Opening 2026’s jazz reviews with a story from the mid-1980s might be risking audience restiveness, but that was the decade in which a far-sighted young saxophonist on the UK jazz scene called Iain Ballamy first appeared on this writer’s radar. The cross-generational lineup and captivating ideas of Riversphere, his first solo release in years, testify to exactly why he has stayed there for 40 years.
In their 20s, Ballamy and pianist/composer Django Bates frequently joined forces as two mavericks, skilfully respectful of the classic jazz tradition while adventurously and often mischievously transforming it. They were key figures in a gifted UK generation that created some of the sparkiest European jazz of the 1980s and 90s, most influentially in the revolutionary orchestra Loose Tubes, which brought together genres from old-school swing to vaudeville, improv and avant-rock, and on occasion really did get people dancing in the streets.
Riversphere likens the interweaving of rivers to the flows of music-making between genres, individuals and across the blurred lines of composition and improv. Ballamy’s beautifully paced and tonally evocative sax sound fronts an A-list quartet with the atmospherically Bill Frisell-ian guitarist Rob Luft, bassist Conor Chaplin and drummer Corrie Dick, while the ever-empathic Laura Jurd and Ballamy’s very promising son Charlie share trumpet roles on three tracks – notably the set’s exquisitely harmonised finale, As Time Passes.
The horns and guitar shift from folksy songlike lines to raw note-bending on the opening Harmonique, while wistful guitar and sax long tones delicately drift through softly shifting drum patterns on Unresolved. Frisell’s dreamy Strange Meeting sets slow tenor exhalations floating amid treble-guitar peals, and two yearning Chico Buarque/Jobim songs warmly reflect both Ballamy’s affection for Latin jazz and north-Euro ambient music, and Luft’s versatility as a tone-poet and a nimble postbopper. Volume 2 is already in the pipeline – an intriguing prospect for later this year.
Also out this month
Keyboardist Craig Taborn, legendary reeds player Henry Threadgill and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire are among many jazz stars duetting with double bassist Thomas Morgan on the latter’s Around You Is a Forest (Loveland) – but Morgan mainly plays the Woods here, his own virtual invention mimicking the sounds of lutes, harps, zithers and more. The machine creates a fascinating soundscape, even if, compared to Morgan’s bass imagination, it sometimes seems to hamper the two-way flexibility of these conversations. Tom Ollendorff’s Where in the World (Fresh Sound New Talent) creatively augments this fine young UK guitarist’s closely attuned regular trio with Blue Note’s US piano star Aaron Parks, on fast, hard-boppish groovers, elegant melodies (all Ollendorff’s) and inventive improv. And the late great UK pianist John Taylor’s Tramonto (ECM) is the welcome unveiling of a live recording by the superb 2002 trio (with Americans Marc Johnson on bass and Joey Baron on drums) who made Taylor’s iconic ECM studio set Rosslyn in the same year.
