Artist: Finn Peters

Date of Release: 15/09/2006

Catalogue no: 1015

Label: Babel

Price: £11.99

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Track Listing

Over recent years, this young flautist/saxophonist/producer has been successfully embracing interactions working in the worlds of club music in the West London Broken Beat scene, jazz, classical and various world musics. Finn's 2006 release Su-Ling on Babel demonstrates how he has matured as a jazz composer and musician, soaking up the experience he has gained from a range of musical cultures, and honing the complexity of these forms into an accessible acoustic jazz format. A keen interest in ethnomusicology, specifically centred on latin and African music (The Suling of the title refers to a flute used in Javanese music) also permeates the grooves. Finn's quintet brings together kindred spirits with similar contemporary popular sub-cultural, improvisation and global music influences: they are the members of the eclectic band Jade Fox: keyboard/pianist Nick Ramm, guitarist David Okumu, bassist Tom Herbert and drummer Tom Skinner.

Reviews

22/09/2006 John Fordham. The Guardian

Finn Peters, the 31-year-old British saxophonist and flautist, has always sounded like a player who didn't need much acquaintance with an unfamiliar context to be able to make a difference to it. But house music, contemporary classical music (with the group Nosferatu) and production have occupied much of his time - so this is a belated jazz album from him, with the formidable F-ire Collective partnership of guitarist Dave Okumu, pianist Nick Ramm, bassist Tom Herbert and drummer Tom Skinner.
Peters adopts a Wayne Shorter-like mix of muttered, insinuating lines and hollow, dolorous long notes in the opening Latin section of Al Dar Gazelli before it opens out into free swing. The handclapping/bass-riffing Red Fish is catchy but gets muscular as its squirming melody develops. And the title track (the name of an Indonesian flute) has Peters breathing wisps of sound over delicately stepping treble piano and deep bowed bass. Nelson's Blood mixes a contemporary-classical intro with devious flute improv and accordion sounds from Ramm's synths, and Machine Gun has the kind of playfully wayward melodies, collective tussles, electronics-broadsides and rhythmic unpredictability that could have muscled in on some of the slighter Latin groovers more. But it's a welcome return to full-on jazz for a gifted exponent.