Jazz
Dundus Records · 31 July 2026
“Hancestry (for Zora Neale Hurston)” (5:38) opens the album with layers of percussion stacking up before any theme arrives, and it tells you straight away what kind of record this is: Sean Corby’s trumpet lives inside the rhythm rather than on top of it. Nine tracks, forty-three minutes and fifty-seven seconds, the first album by the Solomon Gundy Band and Corby’s first as a leader.
Corby is British, came up through the Jazz Warriors and Abibi Jazz Arts, and before all that had played with Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown and Ty. That second half of his biography is where the sound-system logic running through the record comes from, and it finally takes over on “Jazz Interlude/Solomon A Dub” (5:10), where the band lets itself be dismantled piece by piece like a dub mix. Years of serious illness had kept him away from the horn.
The guest list does a lot of work: Courtney Pine’s tenor on “Divine Days (for Leon Forrest)” (6:11), Sultan Stevenson’s piano on “Drum Song for Chino” (6:34) and Julie Dexter’s voice on “Seasons” (3:58), with Drew Gonsalves also singing. Ashley Slater, the Loose Tubes trombonist, mixed it, and you can hear that in the room every rhythmic detail is given. “Wadada” (5:45) is the toughest thing here and goes out to Wadada Leo Smith and the people of Grenfell; “Choose to Be” (4:53) speaks plainest, and goes to James Baldwin.
Six of the nine tracks are dedications, and that is where the seam shows: what holds the programme together is who each piece is for rather than any musical argument tying them. “Sparky’s Lament” (3:10) and “Duke of Da Bronx” (2:34) go by so fast they sound like offcuts from a longer session, and with a cast that rotates three drummers, three bassists, three guitarists and two keyboard players, the unity of sound ends up owing more to Slater’s mix than to the band. Set against that, very few British records this year are willing to travel from electric Joe Henderson to dub without apologising for it.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents