Byron Wallen: Black Flag

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Byron Wallen (t)
Nick Ramm (ky)

Label:

Twilight Jaguar Productions/Bandcamp

Dec/Jan/2022/2023

Media Format:

CD/book

RecordDate:

Rec: 2004

The polymathic UK trumpeter and composer Byron Wallen has been walking a creative line between classic-jazz virtuosity and global conceptual adventurousness since the mid-1990s - with a succession of bold projects that have included his Tarot Suite, the MOBO Award-nominated Earth Roots, and the jazz/poetry venture dedicated to Langston Hughes that helped win him a British Jazz Innovation Award in 2003.

But Wallen's Black Flag, an album of rich-textured trumpet/keys duo playing with pianist Nick Ramm, packaged with an autobiographical book of images on the theme of family, is up there with the inventiveness of all his work.

Wallen was born and raised in the UK but his parents were from Belize, and a childhood of intimate relationships split by the Atlantic Ocean is movingly evoked in these pictures – as the music is steeped in his observations and feelings from years of travelling and playing all over Africa, the Caribbean, and the East. The CD's 18 short pieces, originally commissioned by the Jerwood Foundation and recorded in 2004 but recently remixed, cover a vivid landscape of styles and sounds, from the Miles-like lyricism of Wallen's trumpet against Ramm's loops, orchestra-mimicking chords and glistening Rhodes tones, to brass fanfares segueing into jigging dances, or effects suggesting church bells, rolling waves, airport announcements, or distant trains.

The inventive Ramm sometimes cranks up hurried, boogie-like piano grooves, or crunching, Weather Reportish bass-note vamps, and the long rapport between him and the freethinking and ever-curious Byron Wallen is evident everywhere.

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