John Tchicai

Afro-Danish saxophonist John Tchicai spent his youth playing alongside the greats, recording and performing with Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Don Cherry. For this recording, Tchicai is joined by John Coxon, Mark Sanders and Ashley Wales, who between them supply an arsenal of instruments including piano, harpsichord, sampler, steel bowls and bowed percussion. This setup makes for a bewitching backdrop of esoteric sound textures and atmospheric accompaniment, giving an otherworldy context for Tchicai's alto sax and bass clarinet excursions. You could argue that there's a similarity between these recordings and the kind of jazz-ambient experiments of Arve Henriksen on his Chiaroscuro album, there's the same sort of re-contextualisation of the lead instrument into a symphonic avant-garde framework, but Tchicai's work is devoid of Henriksen's more new age tendencies, remaining more resolutely experimental throughout.