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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
John Fordham

Rogers/Fincker/Duscombs: Whahay review – a classic from one of jazz’s best-kept secrets

Rogers, Fincker and Duscombs
Rogers, Fincker and Duscombs … Whahay

The astonishing seven-string, UK-born double bass virtuoso Paul Rogers is rarely heard in his homeland, but the French jazz scene benefits from this. Over a career that began in the 1970s, Rogers’s orchestral sound and drum-like drive have accompanied many contemporary jazz heroes – including the late Mike Osborne, Keith Tippett, Evan Parker and New Yorker Tim Berne. But Whahay is his undisguised genuflection to his primary model – Charles Mingus – respectfully but freely played alongside Loop Collective saxophonist Robin Fincker and French drummer Fabien Duscombs. Fincker is warbly on clarinet and leisurely on tenor sax against Duscombs’s energetic pulse on Better Git in Your Soul, and he slithers and squirts in improvised bursts on a churning Pithecanthropus Erectus. Reincarnation of a Lovebird is a playfully loose call-and-response conversation that becomes an ambient trance, and Rogers’s take on a dreamy Goodbye Pork Pie Hat opens with a masterly piece of double bass lyricism. It’s a little classic.

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