Forward-looking bandleader Matthew Halsall is launching An Ever Changing View with a splashy show at the Royal Albert Hall.
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Trumpeter, bandleader and composer Matthew Halsall announces landmark new album An Ever Changing View, an expansive, immaculately conceived project which presents Halsall’s signature blend of jazz, electronica, global and spiritual jazz influences. Released on September 8th via the Gondwana label he founded 15 years ago, An Ever Changing View will be launched at The Royal Albert Hall in London on September 21st followed by UK and EU tour dates.
Halsall has been hailed as one of the leading figures of the UK jazz renaissance yet has never seen himself as part of any one sound or scene: he builds his own sonic universe instead. An Ever Changing View finds him at his most experimental yet, once again expanding his sound and production techniques to create his unique brand of deeply meditative music.
During the album's creation, he was staying in both a beautiful architect’s house with breath-taking sea views and a striking modernist house, where he composed what he saw “like a landscape painting”. In these new environments, Halsall wanted to capture “the feeling of openness and escapism” and to approach making music again from scratch. “I hit the reset button and wanted to have complete musical freedom,” he says. “It was a real exploration of sound.”
An Ever Changing View comes in a package as striking as the music, with handmade fonts designed by Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic and the specially commissioned tapestry by artist Sara Kelly is a stunning and harmonious complement to the record's sound. Get a copy of the album in a variety of formats from your platform of choice right here: https://gondwana.lnk.to/AnEverChangingView
Check out videos for "Mountains, Trees and Seas" and the harp-enhanced "Calder Shapes" followed by an audio clip of the entire album below.
Changing Earth is the title track of Matthew Halsall's forthcoming 4-song EP out December 2 via Gondwana Records.
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Matthew Halsall has already blessed us with one beautifully conceived EP this year, now with Changing Earth he has shared another perfectly crafted four track mini-album or EP. Where the music on The Temple Within came from the energy around the band’s monthly sessions at Yes in Manchester, Changing Earth is a more meditative, spiritual offering:
“I was thinking about climate change and the profound implication of the human race’s relationship with nature and the changes we have wrought on our environment when I wrote the music for Changing Earth. Our world is changing around us, and it is a dark, unsettling period in our shared history, but I still believe that together we can change things for the better and find harmonious solutions together.
The title track Changing Earth is a soulful, elevating groover featuring sublime work from the whole band but especially, Matt Cliffe on flute and Maddie Herbert on harp. Positive Activity is one of Halsall’s most charming compositions, built round a hypnotic bassline from Gavin Barras it’s melody is plaintive but also uplifting and hopeful and harpist Herbert again shines brightly here. Yogic Flying is another soulful, uplifting tune as Halsall and percussionist Jack McCarthy take us on a transcendental journey upwards. Finally our journey inwards and upwards takes us to Upper Space, a quintessentially Halsall tune built around glistening harp and a sublime, soulful sanctuary elevated through beautiful work from the whole band but especially saxophonist Matt Cliffe.
Changing Earth features Matthew Halsall trumpet and electronics, Matt Cliffe flute & saxophone, Maddie Herbert harp, Liviu Gheorghe piano, Gavin Barras, bass, Alan Taylor drums and Jack McCarthy percussion. Changing Earth is produced by Matthew Halsall and Daniel Halsall, recorded by Matthew Halsall, mixed by Greg Freeman, mastered by Peter Beckmann of Technology Works and vinyl cut by Norman Nitzsche at Calyx. The distinctive artwork is by Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic.
Get a copy of Matthew Halsall's limited-run 'Changing Earth' EP via Bandcamp right here. Listen to the title track below.
UK jazz trumpeter Matthew Halsall debuts his new Manchester band on his forthcoming double album, Salute To The Sun.
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Composer, trumpeter, producer, DJ and founder of Gondwana Records, Matthew Halsall remains first and foremost an artist and a musician. A trumpeter whose unflashy, soulful playing radiates a thoughtful beauty and a composer and band-leader who has created his own rich sound world. A sound that draws on the heritage of British jazz, the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, as well as world music and electronica influences, and even modern art and architecture, to create something uniquely his own. A music that is rooted in Northern England but draws on global inspirations.
Salute to the Sun is his first album as a leader since Into Forever (2015) and marks the debut of his new band. A hand-picked ensemble featuring some of Manchester’s finest young musicians: Matt Cliffe flute & saxophone, Maddie Herbert harp, Liviu Gheorghe piano, Alan Taylor drums and Jack McCarthy percussion as well as long-time Halsall collaborator, bassist, Gavin Barras who has been at the heart of Halsall’s bands for over a decade. For Matthew it was important to have a band based locally and able, pre-Covid, to meet and play each week, and who also performed a sold-out monthly basement session at Yes in Manchester. The album draws energy from these sessions and inspiration from themes and ideas that have inspired Halsall through the years – as with his previous albums Oneness, Fletcher Moss Park and When the World Was One – such as the ecology, the environment and harmony with nature.
“I feel Salute to the Sun is a positive earthy album," says Halsall. "I wanted to create something playful but also quite primitive, earthy and organic that connected to the sounds in nature. I was listening to lush ambient field recordings of tropical environments such as jungles and rainforests and found myself drawn to percussive atmospheric sounds which replicated what I was hearing (bells / shakers / chimes / rain sticks) and I started to experiment with more wooden percussive instruments such as kalimba and marimba.”
Salute to the Sun features lush wholly improvised tunes inspired by ambient rainforest and jungle field recordings, deeply soulful tunes built around hypnotic harp and kalimba patterns, deep Strata-East inspired spiritual jazz grooves and some of Halsall’s most beautiful playing and inspiring healing melodies yet recorded.
The album was recorded at the band’s weekly sessions, using Halsall’s own recording set-up, giving the recordings a relaxed vibe and unforced energy that really lets the music breath. The album is also very much a family affair as Halsall’s brother Daniel Halsall, artistic director of Gondwana Records, was an important presence at the sessions and co-produced the album. It is also his memorable artwork that adorns the cover of Salute to the Sun, an album beautifully designed by legendary designer Ian Anderson of The Designers Republic, who also created the covers for the recent archival releases Oneness, Sending My Love and Colour Yes and is one of Halsall’s favourite designers. Together Daniel Halsall and Ian Anderson have designed all of Matthew’s seven albums to date, so it felt extra-special to bring them together for, Salute to the Sun, an album that Halsall was determined to present in the very best way possible. The album was mixed with another long-time collaborator, George Atkins at 80 Hertz in Manchester, who works tirelessly with Halsall to perfect the sound and was mastered by noted engineer Peter Beckmann who brings an added depth to the sound specially around the bass notes as well as Halsall’s trumpet. The magnificent double vinyl was cut as a Half Speed master by Barry Grint at Alchemy Mastering for the best possible analogue experience.
Matthew Halsall's Salute To The Sun album is available November 20 but you can pre-order it right here. Watch the preview clip followed by a performance of "Joyful Spirits Of The Universe" below.
Oneness is a triple 12" set of Matt Halsall's previously unreleased spiritual jazz recordings which share a meditative vibe.
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The recordings on Oneness date from Jan, March and September 2008 and were born from a period of experimentation as UK trumpeter Matthew Halsall first began to explore the music that would provide the inspiration for his spiritual jazz recordings Fletcher Moss Park and When the World Was One. They also offer an intriguing snapshot into the birth of Halsall’s Gondwana Orchestra and feature many musicians who would go on to become a key part of Halsall’s musical journey, such as harpist Rachel Gladwin, bassist Gavin Barras and saxophonist Nat Birchall. The recordings sat in the Gondwana Records vaults for over a decade before Halsall felt it was the right time to share them. Asked about the recordings Halsall says:
“I’ve always treasured these recordings and loved how vulnerable, open and free they are, but I just felt they were too subtle and sensitive to release early on in my career, so I held them back until now. I also feel now is the right time to release these before I begin a fresh journey with a new bunch of musicians.”
Remarkably, the beautiful compositions heard here were all built around a simple tanpura drone sound. An instrument Halsall heard on Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ album and then at a later date in a concert featuring Arun Ghosh on clarinet and John Ellis on piano. “I loved the way this instrument created a sort of meditative atmospheric pulse for the musicians to work over and it had this beautiful feeling of togetherness, so after the gig I went out and bought a Raagini Shruti box featuring the tanpura drone and began to practice my trumpet over it and wrote lots of loose themes and melodies”.
The sessions that make up Oneness capture Halsall in the process of building a new band, reaching out to various musicians he’d discovered and admired on the Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds music scene. “I really liked this idea of bringing lots of musicians together from different backgrounds and was fascinated with how they would all react to each other and the tanpura drone box seemed to bring everyone together really well, it was kind of like a nice meditative icebreaker exercise for everyone to loosen up, before we got stuck into the more composed tunes I’d created, some of which ended up on the Sending My Love and Colour Yes albums”.
The album’s title, Oneness, speaks to both Halsall’s conviction that the planet should be shared equally with all of its inhabitants. That no human being or other inhabitant deserves to exist more than the other and that we can achieve far more together than against each other. And also importantly to what Halsall was aiming for musically:
“I really believe in Oneness and I’ve always loved the term ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. I could make music on my own and live a fairly isolated antisocial life, but there’s something far more rewarding about creating things with others. And for me these sessions document the coming together of lots of different musicians in a wonderfully organic soulful way to make egoless music”.
It’s a belief that continues to underpin Matthew’s music making and a message that the world sorely needs right now as we feel more divided and separated than ever. This then is Oneness, a decade in the making and well worth the wait. Get it right here. Listen to the track "The Traveller" below.
Listen to "The Detour" off Chip Wickham's album La Sombra which sounds like it was recorded in the late 60s.
In recent times Manchester has produced an impressive slew of jazz musicians, with the likes of Matthew Halsall and Nat Birchall both receiving widespread acclaim. A lesser known figure but no less important in the development of the Manchester scene is Chip Wickham, a flautist and saxophonist who soon releases a spiritually leaning and vintage sounding jazz record called La Sombra on Lovemonk Records.
Translated from Spanish as 'The Shade', Chip's debut album drops after a 25-year career touring, recording and experimenting across three decades of jazz, funk, soul, hip-hop, Latin and electronica. La Sombra is a monumental record for Chip as it symbolizes the moment he stepped out into the light as a director of his creations with freedom to explore his roots, express and tell his version of jazz and pay testament to his heroes Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef and Harold McNair.
Now living in Doha after an intense and productive six years in Madrid, it was Manchester where Chip studied in the late '80s and became enmeshed in the chaotic and thrilling music scenes emanating from one of the world's most culturally prominent cities of the time. Recording and generally 'keeping things real' with Manchester's hip-hop collective Grand Central Records, Rae & Christian, Nightmares on Wax, Graham Massey (808 State), Chip was in a city that was undergoing a music revolution with the Haçienda as its temple. Yet it was the headlights of the M62 motorway and not the strobe lights that were lighting Chip's path during his student years ('88-'92). The lure of the jazz and funk clubs of Leeds, where The New Mastersounds were breaking out and building the blocks that would lead them to UK funk royalty status, proved too strong.
In the 1990s Chip continued to refine his craft in the rainy city and the gigs booked were growing in stature. It wasn't long before he was on the road with Roy Ayers and Badly Drawn Boy. Around that time Chip met up with trumpeter Matthew Halsall that was the beginning of a friendship that lasts to this day. Chip was a recording artist on Matthew Halsall's breakout album Sending My Love and continues to work with him, with live dates confirmed in spring 2017. This close connection with Halsall gave rise to other collaborations, such as with Nat Birchall and Go Go Penguin’s Rob Turner.
Three decades after his late night excursions to Leeds, Chip found himself recording with Eddie Roberts from The New Mastersounds in Madrid, as part of their new band, The Fire Eaters, which he'd formed soon after he moved to sunny Spain in 2007 – the same year he released the Fried Samba album under his moniker Malena, his electronic Latin band that became a hit at the turn of the century for Freestyle Records. During his time in Spain he connected with the local scene and brought together many of his musicians colleagues from the UK to Spain and it was for a local and well established label, Lovemonk, that he released two 45s blending raw funk and Latin. These new roads and musical leanings led to an invitation to play for the Craig Charles Fantasy Funk Band. Based on a poll from Craig Charles’ BBC6 radio show, Chip was chosen to play alongside the cream of the UK funk & soul scene: James Taylor (JTQ), Snowboy, The Haggis Horns (Mark Ronson), John Turrell (Smooth & Turrell), and Mick Talbot (The Style Council).
La Sombra takes an altogether more rooted direction than Chip's recent collaborative work, with the jazz of the late '60s and early '70s a dominating influence to the recordings. Comprising of seven tracks recorded in Madrid with musicians assembled by Chip from Madrid's jazz scene (namely pianist Gabriel Casanova, bassist David Salvador and drummer/vibraphonist Antonio Pax), it combines contemplative explorations akin to Yusef Lateef's early work on tracks like 'La Sombra' and 'Pushed Too Far'.
There's a fiery cover of Camarón de la Isla’s classic ‘La Leyenda Del Tiempo’ and tracks like 'Sling Shot' and 'Red Planet' are locked in a groove harking back to Freddie Hubbard's Blue Note era and the mid-period peak of Nathan Davis. Listen to the Harold McNair-inspired track "The Detour" below followed by Chip's appearance with Manchester jazz scene don Matthew Halsall on Worldwide FM from 11/05/2017. Check out La Sombra and Chip Wickham's other releases on his Bandcamp page right here.
Being a DJ himself, you'd think that Matthew Halsall would've had his On The Go album on wax much quicker.
It's been a long wait but UK rising star jazz trumpeter Matthew Halsall's fantastic On The Go album from 2011 is finally being issued on vinyl as a limited double-LP edition on May 20.
Hailed as the "Best Jazz Album of the Year" at the 2012 Worldwide Awards, Halsall's third set on Gondwana label – featuring the stellar line-up of saxophonist Nat Birchall, pianist Adam Fairhall, bassist Gavin Barras and drummer Gaz Hughes with Rachael Gladwin on harp – has been specially remixed and remastered by Matt with George Atkins at 80 Hertz boasting three previously unissued bonus tracks.
Hopefully Matthew will have the good sense to re-press that Alice Coltrane tribute 12" he recorded with his Gondwana Orchestra (featuring the aforementioned harpist Rachel Gladwin) at the BBC's Maida Vale Studio released in a tiny edition last year. You can pre-order On The Go (Special Edition) right here.
Matthew Halsall - On The Go 1. Music For A Dancing Mind 2. Song For Charlie 3. The End Of Dukkha 4. Samatha 5. The Journey Home 6. The Move 7. Only You* 8. Singing Everyday* 9. Breathless* *bonus track
