Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth: Epicenter

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Tony Malaby (ts)
Chris Lightcap (b)
Chris Cheek (ts, bs)
Craig Taborn (syn, el p, p)
Gerald Cleaver (electronics)

Label:

Clean Feed

April/2015

Catalogue Number:

CF315CD

RecordDate:

date not stated

Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth have quietly been accumulating favourable reviews for almost 10 years now, but they really began to get noticed with Deluxe from 2010, which made it onto some 20 end-of-year listings, including those of The New York Times, NPR and Jazz Times. On their latest album they include a version of Lou Reed's ‘All Tomorrow's Parties’, their performance of which was by general consensus the hit of the 2014 New York Winter Jazz festival, and is probably the album highlight here. The rest of the album is given over to an extended work of seven parts called ‘Lost and Found: New York’, which was funded by Chamber Music America's 2011 New Jazz Works Commissioning and Development Program. The compositional content of the suite, as with much contemporary jazz, is actually quite weak, the themes (because that is all they are) are more functional than memorable, before opening up the improvised section with the length of Speed and Malby's solos often exceeding inspiration. Taborn is not used to the extent his talent would seem to demand in an album that offers quirky affectation rather than fresh insights.

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