Joe Morris & Elliott Sharp Realism (2025)

This is the second recording for Quartz from Olwen Morris, offering a cross section of works from the Classical period through the early Contemporary. Olwen Morris grew up in war-time rural Wales, where she was first taught by Josef Gruenbaum, a musician and lawyer from Stuttgart, who with his family had fled Nazi Germany. Olwen made extraordinary progress, and enrolled at 14 as the youngest student at Cardiff College of Music, (later becoming the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama). She soon made her first early live broadcasts, including a concerto with the BBC Welsh Orchestra, and debut concerts in Cardiff's City Hall and Reardon Smith Theatre. Teaching, directing church music, organ improvisation and chamber music have all played parts throughout a lifetime in music, but solo playing continues to remain the vital center of it all. Her performances of the Viennese classics are remarkable for their insight and depth, and her playing of French music for sensitivity to sensual sound, also reflecting her long close association with northern France, where her artist husband, David Morris painted.

The Blues Masters series, much to Rhino`s credit, adopts an expansive definition of blues, allowing the likes of Count Basie, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Muddy Waters and even Louis Prima admission. There is none of the purist`s quibbling over strict 12-bar form or the relative significance of prewar and postwar styles.
What Rhino delivers instead is the blues in all its myriad guises. This music is old and new, black and white, acoustic and electric, folksy and jazzy, performed by women and men, and yet it is all still blues at its core.

Inevitably, there's some symbolism implied when an artist, after years of lurking behind a semi-obscure pseudonym– head down, eyes averted, shoulders squeezed and high– puts out a record under his common name. Former Third Eye Foundation principal Matt Elliott has spent most of his recording career as a modish UK hipster in a dark disguise: thus, the leap from "Third Eye Foundation" to "Matt Elliott" should involve a nice dose of lurid confessionalism, some newfound honesty, a running-around-naked-in-daylight reinvention of self. Right? Hey, turn this car around! Someone left the personal catharsis at home! The Mess We Made, Matt Elliott's proper debut as Matt Elliott is, at least atmospherically, just as shadowed and sinister as his late, orchestral Third Eye work.