Mark de Clive-Lowe, Shigeto & Melanie Charles - Hotel San Claudio (2023)

Revered composer, pianist, DJ and two decade-long bridge between jazz, dance and hip-hop, Mark de Clive-Lowe (MdCL), links up with influential drummer/producer/DJ, Shigeto and Brooklyn-based, Haitian-rooted, flautist/songwriter and Verve Records artist - Melanie Charles on Hotel San Claudio, a collaborative LP of spiritual jazz, live deconstructed beats, and a three-track set of Pharoah Sanders reinterpretations.

'Strings' speaks to the group’s love of hip-hop, with Shigeto’s Dilla-esque ‘hanging off the beat’ slap and Melanie Charles’ deft rhymes and MdCL’s sample-chops, whilst 'Kanazawa' references a love of soulful house, with Charles’ 70s disco/fusion-tipping flute solo, leading into a euphoric and climactic club outro. The warrior-themed Bushido, first heard on MdCL’s album Heritage, leans even heavier on 70s jazz fusion as MdCL’s unruly synth impulsions and Donald Byrd-leaning soul-jazz production strides the line between atmospheric and experimental. MFT showcases Charles’ jazz vocals, treated here with big reverbs and delays, affording a vast, celestial quality that stands present throughout Hotel San Claudio.

One musician the group kept circling back to as a major influence was saxophone titan and cosmic sage, Pharoah Sanders. The trio’s absorbing 2-part versioning of Sanders’ 30m-long classic ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ as well as his iconic ‘Love Is Everywhere’ become the centrepiece of Hotel San Claudio’s spiritually-focused, reimagined jazz core.