Martin Archer - Another Fantastic Individual (2019/2020)

This is the first time I've made an album on which I'm the only performer. I've been playing AACM style saxophone for more than 40 years now, and this collection a mixture of solo and small ensembles, sometimes with percussion or minimal electronics - presents everything I've learned about the instrument as a player and composer in that time. Between 1983 and 1993 my sole performing band was Hornweb Sax Quartet. During those ten years we made three albums and performed dozens of concerts. One of my favourite reviews from the time, by Ben Watson, described Hornweb as a mixture of searing abstraction and roots . That succinct description would, I hope, apply to my music generally - although in my own case those roots are tangled, and reach down into many sources of nutrition. I ve always regretted that all our recordings came from the first half of the band s life, and that later versions were never captured it was much more difficult to make and release records back then, and perhaps the line-up changes were just too disruptive for the band ever to quite settle down in its later years. Certainly at the time I remember wondering what the band might sound like if I were able to play all the parts myself.....Well, a quarter of a century later I ve found that answer to that question. Hornweb itself came back to life in 2018 as a loosely organised and very occasional improvising group of anything up to twelve saxophonists. This recording is quite different and is one which I hope is true to the firmly AACM based concept of the original band (Martin Archer).