MARK LOCKHEART & ROGER SAYER - Salvator Mundi
Edition EDN1132
Mark Lockheart: soprano & tenor saxophone; Roger Sayer: organ
Jazz is odd. I had a friend who just wouldn't accept that the stuff they did in Europe merited the title. For him, I think, Jazz died with Miles… After that, it was just, stuff – especially if it came from Europe. Me, I'm more eclectic. I'll listen to most things and worry about classifications later – and this can range from Garbarek's collaborations with the Hilliard Ensemble to Yann Tiersen's EUSA, or Maria Pia de Vito singing "Chi disse ca la femmena" on Il Pergolese. Of course, they're all astoundingly different, but they're also unified by a delight in improvisation and discovery – whether it's the potential in an old, old tune to still surprise, or the way in which something newly coined can delight when it's twisted to catch the light from another angle.
Mark Lockheart and Roger Sayer's gloriously recorded CD Salvator Mundi does all of this, as well as creating a soundscape which inhabits the extraordinarily resonant acoustic of London's 12th Century Temple Church. Lockheart's soprano and tenor saxophone pair beautifully with the four manual modern organ which is now used in the church, and where Sayer is the resident organist. The sound they make is less ethereal than the extraordinary sonorities that Manfred Eicher achieved in the Garbarek / Hilliard Ensemble Officium project (recorded in an Austrian monastery), but for me, this is no bad thing. The music is more intimate, and more human as a result, and there's something to be said for avoiding some of Garbarek's yelping interjections.
What we find instead in Salvator Mundi is an unfolding in which themes are simply stated – by one musician or the other – and are then developed in a process which almost feels like navigating around something, seeing it from behind, even from above. The tune is always there, anchoring the improvisation, but whether it's something as well known as the carol "In Dulci Jubilo" or Purcell's "Dido's Lament", or John Ashton Thomas' less familiar contemporary pieces, Lockheart and Sayer manage to shine light on surfaces that would have remained hiddent without their gentle, intuitive exploration.
If you are willing to suspend any commitment to categories you might have and be open to the music, there's much here that will give pleasure over many, many hearings.
Reviewed by Chris Tribble
Edition EDN1132
Mark Lockheart: soprano & tenor saxophone; Roger Sayer: organ
Jazz is odd. I had a friend who just wouldn't accept that the stuff they did in Europe merited the title. For him, I think, Jazz died with Miles… After that, it was just, stuff – especially if it came from Europe. Me, I'm more eclectic. I'll listen to most things and worry about classifications later – and this can range from Garbarek's collaborations with the Hilliard Ensemble to Yann Tiersen's EUSA, or Maria Pia de Vito singing "Chi disse ca la femmena" on Il Pergolese. Of course, they're all astoundingly different, but they're also unified by a delight in improvisation and discovery – whether it's the potential in an old, old tune to still surprise, or the way in which something newly coined can delight when it's twisted to catch the light from another angle.
Mark Lockheart and Roger Sayer's gloriously recorded CD Salvator Mundi does all of this, as well as creating a soundscape which inhabits the extraordinarily resonant acoustic of London's 12th Century Temple Church. Lockheart's soprano and tenor saxophone pair beautifully with the four manual modern organ which is now used in the church, and where Sayer is the resident organist. The sound they make is less ethereal than the extraordinary sonorities that Manfred Eicher achieved in the Garbarek / Hilliard Ensemble Officium project (recorded in an Austrian monastery), but for me, this is no bad thing. The music is more intimate, and more human as a result, and there's something to be said for avoiding some of Garbarek's yelping interjections.
What we find instead in Salvator Mundi is an unfolding in which themes are simply stated – by one musician or the other – and are then developed in a process which almost feels like navigating around something, seeing it from behind, even from above. The tune is always there, anchoring the improvisation, but whether it's something as well known as the carol "In Dulci Jubilo" or Purcell's "Dido's Lament", or John Ashton Thomas' less familiar contemporary pieces, Lockheart and Sayer manage to shine light on surfaces that would have remained hiddent without their gentle, intuitive exploration.
If you are willing to suspend any commitment to categories you might have and be open to the music, there's much here that will give pleasure over many, many hearings.
Reviewed by Chris Tribble
