Sand Lines, Jeremy Rose Quartet, review by John McBeath

courtesy of the Australian

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Album: Sand Lines
Artist:   Jeremy Rose Quartet
Release Date: November 2015
Label:    Earshift Records

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Sydney saxophonist Jeremy Rose has been working with the musicians on his latest album for the past ten years, and these six lengthy pieces were developed over a two year period, but Rose is also very active in a variety of other groups: The Vampires, The Strides, Compass Quartet, Cameron Undy’s 20th Century Dog, Ensemble Offspring, and Earshift Orchestra. Amongst numerous achievements Rose has scored a Bell Award, and this year won an APRA AMCOS Professional Development Award worth $15,000.

The title track is a good introduction to the collection of originals, with Jackson Harrison’s opening piano flourishes and the delectable upright bass notes of Alex Boneham – who’s since relocated to Los Angeles – ahead of one of several themes stated by Rose’s soprano sax with rhythmic punctuation from drummer James Waples. All of this serves as a build-up intro for Rose’s lift-off solo of swirling excitement aided by Harrison’s substructural chord stabs, before a curling piano solo travels on with ceaseless invention.

Guitarist Carl Morgan is a guest artist on two tracks including The Long Way Home, a slow ballad that wanders expressively adding rhythmic accents for appropriate solos from alto and guitar. Mind Over Matter is a soft post-bop tribute to the late altoist David Ades, ‘a mentor, friend and fellow surfer’ for Rose.

Rose explains that the music uses improvised sections that build from the notated material, ‘creating a blurred line between improvisation and composition’, and he has assembled a group of players perfectly capable of understanding and interpreting these elegant works.

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For just over 24 years I have been a freelance writer, publishing in that time a wide variety of genres: news items, live concert reviews, travel articles, features, personality profiles, and CD and book reviews. I have written for various in-flight magazines, The Adelaide Review, The Republican, The Bulletin, The Australian, The Advertiser, The Melbourne Herald Sun and several regional newspapers. In 1994 I won a national travel-writing prize sponsored by The Australian newspaper, which led to my writing regularly for that paper. Since 2003 I have been jazz critic for The Advertiser and The Australian newspapers, on average contributing weekly to each paper. In 2005 I won a national Jazz Writing Competition sponsored by the Wangaratta Jazz Festival.