COMPOSERS: Andy Sheppard & John Parricelli
LABELS: Provocateur
PERFORMER: Andy Sheppard & John Parricelli
CATALOGUE NO: PVC 1034
Having regrouped by retreating into neo-classicism in the Eighties, jazz reasserted itself in the Nineties by resorting to one of its classic strategies: extending hospitality to an extraordinary variety of other musics, adapting and assimilating them.
The music was thus able to emerge in the new millennium as unashamedly polystylistic, yet retaining its core strengths: interactive spontaneity and improvisational imagination.
Consequently, an average month’s new issues will now run the stylistic gamut, from the strictly conventional, through the mildly eccentric, to the wholly individual.
Unconventional both in format – a saxophone-guitar duo – and in approach (it seems more interested in creating mood and atmosphere than in straightforward swing) is PS by two of the UK’s most respected musicians, andy sheppard and john parricelli.
Drawing on Latin and ambient music as much as on jazz, the pair have produced music that is by turns sweetly plangent, dreamy, melancholic and plaintive, but which is consistently poised and elegant, yet complex enough amply to reward repeated listening.