"Music to make you realize why you love this music..."
JazzUK
Garnett has all the individuality, skill and stamina every star soloist needs, and his debut album as leader is an impressive affair. Alex contributes eight excellent themes including the title track. This is a serpent with plenty of bite.
**** 4 Stars, CD Pick of the Week for July 29th, 2011
JACK MASSARIK, The Evening Standard
"[Serpent] reveals a compositional sharpness that makes this new solo career look like a long-term one... full of exhilarating melodic turns... it's an unexpected gem."
**** 4 Stars, John Fordham, The Guardian
"impeccable...[Serpent] delivers the impression of a club gig even though it's a studio session..."
Clarinet and Saxophone Journal
"Alex Garnett has a classic saxophonists sound, and on 'Serpent' he fronts an impeccable band..."
Cuadernas de Jazz (Spain)
"[Garnett] confidently moulds a personal voice out of the best of the contemporary mainstream on his first, somewhat belated album as a leader... with a deep-tone, soulful spontaneity and an impressive sense of form..."
**** 4 Stars, Mike Hobart, The Financial Times
**** 4 Stars, CD of the Month for Sept. '11
UK Jazz Radio
"Garnett's trip to NYC in 2009 paid off...what we hear on this disc is something jazz is supposed to offer but seldom does these days..."
Jazz Journal
"These musicians don't chase fashion. They are what they are, and do what they do as well as anyone. It [Serpent] has been worth the wait."
London Jazz
"A thoroughly enjoyable and refreshingly unpretentious album, unfussily recorded in what sound like first takes, so that the overall effect is of a hot live performance"
Chris Parker, London Jazz
"[Serpent] impresses on numerous levels, including the quality of Garnett’s writing, the playing skills of the individual muscians and the way in which they lock in together as a unit...a belated but emphatic debut for Garnett as bandleader, who reveals himself to be wild, hip and cool in turn..."
Bruce Lyndsay, All About Jazz
"Garnett confirms jazz as one of the most renewable of energies with a very clever, grooving reworking of 'When The Saints Go Marching In' (here renamed Atonement), revealed his and his band’s mastery of Latin American and bebop rhythms and tempos, and encouraged a collective free improvisation that resolved into consummate jazz ballad playing..."
Rob Adams, Scotland Herald
"[Serpent] is a self-composed album of agile, fresh-sounding contemporary bop"
Kenny Mathieson, The List
"What a great disc! What a great band!...Close your eyes and it could be a '50's blowing session by Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson or Dex, 'cept Garnett has also absorbed later saxophone gurus such as Joe Lovano and George Garzone and the end result is an intricate weave of those influences culminating in a sound that is totally today..."
Bebop Spoken Here Blog Site (UK)
"Garnett is a first call sideman to the stars... [Serpent] is an engaging introduction to a notable talent who's ducked donning the leader's hat for too long"
JazzWise Magazine
"full of life and spontaneity... Garnett has a great muscular style and a rich, gritty tone..."
The Jazz Breakfast |
