Alec Dankworth's 'Spanish Accents'
Alec Dankworth double bass
Mark Lockheart saxophones
Chris Garrick violin
Phil Robson guitars
Demi Garcia drums / percussion
Alec Dankworth's long-standing love of all things Spanish provided the inspiration for this group. Metheney, Corea, even Rodrigo, are reinvented alongside traditional Spanish folk songs and originals in flamenco rhythms, creating a wonderful and genuinely Spanish world. A heady mix of top British players make this an unusual line-up.
Reviews of Alec Dankworth’s ‘Spanish Accents’ album
John Fordham. The Guardian
It doesn’t matter how familiar the tunes are - and on this Spanish themed set they’re very familiar, from
‘Armando’s Rhumba’ to ‘Con Alma’ – any album with saxophonist Julian Arguelles on it is bound to avoid
cliché. Alec Dankworth is a rock-solid, imaginative jazz bassist, but this is more like an ECM setting for him. Its greatest strengths are the improvisations of Arguelles (particularly on tenor sax, where he sounds at times like a 21st-century version of 1960s Stan Getz) and the elegant violin of Chris Garrick. Dankworth’s playing has a captivating bounce, his own themes gently personal yet deeply rooted in the idiom. And the resourceful Phil Robson plays Spanish guitar as if raised on it.
Dave Gelly. The Observer
Jazz, as Jelly Roll Morton observed, works very well with a ‘Spanish tinge’ and Dankworth, with his special fondness for all things Spanish, proves the point here. Alongside his own compositions and arrangements of folk songs, there are Spanish-jazz pieces by Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny and Chick Corea. He works them all into an attractive patchwork of rhythms and textures. His bass playing, sounding at times like an enormous Spanish guitar, is outstanding.
Robert Shore. Jazzwise
Alec Dankworth has shared stages with Stephane Grappelli, Abdullah Ibrahim and Courtney Pine, not to mention dad, John, and mum, Cleo Laine. So he hardly needs to give further evidence of his chops as a player. But with this highly engaging and original set of ambient Hispanica, Dankworth really emerges as a bandleader in his own right. Pursuing a fresh and fruitful line of musical thinking and surrounding himself with a crack team, Dankworth sets out to explore a variety of Spanish moods, employing a richly diverse sound palette to do so. There are stirringly romantic original compositions (the flamenco-fuelled ‘Palmas’ and ‘El Levante’), versions of Spanish-related jazz and non-jazz standards from Chick Corea’s ‘Armando’s Rhumba’ to Rodrigo’s ‘Concierto de Aranjuez’) and seductive takes on traditional Iberian folk songs (Cantos’).