Alan Shorter

“Broadbent plays Brubeck” is a return to Alan Broadbent’s beginnings…

A very important artist from Naples, ALAN SORRENTI released his first album in 1972 on Harvest. He had a Welsh mother and had lived in Wales as a child. "Aria" is a very good album, with two different sides: the first only contains the long title track, a dreamy suite starting with acoustic guitar and based on the marvellous, instrument-like voice of Sorrenti, and culminating in the final part with a memorable violin solo by Jean-Luc Ponty. Side 2 is softer, with three tracks, two of which ("Vorrei incontrarti") also appeared as a single. The album was successful in Italy, and Alan Sorrenti was one of the few solo artists to compete with other prog groups in the open air festivals of the time. The album was also released abroad, but to little success.

On May 13, 2000 the Chicago Underground Quartet played one of the most searing and transcendent sets of music I’ve ever witnessed, as part of the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music. Cornetist Rob Mazurek, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Chad Taylor, and bassist Noel Kupersmith performed with a fiery singularity of purpose, ripping through its set like a bulldozer, albeit a machine marked by nuance and soulfulness. The following year the same line-up—which had previously made two albums for Delmark as the Chicago Underground Trio despite, with Parker nominally billed as a guest—dropped its eponymous debut on Thrill Jockey, serving up one of the strongest entries in the city’s modern history. Little did anyone know it would be nineteen years for the follow-up to surface.

The release of this album is an event momentous enough to warrant repeating the preamble to the previously published review of Albert Ayler's Quartets 1964: Spirits To Ghosts Revisited… Before considering the music on this disc, something else has to be celebrated—the resurrection of Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut label (see past profiles). Founded in 1975, the Swiss-based company's hatOLOGY series championed European and American outer-limits jazz, producing a large catalogue of newly recorded and legacy material. Sadly, in 2016, financial pressures obliged Uehlinger to sell the back catalogue and the hatOLOGY name to Outhere Music.

With his second album, Alan Sorrenti reached the most complex and brutal vocal experiment in all his career. The album's structure is similar to the previous Aria, a little bit extended being over 46 minutes of music and divided between the whole side's self titled epic (side two - 23 min.) and shorter and simpler songs.
For the recording sessions of the album he went to London and was helped by other famous guest musicians as Van der Graaf Generator sax hero David Jackson, who played flute and by Curved Air's member Francis Monkman on synthesizer, piano and electric guitar. Differently from Aria, his voice appears more nervous and complicated passing through stronger dissonances and unusual noises and strange sounds…