JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2025: THREE Darren Pickering-Small Worlds

Darren Pickering-Small Worlds

THREE
Darren Pickering Small Worlds

Release Date: 30 April, 2025

Available from the RATTLE WEBSITE as a Print-on-Demand CD or Digital Download and on all major download and streaming platforms

Following their critically acclaimed Volume One (2022) and Volume Two (2023), Darren Pickering Small Worlds continue their through-composed improvisational explorations into the melding of jazz and song-based structures incorporating the “cinematic sonics” of modular synthesisers. Their music features lyrical melodies over shifting textures grounded in solid modern jazz harmony.

RATTLE

An Auckland-based artist-focused art music label specialising in contemporary works by composers and performers who explore unique creative pathways—new music for open ears.

THREE (RAT-J-1059)

01    Green Blinking Light                  (3.11)

02    What If                                       (6.26)

03    Tauhou Waltz                             (7.03)

04    Soft Life                                      (3.04)

05    Hjartdal                                      (2.36)

06    Randall                                       (7.58)

07    Taylor Time                                (8.34)

08    Folly                                            (8.28)

09    Push Bliss                                   (1.42)

All compositions by Darren Pickering © 2025

DARREN PICKERING

Darren is a jazz pianist, composer, educator, modular synthesist and session musician based in Christchurch (NZ). Some of the notable international artists he has worked with include Gordon Brisker (USA), Dick De Graf (Holland), William Parker (USA), Raed Yassin (Lebanon), Bobby Shew (USA), Jamie Oehlers (AUS), Tom Warrington (USA), Iain Ballamy (UK), and he has also worked with nationally renowned NZ artists Julia Deans, LA Mitchell, Mark Vanilau, Whirimako Black, Dave Dobbyn, Anika Moa, and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. His playing and compositions also feature on albums by Shapeshifter (Stars), Cairo Knife Fight (Iron), Julia Deans (Modern Fables), Oakley Grenell (The Deep), The Tiny Lies (The Oaks They Will Blow), Pacific Heights (The Stillness), Departure Lounge (In Session), Sacha Vee (Sacha Vee, Rising One, Luminous), Glen Wagstaff (Firefly), Oval Office (Oval Office, Move, Don’t Stop), Sumo Jazz (Shiko and Throwing Salt, Jazz Album finalist, 2011).

DARREN PICKERING SMALL WORLDS

L to R, Darren Pickering (piano), Jono Blackie (drums), Pete Fleming (bass), Heather Webb (guitar)

This Ōtautahi (Christchurch, NZ) based jazz quartet performs works composed by pianist Darren Pickering as well as re-imagined versions of selected works from other genres. The group’s emphasis is mostly on through-composed material combined with improvisation, and the artistic direction is determined equally by all members. There is a cinematic flavour to the ensemble’s sound, enhanced by the electronic textures of Darren’s ever-expanding collection of modular systems, synths, selected iPad apps and sonic manipulation devices.

Influences include Aaron Parks, Brian Blade and The Fellowship Band, The Cinematic Orchestra, EST, Floating Points, Jacob Karlzon, Kendrick Scott Oracle, Romain Collin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Slowly Rolling Camera, and many others. 

Produced by Darren Pickering Small Worlds

Recorded at Rapaki Studios, Christchurch (NZ)

Engineered and mixed by Alex Harmer

Mastered by Steve Garden

Cover art ‘Sign of Life’ by Harry Harrison

Design by Unklefranc

Printing by Studio Q

This music was composed, performed, recorded, and produced in Aotearoa (NZ)

LINKS

ARTIST Website:

https://www.darrenpickeringmusic.com

RATTLE Website – album profile page:

https://rattle.co.nz/catalogue/releases/three

RATTLE Media Portal – album assets for reviewers and broadcasters: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xg3ifgs0bjx6a45_gfmWh4ztQq44FtTW?usp=sharing

RATTLE Bandcamp: https://darrenpickeringsmallworlds.bandcamp.com/album/three

RATTLE Media Portal – the complete Rattle catalogue:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10fp1w4uuR6ulC1AnVdGxH0cS1vomZHPQ?usp=sharing

CONTACT

Label manager | Steve Garden

1 Kitchener Road Sandringham, Auckland 1025 (NZ)

p: +649-8466642 | m: +6422-6579351

steve@rattle.co.nz

JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2025

World Music Mix: Tom Rodwell – Album: Wood & Waste (2021)

TOM RODWELL TO RELEASE WOOD & WASTE (Fireplace Recordings / October 22, 2021)

Writerly Taste And Crossover Vision Forms Decadent LP By UK Blues/Spirituals Guitarist

Tracked on tape At Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, New Zealand, via The Who’s old Neve Console, Wood & Waste is an entirely analog production with no digital conversion at any stage. Mastering and lacquer cut from 1/2” mixdown tapes. First run of 500 x 180gram LP’s by Pallas, Germany.

Auckland, New Zealand August 2021—Novelists famously use their day jobs for material—guitarist Tom Rodwell mines his crossover blues career with a writerly taste for the surreal on Wood & Waste, a decadent and charmingly outré collection, released on October 22 2021.

An English artist presently moored in New Zealand, Rodwell’s revival of blues music as a vehicle for dance has been supple enough to embrace rhythms from spirituals and calypso, and seen him support acts like Otis Taylor, C.W. Stoneking and Leon Russell. (“Beautiful tunes, beautiful groove—you don’t hear that anymore,” said Derek Trucks). A parallel career as a session player has seen him moonlight live and on record for artists as diverse as Lonnie Holley, Robert Lamm and Don McGlashan, and delve into a host of avant-jazz projects.

In his own songs, Rodwell’s secret weapon is feel. “All the clues to a song are contained in the first bars of a primitive rhythm guitar part, it’s my job to inhabit that space and gradually tease the rest out,” he says. “You just have to pay attention when a song makes a left hand turn.”

Consequently his songs resemble ragged short stories, cobbled-together genres from an alternate history. “The aim is to locate each song in a very specific room of its own, with contrasting feels like layers of paint or old wallpaper. That can result in a take that’s seductive and seasick all at once.”

Lyrically, the slip of the tongue is right at home on Wood & Waste – many of the numbers speak in a late-night jumble of double entendres and stream of consciousness. “I want to give the subconscious some legroom,” Rodwell says. “And to me a song is successful when the exact tone is hard to name, like the feeling of a strange dream you only half recall.”

The record opens with a slow-mo slab of ‘misanthropic gospel’—“Don’t Be a Fugitive All Your Life” finds a Randy Newmanesque unreliable narrator admonishing his buddies from beneath a hangover of overcooked reverb, slippery slide guitar, and ramshackle percussion.

The percussion is from Chris O’Connor and Jeff Henderson, notorious New Zealand free jazz multi-instrumentalists. They turn it loose on the absurdist one-chord freak-out “Touch Me Like a Teddybear”, with booming marching drum and splashing hi-hat pitted against Rodwell’s unhinged guitar. “It’s perversely satisfying having these jazzmen churn out this meaningless bubblegum,” Rodwell jokes. Meanwhile his own elaborate rig adds a shimmering polyphony—multiple amps and a revolving Leslie speaker creating the illusion of a bass player.

Improvisation is a key theme of Wood & Waste, where frequently a skeletal idea transforms into a fleshy dance rhythm. “Keep on Knockin’” subverts a determined Bo Diddley beat with dissonant Mellotron in praise of Edward Hopper and William Morris. “Plenty Time” is a species of prog rhumba set in Roman Britain, indebted to Nigerian giant King Sunny Ade. Elsewhere there’s satirical funk on “Small Town”, the Beach Boys-bossa of “Make Believe” and mythic doo-wop on “Carry On”.

The album’s centrepiece is “She Got Me Boiling”, a juggernaut of psychedelic calypso welded to mindless riffs on cannibalism that would make the Mighty Sparrow blush. Driven by a bass-heavy guitar pulse and animated carnival drums, it’s a fiendishly irresistible piece of music. Against that lusty fever-dream, a sickly waltz of slide and synth evokes the intergenerational nightmare of war—“Dead End Road” a reminder as the album closes that music is concerned with pain as much as pleasure.

Wood & Waste was tracked and mixed entirely on tape without click-track or edits at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, an analog sanctuary built around The Who’s old Neve console. The discipline in the studio sparked alchemy in the sessions. “Using tape means making decisions without a digital safety net, and living with the consequences,” says Rodwell. He produced Wood & Waste alongside the safe hands and cool head of Raphael Mann (Frizz Records, Mr Hudson & The Library), with engineering by Jordan Stone and analog mastering and lacquer from LA legend Kevin Gray (Blue Note, The Beach Boys). The first run of the LP (care of Pallas, Germany) is the end product of an entirely analogue signal chain.

Rodwell’s first full-length was 2012’s Live Humble, an inward-looking set of spirituals, work songs and self-described “oddball improvisations”. “Live Humble was a warping of tradition. The new record is liberated from it.”

Wood & Waste is what used to be called a cult record – a set of warmly anarchic influences and timeworn qualities that is Tom Rodwell’s trademark.

For more information: https://tomrodwell.com/
Press Contact: Kim Grant | KG Music Press | Kim@kgmusicpress.com | 626-755-9022
US Radio: David Avery Powderfinger | David@powderfingerpromo.com
Euro PR/Radio Peter Holmstedt, Hemifran | Peter.Holmstedt@telia.com
UK PR/Radio Joe Cushley, Balling the Jack | JoeCushley@yahoo.co.uk

World Music Mix