Coxhill, Lol & Roger Turner

Success With Your Dog

Label: Emanem Country: UK

"Excerpts from sleeve notes:

Elsie Artie (Lol and Roger) probably first met at the Bath Last Resort festival in England in the very early 1970's. They've played in a lot of different combinations since - in marching bands in Welwyn Garden City, in a short-lived incarnation of the Johnny Rondo Trio, in Lol's new orleans-flavoured "Before my Time" band, in lots of ad hoc combinations, and since 1982 most often in the Recedents with Mike Cooper around Britain, Europe and Canada.

The recordings here are from a tour they had as a duo in France, during which they played in the wonderful Espace Vauban theatre in Brest - an old building that has the hotel on the upper floors where the musicians stay, a restaurant on the ground floor where they can eat, and the theatre below where they work. A nice little spot indeed.

The Shoreditch recording reflects something of the church acoustics, and was the first of two sets played there. The building dates from 1740, and its bells are mentioned in the famous nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons", a startling fact that not a lot of people might know, as it happens."-Emanem

Excerpts from reviews:

"You can hear them tumbling deeper into the wonderland, generating sounds and structures so touchy-feely sculptural you could walk inside them if they weren't on a CD. The frustration is, of course, that Coxhill isn't driven to make more records. Whenever he plays, a whole narrative about the history of the soprano saxophone, from Sidney Bechet and Johnny Hodges to Steve Lacy, via Bruce Turner, sparks into life. But calculating those historical joins clearly isn't the point - during the 58 minutes it takes to play this disc Coxhill remains as poker-faced as a Sphinx.

Even when, four minutes into the second track, Turner lays down a crazy-fast swing groove, Coxhill leaves any concrete statements to some imaginary, non-specific future. Instead, he mines all the gaps, filleting the rhythmic flow and kaleidoscoping the groove into atomised inner grooves. And his melodic concept throws up another carefully considered, conceptual meta-syncopation. The journey between notes is more intriguing than the notes themselves: all those many-headed glissandi, those subtone soliloquies, those chordal rasps reconfiguring done-to-death melodic contours and dramatic arcs.

Turner yanks open space in the first few minutes. Then he slows the regularity of his push, and his cymbal attacks become more resonant and countable. His sensitivity to Coxhill's requirements regularly boils over into outbursts of off-the-leash cartoon violence and, after 13 minutes, his high-velocity tapdancing cowbells move faster than we can listen, impressive like Fred Astaire dancing up the walls. And how to resonate in sympathy with Coxhill's twisting melodic rubble on a drum kit? Turner invokes Duke Ellington's great 1960s drummer Sam Woodyard as skins are needed - and kneaded - to sing like a great soprano."-Philip Clark, The Wire 2010