Twenty-first century jazz – with steel pans as the dominant motif.
Why?’ And ‘How did Mark and chums get to this point?’
Why so serious, fronting a steel pan light jazz album? Steel deadpan jazz.
Revulsion and nervous shameful laughter. Why is it making me laugh?
Cos Cherrie is challenging a massive stereotype – the steel pan – traditionally – gay and carefree – a butterfly.
Now all introspective and pretentious.
Out of place in the company of the philosophical sax.
God, this is crazy.
Though, it occurs to me, steel deadpan jazz might be a spectacle worth watching.
MARK CHERRIE QUARTET
Presents
ANY ANXIOUS COLOUR
Released 6th September 2024
Mark comments….
“My dad had two tenor pans made by Lincoln Noel, considered by many to be one of the great Trinidadian pan tuners. Despite being twin pans, one of them was vastly superior to the other and so I gigged with the better one in my dad’s band for quite a few years. The poor brother pan was left languishing in a sorry state, never having been gigged. It was this pan that received the Repair Shop treatment and it miraculously sprang back to life, almost as if it had spent decades in a kind of coma.”
He goes on to say that: “The steel pan of course has no particular history in jazz music itself, unlike many other instruments. Whilst some might regard this as a hindrance, I always felt that this was in fact liberating, since as a writer & player, I didn’t feel particularly married to any period of jazz’s rich history. It enabled me to dance around any era of jazz’s evolution.”
