Don Edwards Cotote

Principal Edwards Magic Theatre were one of those support bands you’d encounter in the colleges and town hall venues of the UK in the early 1970s…

Sony has packaged this album like a 1980s disc of music to snog by, but the saxophonist Amy Dickson’s new release is an intriguing and entirely serious collection of recent works by Australian composers, works she did much to create. The title work, premiered by Dickson in 2012, is a late score by Peter Sculthorpe. The first movement is sun drenched and full of yearning, the saxophone soaring over a teeming orchestra; the second is a more unsettled expression of homesickness. Ross Edwards’s concerto entitled the Full Moon Dances – recorded, unlike the rest, live in concert – is elegantly scored and evocative, especially in the opening Mantra, in which the saxophone interweaves with the orchestral soloists, and in the pulsing, almost Stravinsky-esque First Ritual Dance. But it is Brett Dean’s 2007 flute concerto The Siduri Dances, here arranged for saxophone, which offers the most wide-ranging demonstration of Dickson’s mastery with its note-bending, buzzing effects and hectic rhythms.

Teddy Edwards, who took part in classic tenor battles with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray in Los Angeles during the mid-to-late 1940's, has been a major tenorman ever since. However, his decision to live in L.A. has resulted in him being greatly underrated through the years. Fortunately the superior hard bop tenor (who showed that there was more than just cool jazz being played on the West Coast in the 1950) has recorded on a fairly frequent basis throughout his career. This CD reissue brings back music from 1959-60 with Edwards joined by either Amos Trice, Joe Castro or Ronnie Ball on piano, Leroy Vinnegar or Ben Tucker on bass and Billy Higgins or Al Levitt on drums…