Ian Carr's Nucleus

When Ian Gillan was recording his solo albums in the late 1970s and early '80s, Deep Purple's influence never went away. But Gillan did make an effort to try different things, and he was at his most experimental on Clear Air Turbulence. Enjoyable, if uneven, this album illustrates Gillan's willingness to take some chances. While the singer favors an aggressive hard rock groove on "Money Lender," the jazz fusion-influenced touches of "Over the Hill," "Goodhand Liza" and the title song could lead you to believe that you'd been listening to Weather Report and Return to Forever. Had Chick Corea formed an alliance with Deep Purple, perhaps it might sound something like "Over the Hill." Heavy metal and hard rock are in short supply on this album, which employs no less than five horn players and shows that Gillan didn't want to be a headbanger 100-percent of the time.

When Ian Gillan was recording his solo albums in the late 1970s and early '80s, Deep Purple's influence never went away. But Gillan did make an effort to try different things, and he was at his most experimental on Clear Air Turbulence. Enjoyable, if uneven, this album illustrates Gillan's willingness to take some chances. While the singer favors an aggressive hard rock groove on "Money Lender," the jazz fusion-influenced touches of "Over the Hill," "Goodhand Liza" and the title song could lead you to believe that you'd been listening to Weather Report and Return to Forever. Had Chick Corea formed an alliance with Deep Purple, perhaps it might sound something like "Over the Hill." Heavy metal and hard rock are in short supply on this album, which employs no less than five horn players and shows that Gillan didn't want to be a headbanger 100-percent of the time.

Two years after Thick as a Brick 2, an explicit 2012 sequel to the 1972 prog classic, Ian Anderson embarked on another ambitious journey, this time assembling a concept record called Homo Erraticus. A loose – very loose – album based on a "dusty, unpublished manuscript, written by local amateur historian Ernest T. Parritt (1873-1928)," Homo Erraticus is an old-fashioned prog record: it has narrative heft and ideas tied to the '70s, where jazz, classical, folk, orchestral pop, and rock all commingled in a thick, murky soup…

Boddy has often used concert appearances to test out new material and indeed some of the tracks on "Aurora" were first aired at his solo performance as part of the DiN series of concerts at the Buddle Arts Centre in his native north-east England.
"Aurora" sees Boddy creating a seamless mix between the 6 tracks, which covers an enormous amount of sonic territory in its 67 minute running time. The music runs the full gamut from purely abstract, impressionistic pieces such as the darkly oppressive textures of "Gravity Well" to the analogue sequencer driven track "Escape Velocity". Boddy has created a work with an almost orchestral sense of dynamics despite the resolutely electronic nature of its voicings…

Brad Mehldau presents The Folly of Desire, a song cycle inquiring the limits of sexual freedom in a post-#MeToo political age, together with tenor Ian Bostridge, one of the greatest song interpreters of our times. Setting poetry by Blake, Yeats, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe, Auden and Cummings, Mehldau’s music shifts seamlessly between a jazz idiom and Classical art song, and the work explores a theme as timeless as it is topical. The stylistic diversity of this project is underlined by adding a selection of jazz standards, as well as a Schubert lied.

After leaving Deep Purple in June 1973, Ian Gillan had retired from the music business to pursue other business ventures, including motorcycle engines, a country hotel / restaurant (with a guitar shaped swimming pool), and ownership of the Kingsway Recorders studio, where from April 1974 he began to work on his first post-Deep Purple solo tracks…