Paul Dunmall Quintet with Ed Puddick and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Large Band – Soultime Once more
(Stoney Lane. Album evaluation by Phil Johnson)

Everybody ought to know that Paul Dunmall is without doubt one of the strongest and expressive saxophonists on the planet. In no matter format he performs, he offers his all. However getting that uncooked improvisational power and creativity to work inside the written preparations of a 14-piece large band, nonetheless unconventional, would appear like asking a rhino – if you’ll find one today – to eat with chopsticks.

It’s not that Dunmall is in any manner an incomplete or untutored musician. Fairly the opposite. However what he does above all else is improvise, that’s to spontaneously compose within the precise time-bound second of efficiency, whether or not making all of it up as he goes alongside or adapting his taking part in to a pre-existing holding kind or theme, usually primarily based on his personal compositions. This totally triumphant stay recording from Might 2022 takes its important impetus from the second of those choices, a modus operandi determined upon in a earlier post-gig meal in a Birmingham balti restaurant when the multi-instrumentalist Percy Pursglove – who performs trumpet fantastically on the recording – prompt Paul ought to file his compositions with an enormous band and advisable the arranger Ed Puddick.

“Ed and I mentioned how you can go about this mission, and I assumed that on the core we should permit the quintet to play freely, with the written music organized round them, and the band nearly like a sixth member of the group”, says Dunmall. The important idea, indicated within the mission’s title of ’Soultime Once more’ – and the stroke of genius that makes the music so distinctive and listening to it such a foot-tappingly bodily expertise – was Dunmall’s resolution to look again to his roots as a younger saxophonist taking part in in soul bands: “It goes again to my earliest instances on gigs aged 15 taking part in the music of Otis Redding and the Stax label.”

The soul theme, nonetheless, goes additional than that. Later in his younger profession Dunmall lived in Los Angeles and performed with each Alice Coltrane and the rhythm and blues and soul star Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson (the Snoop Dogg of his day), whose killer 1976 album ‘Ain’t That A Bitch’ was simply concerning the first recording he performed on: fairly a curriculum vitae entry for a chap from Worcestershire; in actual fact for anybody.

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However the ’Soultime Once more’ proof is within the pudding, and each Dunmall, his wonderful quintet, and the Conservatoire Large Band play with actual ardour on a set of authentic tunes that channel the uncooked fervour of gospel, blues and jazz (each early and late) into startling new shapes. You’ll be able to consider Eric Dolphy with Mingus, or John Gilmore with Solar Ra, or Dunmall himself with Keith Tippett’s Mujician or the Dedication Orchestra. It truly is superb stuff. For the quintet, alongside Pursglove on trumpet, Glen Leach performs piano, Dave Kane, bass, and Miles Levin (son of legendary drummer Tony Levin, of Mujician and far else) on drums. The Large Band sound good for what they do, and the album’s art work is by Dunmall himself.

LINK: Bandcamp