It borders almost on ignorance to describe Greg Foat simply as a »jazz pianist«. The Englishman has demonstrated his responsibility for ambient, folk, space-age pop, jazz-funk and jazz-soul across a good two dozen albums – and in doing so has always shown a leaning towards library music. As on his latest album Blobs, a meditative but minutely arranged fantasy for woodwinds and synthesisers.
Flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, oboe and cor anglais set the tone on the album, which Greg Foat underpins with impressionistic harmonies from the synthesiser. Sometimes the contribution Foat makes to an oboe solo consists only of pointillistically placed splashes of colour. The frame of reference for this album is supplied by all sorts of pseudo-genres with music that is hard to categorise. Blobs has something of Japanese city pop, of 1970s film soundtracks not written by Ennio Morricone, and of library music of a slightly different kind. And everything remains nicely within the bounds of tonality, but it is adventurous all the same. And perhaps, then, it is this after all: jazz.
Blobs
