About this item

“Life is nothing without love. Love is the force that drives our journey in life. Life is love and love is life.”

UK jazz master Chip Wickham follows last year’s brilliant soulful long-player Cloud 10 with a deftly crafted, reflective EP of beautiful spiritual jazz sounds influenced by the soulful sounds of Yusef Lateef. Chip’s music has always drawn from a broad world of influences from hip-hop to Roland Kirk and from classic funk to the classic ‘60s Brit-Jazz sound of Tubby Hayes. But Love & Life finds him foregrounding his wonderful flute playing and producing a perfect fourtracker of reflective, peaceful jazz that elevates and inspires as well as a trademark slice of boppish soul jazz – the jaunty Space Walk.

Elsewhere lead single Love & Life is a joyous jazz waltz with an uplifting, bouncing groove and Slow Down Look Around is introspective and intimate, featuring Chip’s signature flute with a beautiful solo from UK trumpeter Malcolm Strachan. Chip explains that the track presents “a big lesson for us to learn as the world changes around us with such speed. The technology changes but our human needs remain the same: peace, tranquillity and time to think.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I'm not historically a big Jazz fan, but one of the labels that changed my ideas of what a Jazz record was, was Gondwana. It turns out that while I wasn't super keen on 'mad jazz' (Free) it turns out that I was really quite into 'Chill Jazz' (spiritual), and Chip Wickham's warmly evocative, beautifully paced 'Love & Life' epitomises everything I discovered I like in a jazz record.

TRACK LISTING

1. Space Walk
2. Love & Life
3. Seven Worlds
4. Slow Down Look Around