Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

The News Where You Are is one that can be so unique that it seems as if it doesn’t affect the rest of the world; yet as soon as you realise the wider implications, the course of the way that dominos fall, the way that they crash under pressure, then the news is one that can be felt across the globe; it is a signal that the instruments of Time are far reaching and full of congress; it is after all the beat of Jazz.

Jazz has its detractors, it can be seen in some quarters as an art that has reached a critical mass, which it has no sense of pleasure for the vast majority of new music listeners coming through; that like Blues during arguably its downcast period, it has simply become a genre which doesn’t fit in the modern world.

The news though should be seen differently, without Jazz you would not have the art of either the Progressive or the experimental playing in the foreground and such a thought does not deserve to be spoken of; for without experiment you have complete uniformity, of the bland and the beige in charge and that is something that already threatens to dominate music, to treat it as if it were nothing more than a team of a dozen people putting together a song which will generate a hit song, without life, without feeling.

The London Jazz Players respect that notion in their single The News Where You Are and the sense of playfulness in amongst the serious rendition thought out by the two composers Jason Doll-Steinberg and Ruth Wilson. With Steve Lodder on piano, David Mantovani on double bass and Marc Parnell on drums, the scene is set for the imagination to fly across the single, a sense of the reassuring experiment forever finding space in a world that seems to crave the dullness of conformity just a little too much.

A single which offers a difference to the so called accepted norm of the age, one in which the unspoken melody speaks volumes.

Ian D. Hall