BOING! That’s the sound of my jaw hitting the floor. Actually, it’s more of a clunk. But ‘Boing!’ is appropriate because that’s the name of the record label responsible for this jaw-dropping release. If you hear a more astonishing instrumental…
View More The Aristocrats – FREEZE! Live in Europe 2020
‘Live in 2020’ – three words we won’t be reading very often. For most musicians, 2020 was the year from hell, when Covid killed touring, their most lucrative source of income now that CDs no longer make any money. A…
View More Bryan Beller – The Aristocrats
When this album landed it sparked off some juvenile tittering in the TPA cyber-office. “Mediæval Bæbes? I prefer the Jurassic Jezebels! Or the Tudor Teasers! Or even the Big Bang Bimbos!”, said several people who were really old enough to…
View More Mediæval Bæbes – Prayers Of The Rosary
Allan Holdsworth fans start drooling now. The late jazz guitar genius is at the top of his game on this superb live recording of a short-lived but celebrated offshoot of Soft Machine. Canterbury aficionados who mourn the loss of sax…
View More Soft Works – Abracadabra in Osaka
The border between jazz and prog is a bit like the one separating Northern Ireland from the Republic. Some people act as if it doesn’t exist, others want it marked with barbed wire and patrolled by helicopter gunships. I’m of…
View More Rymden – Space Sailors
For the last decade or so, Steve Hackett has been making a very nice living, thank you very much, by dusting off old Genesis classics in front of appreciative audiences across the world. And why not? He had a hand…
View More Steve Hackett – Selling England By the Pound & Spectral Mornings: Live at Hammersmith
We all know many people have suffered hardships during lockdown. They range from the trivial, such as the wide variety of home-made comedy haircuts, to the tragically serious – people who have lost their lives, their jobs and their mental…
View More Andy Tillison – The Tangent
The Tangent have been going through a purple patch of late. Pretty much every album since 2013’s Le Sacre du Travail has hit the spot so far as critics and fans are concerned, with the most recent couple of releases…
View More The Tangent – Auto Reconnaissance
Marco Bernard and Kimmo Pörsti are, respectively, bass player and drummer of The Samurai of Prog, a band formed by Italian-born Marco in Finland as part of a musical project creating prog tribute box sets. Joined by American multi-instrumentalist Steve…
View More Marco Bernard & Kimmo Pörsti – Gulliver
Sometimes great art can come out of adversity. Take the case of Happy The Man founder Frank Wyatt. Five years ago he was diagnosed with ‘the Big C’ and told that time was short. But he was determined to play…
View More Frank Wyatt & Friends – Zeitgeist