Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Denys Baptiste

Denys Baptiste


Denys Baptiste and Max

(download)
This is a story about the power of music and poetry on a little boy with autism. By Max's father, Matthew Bauer.

Max, our son, was diagnosed on his second birthday. It wasn’t the gift we’d hoped for, but we decided early on to help him learn that any limitations on his life are his alone, not dictated by his condition. Even as an infant Max showed an interest in music and showed an ability to sing before he could say much. So we’ve used music as a tool to engage him, and it’s been successful.

 He also loves computers, and his favorite website is YouTube. As he adventured around the site, he discovered new music; not just kid’s music, but pop acts, girls doo-wop, classical piano and jazz. The first jazz clip that caught his ear was Denys Baptiste’s “Let Freedom Ring!”—the brass, the piano, the groove just seemed to get to him, and he’d listen to it over and over and over again.

 As he’s gotten older, his comprehension has advanced to a range that’s more age-appropriate, and he’s re-discovering old favorites. So when “Let Freedom Ring!” came back into his YouTube repertoire, he seemed to start listening with new ears. That was confirmed when we found Max on the couch this morning with his iPad, playing “Let Freedom Ring!” and sitting quietly with his hands pressed together, as if in prayer.

 “Our handicaps, can be the seed of our glories.”

 He listened intently, perhaps finding something new in Ben Okri’s words.

 “We shouldn’t deny them. We should embrace them,”

 He lifted the iPad to his lips.

 “Embrace our marginalisation, our powerlessness...”

 He kissed the music and the words, and gave a rare, genuine, lop-sided smile which we captured on camera.

 “Embrace our handicaps, and use them, and go beyond them...”

 We don’t know what the future holds for Max but we work hard and are eternally hopeful that he will one day release “the power of solar systems” in his mind.

 

London Jazz Festival performance at the Southbank Centre

The Denys Baptiste Quartet recorded at the 2011 London Jazz Festival by BBC Radio 3 Jazz Line-Up.


(download)

1. Evolution from Revolution (Denys Baptiste)

2. Lennox Avenue Breakdown (Arthur Blythe)

3. Dance of the Maquiritari (Denys Baptiste)

Personnel: Denys Baptiste - tenor saxophone / Nick Ramm - piano / Gary Crosby - double bass / Rod Youngs - drums

November and December Dates

Saturday 12 November  Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
Friday 25 November   Wakefield Jazz Club, Eastmoor Road, Wakefield WF1 3RR
Friday 23 December   Clore Ballroom, Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX

The Denys Baptiste Quartet take to the road for more dates in support of their recent release Identity By Subtraction. Alongside Denys are his trusty cohorts Gary Crosby - double bass, Rod Youngs - drums and pianist Andrew McCormack.

Tickets and venue information for Wakefield here.

12 November Clore Ballroom 20 min set for BBC Radio Jazz Line-Up from 4.00 - 5.30pm.

23 December Clore Ballroom performance is a special Friday Tonic starting at 5.30pm.

Vote Denys Baptiste for a MOBO Award!

We're delighted that Denys has been nominated for a MOBO Award in the Best Jazz Act category, a prize he first won in 1999 after the release of his debut album Be Where You Are. But for Denys to win again this year we need your help. All you have to do is register on the MOBO website and cast your vote. The winner will be announced on October 5 at the MOBO Awards ceremony in Glasgow.

And as they say....don't delay - vote today!

Review... Cheltenham Festival

Denys Baptiste arrived complete with a tenor-sax and a mind full of reminiscences. Which was fine and fitting. On reaching the life-questioning age of 40 he planned the album: Identity by Subtraction. The title is for philosophers to ponder, but the tracks are a musical assessment of what makes Baptiste: Baptiste. Far too likeable to be pretentiousness, he pondered the influence of saxophonists like John Coltrane and Mike Brecker, the impact of all the types of music he’s played to earn a living, the people he’s met along the way, and his life support system – his family.

As he roared through the title-track chord changes, with bassist Gary Crosby rock steady, and drummer Rod Youngs dropping bombs of encouragement, it was clear that the years have certainly advanced his considerable playing. 

Denys’ musical relationship with pianist Andrew McCormack is thing of joy and telepathy. On Harriot’s Charriot - dedicated to saxist Joe Harriot, their swopping of long inter-related choruses was a delight. The pianist brought a dreamlike, impressionistic air to Special Times – the family dedication. It evolved through agitation into life-affirming emotion, seeming to say that happiness comes through effort. It also came with Dance of the Marquiritari, inspired by a family member who belonged to that South American tribe. 

Whatever, with the under-recorded band firing over a dynamic rumba beat, it was very apparent that another recording studio date, can’t come too soon. - Derek Briggs.

Review... Identity By Subtraction

Review by Chris Searle 

I've often thought that the emphatic and unifying cry of the Grenadian revolutionary Maurice Bishop, One Caribbean!, had enormous salience to jazz. What a vibrant, groovy and hugely powerful intergenerational big band of jazz musicians of Caribbean provenance could be formed, if only in the imagination, from Jamaica. Born horn men like trumpeter Dizzy Reece, altoists Joe Harriott and Bertie King, Ellington's great trombonist of muted glory Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton and piantists Wynton kelly and Monty Alexander. And from the eastern Caribbean too, two bristling trumpeters - Vincentian Shake Keane and Barbadian Harry Beckett, or pianist Robert Mitchell, a Londoner with forebears from Grenada.

And the impassioned sound of the tenor saxophonist with St Lucian parents, Denys Baptiste, whose fourth album Identity By Abstraction is a telling statement indeed. Baptiste was born in Hounslow in 1959 and his father's record collection, which included albums by Basie and Mingus, propelled him towards jazz. He had his first saxophone lessons as a 14-year-old, while hearing the sounds of the west London Caribbean community all around him. He studied music for two years at the West London Institute before signing on for a course in jazz at the Guildhall School of Music. He played with his mentor Gary Crosby and his Nu Troop in the '90s before cutting his first album Be Where you Are in 1999, followed by Alternating Currents in 2001. In 2003 Let Freedom Ring commemorated the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's epochal Washington speech. It was a contender for Best Album and Best New Work in the BBC Jazz Awards.

Read the rest of this post »

Identity by Subtraction... review by Not all that Glitters is Gold

I was asked to write a review for the fabulous Denys Baptiste's new album by the wonderful people at Dune Music, whom I owe and love and miss dearly. It has taken me months, but late last night, Saturday that is, I sat down, erased everything I had and started over. I wrote what I love about the new album. I hope everyone enjoys it too. 

I’ve been trying to write about Denys Baptiste’s latest album for a good two months now. I’ve listened to the album every day, sometimes multiple times, trying to find the words the poet would use to describe the sublimity of discovery and exciting novelty. The words never really came to me, but the notes played on and on. I enjoyed every note. 

Read the rest of this post »

Interview... York Press

Identity By Subtraction could only be the title of a jazz album. Saxophonist Denys Baptiste laughs in recognition of that truism when York Twenty4Seven makes the cheeky suggestion in advance of tomorrow’s tour date in York to promote his new recording.

“It was a phrase I heard in a debate and it had immediate resonance for me because I’d never heard it before and I started thinking about it,” says Denys.

“It’s that thing of identifying yourself by the things that you’re not; that thing of taking on superficial things you feel you ought to be. Like playing a solo on a pop record that you do just to fit in, but then you learn to take away those things that make you just a functioning musician.

“And then, beyond music, there’s also that social thing of being a black man living in the UK.”

Born to St Lucian parents in London on September 14, 1969, Denys says he used to define himself solely as a musician.

“But I don’t do that now. I’m a husband, a father and a school governor in Enfield,” he says. “I also do things for the Arts Council, looking after a number of organisations to make sure they get their funding on time; things that I though I’d never do. So every day is different now.”

Read the rest of this post »

Review... St Georges Bristol

by Jon Turney

And so to another sort of re-creation. The final date in St G’s short sequence of John Coltrane themed gigs featured Denys Baptiste’s quartet tackling A Love Supreme. That is a brave thing to do, if only because it is on everyone’s list of top albums in jazz history – though it happens reasonably often: Branford Marsalis is the last touring performance I can recall, David Murray has done some, and so on.

Baptiste gave us a game of two halves. First set was selections from his own new recording. These were uniformly excellent, even though the decision to play acoustically – as folk often do at this venue – produced a few sound problems. It needs musicians who haven’t forgotten how to do that, and it seemed as if the drummer had for a while. He drowned out everyone else in the first number, and occasionally throughout when he mistook volume for intensity, as drummers will.

It’s a great band, though, with Gary Crosby on bass and the phenomenal Andrew McCormack on piano. And the pieces were plenty varied. The opener, suffering from the drumming, was a pretty straight Coltrane-style blow, but there were affecting ballads, a bluesy tune dedicated to the Large Hadron Collider (a man of broad interests, Denys) and a somewhat Rollins-like Dance of the Maquiritari, inspired by the composer’s discovery that he had a Venezuelan great grandmother. That was the set closer, and the most convincing and uninhibited effort of the first half. Guess they were getting warmed up for the demands of the second.

Read the rest of this post »

Identity By Subtraction... The Jazz Breakfast review

The saxophonist is not exactly prolific – this is his fourth disc in 11 years – but there is always a feeling that his music has benefitted from the long gestation period. It’s thoughtful, rich and has some real personality and depth.

The line-up is the classic quartet format, with Andrew McCormack on piano, Gary Crosby on double bass and Rod Youngs on drums, and Baptiste uses it to express his “responses to life’s experiences as a black man of Caribbean descent playing jazz music in the UK in 2011”.

The title track and Apprehension both push hard, while Dance Of The Maquiritari has a lovely light step and a great hook of a melody line. Special Times is a graceful soprano exploration.

There is a timeless quality about the compositions which I rather like. Take a tune like Evolution From Revolution, which, although it might have the occasional modern turn and a beat which has hip-hop nuances from Youngs, could come from any time in last half century.

Read the rest of this post »

Identity By Subtraction... Jazzwise review by Stuart Nicholson

Denys Baptiste (ts), Andrew McCormack (p), Gary Crosby (b) and  Rod Youngs (d). Rec. 2010

Although he never really went away, Denys Baptiste is back again with his first album since Let Freedom Ring released seven years ago. Less ambitious than his suite that combined gospel, blues, contemporary jazz and Afro-Caribbean music with poetry excerpts, here Baptiste concentrates on refining his approach to the quartet through a series of compositions that tackle identity through attempting to explore the essence of the inner man.

The pieces are linked by their relationship to aspects of his persona, thus ‘The Long Night’, the album’s most dramatic and forceful piece, explores slavery; ‘Dance of Makritari’ – a musical descendent of ‘St. Thomas’ – reflects Baptiste’s recent discovery that his great-grandmother was a member of the Makritari tribe; while ‘Special Times’ is a dedication to his family (his wife and two children) which for the last few years have been his priority at the expense of his career in jazz. It is a robust and absorbing statement from one of the UK’s finest young saxophonists, the track ‘Shorter by Miles’ showing he is back for business and in fine form.   - Stuart Nicholson