ELLIOT GALVIN piano, kalimba, melodicas, accordion, cassette player and stylophone
TOM McCREDIE double bass
SIMON ROTH drums, percussion and glockenspiel
Elliot Galvin is one of the rising stars of UK jazz. A superbly gifted composer and pianist, whose maverick imagination and magpie like ability to blend a disparate world of influences into his own unique musical vision has seen him compared to Django Bates although in truth he sounds like no one except himself. From de-constructing standards to creating his own mirco-tonal, Galvin’s music is both playful and deadly serious drawing on a wide range of influences from Keith Jarrett to Stravinsky, Ligetti, Deerhof and the Beatles as well as the films of David Lynch, the Dada movement and the literature of James Joyce. A regular collaborator with Laura Judd, he also plays in a free improve duo with Mark Sanders. But his main artistic vehicle is the Elliot Galvin Trio, who in 2014 were announced as the winners of the European Young Jazz Artist of the Year Award in Germany. That same year they released their debut album ‘Dreamland’ to rave reviews, with the Guardian calling it “audaciously accomplished” ****, Jez Nelson (BBC Radio 3, Jazz on 3) saying it was “Perhaps one of the strongest debuts that I’ve heard from a UK artist in a long while… extremely bold and progressive” and The German Jazz Magazine ‘JazzThing’ naming it as one of it’s albums of the year.
They will be launching their new album ‘Punch’. It is their second album, and their debut for leading European jazz label, Edition Records.
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Guardian review (29/7/2016) ****
Pianist Elliot Galvin delivered an eccentric homage to bebop, Broadway musicals, Margate’s Dreamland amusement park and more on the 2014 album debut of his trio with bassist Tom McCredie and drummer Simon Roth – a miscellany of warped blues, gothic clankings and bold groove-bending that brought him Europe-wide acclaim.
Punch is an even better set of originals, with the single cover – Mack the Knife – reclaimed as a doomy deep-chord march with the famous theme perkily plinking away on a glockenspiel. Fast, knotty free-jazz piano and then bleepy accordion drive Hurdy Gurdy, Galvin plays quarter-tone bebop on a DIY-modified melodica, and a Beatles tribute on the casually whistled Cosy that was apparently inspired by A Day In the Life, but develops a low-end ostinato more reminiscent of Lady Madonna. Packed with pop, jazz and contemporary classical references, it’s typically whimsical-sounding Galvin music (there’s a real Punch and Judy show sample in the opener) but steered by an unblinking artistic focus that has nothing whimsical about it at all.