Barbara Thompson's Paraphernalia - Never Say Goodbye

“This album is our jazziest to date”, says Barbara Thompson on her 13th release for Intuition.

“… Jon [Hiseman] and I have never really seen ourselves as jazz musicians.  I started in the classical world, and although Jon did start by playing jazz, he always felt it was a bit second-hand and very quickly started playing his own way culminating in his famous jazz-rock bands of the 60’s & 70’s.  By the time I formed my first version of Paraphernalia in the mid 70’s, I was already writing music for  it, which many of the jazz musicians who worked in the band then, found rather strange.   As the band developed into what it is today, we found ourselves often playing in jazz venues, but as our promoters so often told us, the crowd that paid to see us, was composed of people, whom they never saw at any of the other jazz events.  I suppose that it is now time to acknowledge the abiding influence that jazz and improvisation has had on our music.  Hence the decision to pay homage now to all those great players, composers and bands, who have made jazz perhaps the most alive, vibrant and challenging music of the last hundred years. The album features two well known standards written by my favourite jazz artists, John Coltrane and Benny Golson. The arrangements were great fun, especially ‘Giant Steps’ with Jon’s driving drums leading the way. ‘Living in the Fast Lane’ was originally composed as a three movement concerto for tuba and big band and first performed by the NDR Big Band in Hamburg, 2004. It has been broadcast by different ensembles several times since and I couldn’t resist taking one step further, and with the help of Pete Lemer, re-arranging it for Paraphernalia and some of the finest brass players in the UK.”

In the aesthetic sense, Barbara Thompson was never a revolutionary. She didn’t develop any new style, attitude or concept. But that was also never her intention. She was more concerned with breaking up the „men-amongst-themselves“ mood and to draw her audience  more deeply into her music than was usual in the eccentric Jazz of the 70s. Her trademark was gripping, inviting, but not compromising Jazz Rock. She ridded her Jazz of all reservations. Her unflinching openness made it all the easier for her to integrate all imaginable genres into her music, whether Classical, Pop or World Music, and to move light-footedly between the various contradictory schools and epochs of Jazz, without ever having to resort to programmatic thinking or logos. In that she brought that together, which was excluded elsewhere, she completed and refined on the ideas of her more experimental contemporaries. But in contrast to many of her male colleagues, Barbara Thompson found acceptance where Jazz normally didn’t have a chance. She broke with the American pattern early. She didn’t necessarily explore new terrain in European Jazz, but she did give it a new face, from which it still profits today. From the very beginning, she cultivated a language which promised to be timeless and which could adopt the most diverse styles without distorting them. As such her compositions, ornamental, rich in arabesques and in which the not at all soft sound of the saxophone remains organic and leads back into the ensemble, have not lost their hypnotic fire.

“Never Say Goodbye” is a stunning, for some maybe, an unexpected return from one of the most prolific female musicians.