Label: Discus Music

テレク・ベイリーのIncusより氏とのデュオ録音をリリース、その他EmanemやTreaderに諸作を残し、London Improvisers Orchestraにも所属していた英国の名プレイヤーAlex Ward。英老舗Discus Musicより発表した2021年のソロアルバム。様々な楽器を全て自身で演奏、それらを全て多重録音で仕上げた実験ジャズアルバムであり、エクスペリメンタルロック、AACM以降のクリエイティブな音楽、また室内楽の要素も伺える多彩なスタイルを披露。







"There are enough ideas in the first couple of numbers to fill a whole album, with wailing sax and clarinet and lightning propelled guitar in the brief opener ‘Heat Patch’- think Zappa- then Fripp in ‘The Celebration Restriction’. It’s a whirlwind, visceral listen with the free spirit of experimental jazz and the nous of heavy rock." Phil Jackson, ACID DRAGON

Conceived and realised over an 8-month period of intense solitary work, "GATED" is Alex Ward's most ambitious musical statement to date. The ten pieces employ all of Alex's instrumental resources as a performer, featuring clarinets, saxophones, guitars, keyboards, electric bass and assorted software instruments; and furthermore they draw on everything he has learned during his three-decades-plus of activity as a free improviser, composer/bandleader and sideman. The result is a dense and multi-layered array of detailed compositional structures, headlong improvisational flights and deft studio manipulation.

As the conception of the album progressed and Alex resolved to let his ideas develop in a manner unfettered by anything other than his own aspirations and abilities, he strove to create a work which would inhabit a wide-open stylistic and sonic terrain without succumbing to the pitfalls of pastiche. The range of instrumentation and attack deployed throughout the album might at various points suggest any number of strands of avant/experimental rock, AACM-and-beyond traditions of creative music, or post-Darmstadtian chamber rigour; but rather than generic signifiers being employed as decoration or even tribute, in "GATED" every musical element is mined for the most fertile and least standardised possibilities it can yield. Despite the album's startling diversity of sound and atmosphere, a consistent set of compositional and aesthetic principles underlies its entire contents.

This album is dedicated to Simon H. Fell (1959-2020).