//

Blanchard: no borders just horizons

When Terence Blanchard appeared at Ronnie Scott’s during the London Jazz Festival he let drop in his bandstand chat that his band would be entering the studio imminently. And that Friday night on Frith Street the quintet played for the early house Brice Winston’s ‘Time To Spare’ a sprawling multi-section epic that sure enough is included on new album Magnetic.

Now confirmed for a May release by Blue Note in the States (no UK date yet) the album has ten songs with Tuczon road warrior Winston joining the great jazz composer and trumpeter, as well as pianist Fabian Almazan, new bassist Joshua Crumbly, and drummer Kendrick Scott whose own album, the happening Oracle session Conviction, has just been released by Concord. Magnetic has the Second Great Miles Quintet bassist Ron Carter as a guest plus Ravi Coltrane, who’s also signed to Blue Note, and Blanchard’s old friend guitarist Lionel Loueke who used to be in the Quintet and whose lovely ballad ‘Benny’s Tune’ named for Lionel’s former wife is still in the band book. Tunes are ‘Magnetic’, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’,‘Don’t Run’, ‘Pet Step Sitter’s Theme Song’, ‘Hallucinations’, ‘No Borders Just Horizons’, ‘Comet’, ‘Central Focus’, ‘Another Step’, and that tune previously mentioned, ‘Time To Spare’ as closer. Blanchard is also to premiere Champion, an opera in jazz at a theatre in St Louis, more of which later in Marlbank.

Terence Blanchard above