncratic Japanese proggers – after 2020’s Tsumibito No Kioku and 2021’s Sazaki Orite Hikari Overflow – is a 90-minute concept album containing all the elements we expect from a band of the Rising Sun: jaw-dropping technical…
View More Project Nayuta – Uniomisty
Can an eight-year-old kid have the blues, asked a 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary. It turned out he could – not only that, he could ‘have’ jazz too and play guitar like a pint-sized Pat Metheny. The kid was Californian prodigy Julian…
View More Julian Lage – Scenes From Above
Daevid Allen was a geographical and musical nomad who wandered from British psychedelia to French avant-garde, Balearic acoustic balladry, New York punk, Oz performance poetry, San Francisco improv, Japanese extreme tripping and Brazilian space rock. He is best known as…
View More Weird Biscuit Teatime: Starring Daevid Allen – DJDDay
Japan has the greatest proportion of jazz lovers than any other country in the world. As Michael Caine never said, not a lot of people know that. The land of the rising sun has also bred a substantial number of…
View More Yusuke Shima – Silent Jazz Case 5
CONFUSINGLY, Focus 12 is the veteran Dutch proggers’ 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th or 17th studio album, depending on how you count them. As an additional headscratcher, the track named after the band (there’s one on nearly every album) is…
View More Focus – Focus 12
The Tangent have been more of a real band in recent years, with a line-up that has been fairly stable since 2013. But there is no disguising the fact that, like the heavens circling the Pole Star, everything revolves around…
View More The Tangent (For One) – To Follow Polaris
Andy Tillison has just come out of lockdown. Not a Covid lockdown but 20 months of self-imposed isolation in a compact studio at his remote Yorkshire farmhouse while he single-handedly (well, both hands and feet) created the 13th Tangent album,…
View More Andy Tillison – The Tangent
The ‘P’ in PAKT is Mrs Jones’s lad Percy, the virtuoso fretless bass player on all the Brand X albums from Unorthodox Behaviour in 1976 to Manifest Destiny 21 years later. On one of those albums – I think 1982’s…
View More PAKT – No Steps Left to Trace
It’s probably fair to say that most of our guitar heroes are hairy-arsed men, so I really value the talented guitarists working in the prog field who boast a pair of X chromosomes, people like Hedvig Mollestad and Jane Getter.…
View More Jane Getter Premonition – Division World
I have reviewed two live albums by this entertaining Italian band, which inspired me to discover their back catalogue and left me hankering for a new studio release. Well, here it is, a lovely example of Ancient Veil’s pastoral prog…
View More Ancient Veil – Puer Aeternus