Secret Quartet - Bloor Street (2010)

From the UK, Martin Speake and Nikki Iles, two of our finest improvisers and composers are joined by Canadians, Duncan Hopkins and Anthony Michelli – two of North America’s most virtuosic rhythm players. On their own, each one of these four musicians ranks in world class but as Secret Quartet they become one of the most empathic and musically articulate groups on the planet. Bloor Street is their long-awaited follow-up to Secret from 2002. Dare we say that it is even better? Somehow, the playing and writing is even more intense and authoritative. Somehow, the group’s identity is still more clearly defined and more firmly embedded. These nine tunes come from the pens of Speake, Iles and Hopkins – three individually distinctive voices with a shared sense of how the Secret Quartet’s music should sound. There’s the edgy bebop-inspiration of Iles’ ‘Unit Six’ and the angular, abstraction of Speake’s ‘Make Some Memories’ with some fine percussion from Michelli. There’s Hopkins’ lightly springing, modal ‘Changing Tides’ and Speake’s immediately contemporary and ‘of-the-moment’ title track.