Opening with a fanfare and ending with a hymn Edentide is full of welcoming space, percussive resource, and brass adventure, Loose Tubes trumpeter Noel Langley joined by harpist Ruth Wall, Blink pianist Alcyona Mick, percussionist Keith Fairburn, bassist Zoltan Dekany, drummer Asaf Sirkis, organist Kenny Dickenson, and by bass guitarist Laurence Cottle who guests on the scintillating ‘Sven’s Island’.
The absorbing material includes Graham Fitkin’s gorgeous ‘Glass’ orchestrated for the Stealth Horns, who comprise players from the Swing Out Sister big band and the Radiohead horn section.
Langley goes on to play all four parts, the overdubs made in Ashley Slater’s studio, of Kenny Wheeler’s ‘Four For One’, the second movement of a Wheeler trumpet quartet.
The long title track kept to the end incorporates Crimond, the music for ‘The Lord is My Shepherd,’ quite ingeniously.
An album that manages to combine beautifully captured New Agey textures, jazz-rock, brass bravura, and minimalism without diminishing any of these disparate elements’ fundamental improvisatory impact. SG
