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Larry Stabbins & Mark Sanders: Cup & Ring
by John Sharpe
Inspired by the 5000 year old Neolithic rock carvings pictured on the sleeve, Cup & Ring opens and closes with brooding, ritualistic pieces in which Larry Stabbins' breathy flute drifts like mist over Mark Sanders' deliberate, processional percussion. These atmospheric bookends, along with similarly spare interludes throughout, frame a set grounded more deeply in the language of free jazz--a realm both musicians know intimately. Stabbins, returning to performance after a lengthy hiatus, brings a layered backstory to this ...
Continue ReadingTony Oxley: Unreleased 1974 - 2016
by Chris May
The British drummer and bandleader Tony Oxley passed in 2023, aged 85, after a career which began in the mid 1960s as the drummer in the house band at Ronnie Scott's club. From this prestigious but relatively codified platform, Oxley soon steered into less travelled waters. In 1969 he was in the quartet which recorded John McLaughlin's debut album, Extrapolation (Polydor). In the early 1970s, he began adding ring modulators, tone generators and other fx tools to his assemblage of ...
Continue ReadingTony Oxley Quintet: Angular Apron
by Chris May
Among the most welcome jazz events of 2024 is the return to active duty of the great British saxophonist Larry Stabbins following an absence of over a decade. Stabbins went into voluntary exile in 2013, after around thirty-five years at the deep end of British jazz. Disenchanted with the culturally regressive direction in which the music and its ecology seemed to be heading, he even went so far as selling his tenor. But things change, and towards the end of ...
Continue Reading137: Strangeness Oscillation
by Chris May
More comebacks than Sinatra? Well, not really, given that this is the first one, but the return of the beyond-category British saxophonist and flautist Larry Stabbins after an eleven-year absence is headline news. In 2013, Stabbins (a.k.a. Stonephace) very publicly announced that he was beyond disgusted with the music business in general and the jazz business in particular and that he was leaving London and returning to the West Country where he was born and bred. We would be hearing ...
Continue Reading"Stonephace" Stabbins: Transcendental
by Bruce Lindsay
On his thirteenth birthday Larry “Stonephace" Stabbins, already a promising saxophonist, bought John Coltrane's Africa/Brass (Impulse!, 1961). The impact was immediate and long-lasting, as Stabbins writes in the liner notes to Transcendental. By the early'70s he was an established player on the UK jazz scene. Forty years on, the sound of Africa/Brass still influences Stabbins and while he makes no attempt to mimic Coltrane's sound, there is something of Coltrane's spirituality underpinning much of the music on this excellent recording.
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