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.
