JazzWorldQuest Showcase 2022: Dan Costa(UK)-Iremia

Critically-acclaimed pianist and Jazz music producer Dan Costa, is set to release ‘Iremia’ featuring legendary trumpet player Randy Brecker (The Brecker Brothers). Costa, has an impressive backlog of critically acclaimed albums, and successfully presents a high level of professionalism within his craft.

Iremia takes inspiration from the picturesque island of Paros, and meaning ‘peacefulness’ in Greek, which is perfectly encapsulated with the single’s soothing and calming nature.

Dan initially studied classical piano for six years at the Académie de Musique Rainier III in the south of France, as well as jazz, and wrote his first composition at the age of twelve. In 2010, he was awarded a diploma with merit at Sir Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in the UK. Dan’s strong interest in his Latin roots coupled with his passion for jazz led him to study at the Escola Superior de Música e Artes do Espetáculo in Portugal, where he graduated in jazz piano with a Rotary Club award for outstanding achievement in 2015.

During his course, he was also awarded a merit grant to study Brazilian music at UNICAMP –Universidade Estadual de Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil). He pursued further studies at Berklee College of Music with a scholarship for outstanding achievement.

Costa has attended workshops and classes given by musical artists such as Gary Burton, Kevin Hays, Scott Colley, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jorge Rossy, Chick Corea and César Camargo Mariano. Additionally, Dan has co-directed musicals, performed with orchestras and big bands, and starred as both a pianist and composer in projects in countries such as the UK, France, Finland, Germany, Spain, Greece and the USA.

In January 2016, he recorded his debut album Suíte Três Rios in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with musicians such as Jaques Morelenbaum, Ricardo Silveira, Teco Cardoso, Rafael Barata, Marcos Suzano and Leila Pinheiro. It peaked at #1 on the iTunes Jazz Chart and Top 10 across all genres in Portugal, prior to hitting the #1slot on the CMJ Top Adds Chart in the USA and being top 10 for several weeks on Roots Music Report.

In May 2018 he recorded his second album Skyness at Arte Suono in Italy, featuring Roberto Menescal, Jorge Helder, Teco Cardoso, Custódio Castelo, Romero Lubambo, Nelson Faria and Seamus Blake, launched at Blue Note Rio in November.

In recent years from 2018 to present day, Dan’s music has received rave reviews from the likes of JAZZIZ, Rolling Stone India, Jazz FM, All About JAZZ, Down Beat Magazine, The Jazz Word and so forth.


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World Music Mix: Hakim Jamal(UK)-Album: When You Are Who You Are

Hakim Jamal(UK)
At Last I Am Free/Think I’ll Call It A Day/We Are Who We Are
Album: When You Are Who You Are
Composer: Paul Ashley Wheatcroft
Label: TakingHead TV Recordings (2022)
When You Are What You Are’ is the new studio album by Hakim Jamal, slated for release in Spring 2022. The album is a return to Hakim’s jazz roots, and of course nods towards the ever-present influence of black songwriters and the black power movement.
Streaming CD Store Website

World Music Mix

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