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Carving the Blues in Granite
Jazz musician and vocalist KATE WESTBROOK talks to Chris Searle about her unique new album, a tribute to those who quarried stone on Dartmoor
MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
PETER MASON is exhilarated by an exciting, well-considered and historically minded tribute to the great Trinidadian instrument
Reducing historical lives to ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles, we lose the nuance of those lives and a clearer understanding of past societies, suggests CLAIRE ISABELLA GILMOUR
CHRIS SEARLE relishes the genius of pianist Alexander Hawkins, his many ensembles, and his new album
I FIRST heard Kate Westbrook back in 1973, when she played tenor horn in her husband Mike’s brass band at the E1 Festival in Stepney, east London. Since those days she’s become an outstanding jazz vocalist and now in her 80th year she’s delivered the album Granite, perhaps her most singular achievement.
On a universal quest: Kate Westbrook
The record is a deeply poetic soliloquy about a Dartmoor quarry worker — “a granite creature who has neither gender or scale but memories and longings,” she tells me — searching for the song of his/her life, the song of the curlew.
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