Album Title: AFTER IMAGE
Artist: PINSKI ZOO
Jan Kopinski - tenor, alto saxophones
Steve Iliffe - keyboards
Karl Bingham - bass
Stefan Kopinski - bass
Steve Harris - drums
Double album: 2 cds
CD P (Total disc duration - 73:58 Number of tracks:8)
Track Name: Duration:
1. BOUNCE 9.37 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI
Recording details: 2 May 2004 London
2. SPYMISTRESS 8.07 mins
Composers: S.ILIFFE
Recording details: 2 May 2004 London
3. FATHER DAUGHTER (OJCIEC) 9.32 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI/ K.BINGHAM
Recording details: 2 May 2004 London
4. FIREPOINT 13.56 mins
Composers: S.ILIFFE
Recording details: 12 April 2004 Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester
5. JAB 2.32 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI/ S.ILIFFE/ K.BINGHAM/ S.KOPINSKI/ S.HARRIS
Recording details: 2 April 2004 Susumi Club, Derby
6. SLIM 12.50 mins
Composers: S.ILIFFE
Recording details: 12 April 2004 Phoenix Arts Centre, Leicester
7. PLEASE NOTE 10.54 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI/ S.ILIFFE/ K.BINGHAM/ S.KOPINSKI/ S.HARRIS
Recording details: 29 April 2004 The Cluny Newcastle upon Tyne
8. POLISH ZIGZAG 6. 20 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI/ S.ILIFFE/ K.BINGHAM/ S.KOPINSKI/ S.HARRIS
Recording details: 28 May 2002 Bath Fringe Festival
CD Z (Total disc duration: 73:22. Number of tracks:7)
Track Name: Duration:
1. SHED BOUNCE 11.52 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI
Recording details: 16 April 2005 The Shed , Hovingham , N.Yorks.
2. PLEASE NOTE AFTER IMAGE 9.21 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI/ S.ILIFFE/ K.BINGHAM/ S.KOPINSKI/ S.HARRIS
Recording details: 16 April 2005 The Shed , Hovingham , N.Yorks.
3. NU CHOO 9.37 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI
Recording details: 8 July 2005 Lighthouse, Poole
4. NIGHT TO DREAM 10.28 mins
Composers: J.KOPINSKI
Recording details: 29 April 2004 The Cluny Newcastle upon Tyne
5. NATHAN'S SONG 9.00 mins
Composers: K.BINGHAM
Recording details: 8 July 2005 Lighthouse, Poole
6. FIREPOINT SPHINX 9.36 mins
Composers: S.ILIFFE
Recording details: 18 Sept 2004 Wirksworth, Derbyshire
7 STRETCHER 13.17 mins
Composers: S.ILIFFE
Recording details: 2 April 2004 Susumi Club, Derby
Mixes: Jan Kopinski. Post Production & Mastering: Michael Brown MBM Summer House Studios
PINSKI ZOO JAN KOPINSKI saxophones STEVE ILIFFE keyboards KARL BINGHAM bass STEFAN KOPINSKI bass STEVE HARRIS drums
NEW LIVE DOUBLE ALBUM - AFTER IMAGE - SLAMCD 266
· Pinski Zoo deserves mega-stardom because it not only funked your socks off but forsaw future developments in jazz fusion The Guardian
PINSKI ZOO - Celebrate 25 years of kicking down the barriers and sticking doggedly out for individualism with a new double album - "AFTER IMAGE" - is a collection of live tracks from tours between 2003 - 2005, mixing their new material with classic updated versions. PINSKI ZOO's best and most representative album to date. After 10 years of releasing albums of personal projects such as Jan Kopinski's GHOST MUSIC, EARTH (live soumdtrack to film), ZONE K and Steve Harris's ZA-UM, PINSKI ZOO have released a definitive recording - AFTER IMAGE. With more interest today in music outside the box, the full impact of these UK originators of free funk,/power jazz (however it's described) Is captured on 2 cd's of music with their twin bass propelled rhythm section and the expressive, energetic freedom that live takes bring to the recording.
· Kopinski is one of Britains few authentic voices on saxophone ..Hi-Fi News and Record Review
·
PINSKI ZOO -The true UK originals of free funk or power fusion…..call it what you like this cult-like band are almost impossible to categorize - they swing from virtuosic jazz to gritty funk with freedom and movement, veering into leftfield territory and snap back into grand melody without blinking. A highly potent and controversial force on the late 80’s /90’s UK jazz scene with a unique fusion sound, they foreshadowed later styles, and were linked with harmolodic outfits, such as Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time.
.Led by tenor saxist Jan Kopinski - they recorded and toured extensively throughout the UK, Europe Poland and NYC and were regulars in the early days of London’s Jazz Café, and playing right at the heart of the New York scene in the 90’s at the Knitting Factory. A unique sound, combining the edgy British grittiness of the street with darker evocations of Eastern Europe.
· "Pinski Zoo deliver with a compelling power unique in English Jazz" The Wire
· "…volatile mixture of freedom and funk."… New York Times
· "For improvisational inventiveness, textural variety and sheer gutsiness, it is difficult to match" BBC Music
"Pinski Zoo themselves are highly original, almost uncategorizable" The Independent
Chris May All About Jazz August 2006
Pinski Zoo burst onto the British delinquent-jazz scene in the early '80s, around the same time as Neneh Cherry's Rip Rig & Panic.
Rip Rig & Panic sweetened their avant garde jazz content with vocals, guitars, songs with hooks, and some savvy rock and roll image building. Pinski Zoo, by contrast, made no concessions to the broader marketplace...or to anything at all. They served up a raw, unfiltered mix of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler-inspired tenor saxophone improvisations and rough-sex funk. And they peeled the socks clean off your feet.
This two-disc live set celebrates the band's uncompromising 25 years at the sweaty coalface of deep-seam free funk. The nucleus of the original quartet—saxophonist Jan Kopinski and keyboardist Steve Iliffe—still leads the assault. Bassist Karl Bingham joined in '85 and drummer Steve Harris in '87. So even today's core quartet has been together for very nearly twenty years. Kopinski's son Stefan joined on second bass in the late '90s.
The album was recorded across eight different venues in Britain during tours in '02, '03 and '05. There's both new material and re-arrangements of old favourites. Every tune, of course, is a band original, with Kopinski and Iliffe doing most of the writing.
The performances are as thrilling and unpredictable as any on the band's early-'80s breakout recordings. Utterly faithful to their original, post-Coltrane route to the jazz/funk shotgun marriage, Kopinski and Iliffe's playing is as shocking and in-your-face as it was back when they were freshmen.
Kopinski sounds practically untouched by the passing years. His playing is as hot and visceral and in-the-moment as it ever was, and his technique has grown beyond the merely formidable. He seems more comfortable with subtler nuances and lower boiling points, too: the unusually tender "Father Daughter (Ojciec)" here includes some rapturously lyrical playing.
Iliffe, who was always an arresting colourist and soloist, is on phenomenal form, with a tonal palette as broad as they come. And the rhythm section has never sounded so good: the twin-bass setup allows one player to maintain relentless, on-the-one, groove ostinatos while the other flies free above him.
In short, Pinski Zoo are still out there and still on cracking form. Organic, no-surrender, spiritually uplifting music, After Image is probably the best album the band has released to date. After 25 years at the barricades, that's an astonishing achievement.
BBC Music Magazine August 2006-07-31 Barry Witherden.
With its members involved in extracurricular projects, Pinski Zoo hasn’t released an album since the stunning De-Icer, captured live in 1993. After Image, drawn from concerts across England between 2002 and 2005, has been worth the wait. The classic quartet has for some while been augmented by Kopinski junior on additional bass. He and Bingham constitute a sharp, well-focused unit, threading lines of clarity and strength through the band’s crowded, swirling, polytonal canvas. PZ is still uncategorisable (I’d plump for post-punk-funk-harmolodicism if pressed), still uniquely exciting, danceable and darkly atmospheric, still powers irresistible pulses without stooping to tediously inflexible beats, still conjures nebulous, magical, mysterious soundscapes from forbidding ranks of hardware, still enchants with tender melodies plucked from the rowdiest melee. Less ferocious than of yore, perhaps, but there’s a much-extended palette. Harris is nimble and texture-savvy, Iliffe a master of colour, Jan K’s saxes as gorgeous and passionate as ever.
Performance *****
Sound *****
The Guardian / Friday July 28 2006
The "British jazz boom" of the late1980s produced such distinctively different improvisers as Courtney Pine, Andy Sheppard and Tommy Smith – but it also fostered an unswervingly hardcore cult band called Pinski Zoo, who mixed Dark, throbbing soul-sax, free-improv and jazz-funk with the thudding energy of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, early Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. This two-CD live set is proof of the group’s sporadic survival into the new millennium, with the original lineup now augmented by a second electric bass – the bass dialogues and guitar-like solos now becoming one of the band’s strongest features. Zoo fanatics (and there certainly are some) will want every crunching impact on these long tracks recorded around the UK between spring 2003 and last summer, though the less dedicated might feel a single cd would have done just fine. But the group’s sustained but constantly free and mobile handling of funk grooves is a collective triumph, and you can get lost in just that for long periods – as in the Zawinul – like Firepoint, with the bassists, keyboardist, Steve Iliffe and drummer Steve Harris showing just how much Pinski Zoo can get out of sitting tight. Jan Kopinski’s throaty tenor-sax drives the Prime Time-like Bounce, and he’s hoarsely passionate on Father Daughter, even if his full-on Pharoah Sanders approach can run out of melodic options over these long pieces.The later material situates the sax in a more enveloping electronic soundscape and there’s more Zawinul and Miles in this intriguing band than in its early days. John Fordham
At once a celebration of 25 years of operations in the ‘power fusion/free funk’ corner of the jazz world and a distillation of their live sound into 143 minutes of recorded music, this double CD is as close to a definitive Pinski Zoo album as you’re likely to get. It contains two storming versions each of anthemic live staples such as ‘Bounce’, ‘Firepoint’ and ‘Please Note’, but also captures the band’s subtler strengths: an attention to textural variation and nuances of timbre (especially from keyboardist Steve Iliffe, but also from the alternately stridently keening and multi-textured, almost Barbieriesque Jan Kopinski) that would not be out of place on a Weather Report or Joe Zawinul Syndicate album; a predilection for rubato musings where bassist Karl Bingham’s unshowy virtuosity comes into its own; an ability to sustain hypnotically regular beats (courtesy of ‘new’ member Stefan Kopinski and industrial-strength drummer Steve Harris) without losing tension; a control of dynamic variation that results in the climaxes seeming earned by, rather than gratuitously imposed on, the music. In short, as well as being one of the most viscerally exciting live acts currently operating, Pinski Zoo are a mature musical unit, and should be given credit for spearheading what is becoming an increasingly important and popular jazz movement, creating space for such contemporary bands as Led Bib and Fraud.
Chris Parker, The Vortex.
Jazz Review November 2006
Pinski Zoo have been playing their own concoction of post-Coltrane, post-Prime Time and post-Albert Ayler abstract funk since the early 1980s. This two-CD anthology pulls together material from live gigs, recorded over a three year span, into a sort of idealized Pinski Zoo performance. Tenor man Jan Kopinski and keyboard player Steve Iliff were in the group’s original incarnation, while Bingham and Harris joined in the mid-80s. Add Stefan Kopinski on electric bass and the basic group aesthetic is unchanged? Pinski Zoo is bigger than any single member.
One could criticize a lack of dynamic range in the performance (somehow even the the quiet passages are loud) and a formulaic feel to the music’s structuring., but Pinski Zoo have an immediacy and vigour that’s always compelling. Unlike many post-fusion bands, their rmusic retains a rockist edge and they’re unafraid to be a bit nasty. "Bounce" is dominated by the sort of retchy bass line that’s a trademark, while Jan Kopinski’s tenor has rarely sounded so authoritative. "Father Daughter" treads into what could be described as the ‘driven ballad’ territory that David S Ware occupies so skillfully, allowing Kopinski to reveal his lyrical side. But it’s their up-tempo mania that makes most impression – compromise isn’t a word in their lexicon.
Philip Clark
