Jazz
Rubicon · 29 May 2026
Twelve songs from “Porgy And Bess” and fifty-nine minutes: the quartet of Brighton trumpeter Chris Coull has taken on one of the most heavily travelled repertoires in jazz. As a boy Coull found his father’s vinyl of the 1958 Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaboration, later heard the Glyndebourne box with Willard White, and the arrangements he kept working out stayed in the drawer until he found the singer who could carry them. Imogen Ryall has the diction and the sense of theatre this music asks for, and she’s the one running the record.
“The Buzzard Song” opens at six minutes seventeen and moves briskly; “My Man’s Gone Now”, eight twenty-three, is the longest track and the most thoroughly rebuilt; “Prayer (Oh, Dr. Jesus)” stays inside four minutes with its church tone intact; and on “I’ve Got Plenty Of Nothing” it’s Simon Thorpe’s bass that makes itself heard. John Turville is on piano, and he speaks more clearly than anyone else in the rhythm section, with Matt Fishwick on drums. Coull plays trumpet and flugelhorn on all but two songs and keeps away from the languid blues that trails after this material: his phrasing comes out of bop, and precision is what he brings to it.
The price of entering a repertoire this worked over is that plenty has been said in it already, and what’s added here isn’t always enough. Two of the twelve entries are fragments (one minute fifty-two of “Strawberry Woman – Honey Man” and the closing “Summertime”, one forty-four, sung by Ryall alone), and leaving the best-known song in the opera as a one-minute-forty-four coda is a bet that doesn’t quite pay. It was recorded in a single day in Tunbridge Wells on 23 July 2025, and it comes out with a Rubicon catalogue number and Coull’s own copyright.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents