Splatter + Improgressive at EFG London Jazz Festival at Iklectik

Adam Baruch, author of over 5,000 cd reviews, remarked: 'Surely this music was at least rehearsed to some extent before the recording....Quite honestly this is definitely one of the most beautiful improvised music efforts I have been exposed to in the last few years'. He was talking about 'Splatter', a Berlin-London collaboration. This is a band that invariably executes the same illusive magic trick of persuading audiences, from Berlin's B Flat to London's Café Oto, that their improvisations are composed or pre-structured. Each of the musicians bring something to the mix: Anna Kaluza, from Berlin, supplies spikey, irregular jazz-improv lines that dart frantically around Taylor's hard-wired sense of structure & melody, while Greenhalgh & Peters provide a rhythm section that instantly locks onto each change and nuance. It is music that thrives on rapid, unpredictable shifts of style, a storm of musical ideas delivered with quick-fire velocity and panache...

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Adam Baruch, author of over 5,000 cd reviews, remarked: 'Surely this music was at least rehearsed to some extent before the recording....Quite honestly this is definitely one of the most beautiful improvised music efforts I have been exposed to in the last few years'. He was talking about 'Splatter', a Berlin-London collaboration. This is a band that invariably executes the same illusive magic trick of persuading audiences, from Berlin's B Flat to London's Café Oto, that their improvisations are composed or pre-structured. Each of the musicians bring something to the mix: Anna Kaluza, from Berlin, supplies spikey, irregular jazz-improv lines that dart frantically around Taylor's hard-wired sense of structure & melody, while Greenhalgh & Peters provide a rhythm section that instantly locks onto each change and nuance. It is music that thrives on rapid, unpredictable shifts of style, a storm of musical ideas delivered with quick-fire velocity and panache

The experimental wing of Progressive Rock music of the 1980's - bands such as Henry Cow, Hatfield & the North and Soft Machine - still have a surprisingly loyal following in Italy. The Rome duo, 'Improgressive' - as their name implies - mash together the tight & complex melodic structures of some of their favourite tunes of the period to form a vehicle for extended improvisation. The tunes, arranged for saxophones & clarinet, are given a comprehensive makeover, transforming the achingly familiar into something fresh and invigorating. The spirit of the duo is to travel far and wide from the source material in swathes of incremental risk taking, the tunes remaining in the head as a distant echo, moderating between past and present. Alberto Popolla (clarinets) and Errico Defabritiis (saxophones) are two of the leading lights of Rome's vibrant jazz scene, and it will be the duo's first performance in the UK.

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