Mike Westbrook Recordings
Mike Westbrook - piano
CHAPTER ONE
1. My Song Is Love Unknown
2. Starcross Bridge
3. 'Round Midnight
4. Because
5. Brasilian Love Songs
6. Johnny Come Lately
7. Monk's Mood

CHAPTER TWO
8. I Got It Bad - And That Ain't Good
9. View From The Drawbridge
10. You Make Me Feel Brand New
11. If Thou Must Love Me

CHAPTER THREE
12. Blues for Terenzi
13. Rooster Rabelais

POSTSCRIPT
14. L'amoroso e sincero lindoro
Track Listing
Starcross Bridge
Information
Mike Westbrook - Piano

In concert at 19 rue Paul Fort, 75014 PARIS,
1st & 2nd December 2017.

Recorded by Miles Ashton
Edited and mixed by Jon Hiseman
CD master by Peter Pfister
With special thanks to Helene Aziza and Charles Adriaenssen
Produced by Bernhard "Benne" Vischer, Christian C Dalucas,
Werner X Uehlinger
Starcross Bridge photographs by Kate Westbrook
Hat Hut Records - hatOLOGY 754

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Sound Samples
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Starcross Bridge cover
This album is rooted in the personal. Westbrook’s enduring creative partnership with his wife, the singer, lyricist and painter Kate Westbrook is represented by two songs they wrote together. Starcross is a rail station nearby the Westbrook home in Devon, near Plymouth where his creative life began all those years ago. His title track is dedicated to the tenor saxophonist Lou Gare, whose death in 2017 was a particular wrench. Starcross Bridge is an intricately woven network of musical and personal references. – Philip Clark
Review
Wait 40 years for a solo piano recording from Mike Westbrook, then, stone me, two come along virtually at once. Starcross Bridge is, if it's at all possible, even more intimate and elusive than 2016's Paris. Like Jarrett's The Melody at Night, with You, the music is almost too personal, too heartfelt to open up its secrets. We hear through a veil, often of tears. And yet it is in that witnessing of an artist easing yet pleading, sometimes blithely at one with his art, at others challenged and defeated, that the beauty and strength prevails. As Philip Clark's wise notes suggest, there's something painterly in Westbrook's approach: each track is complete in itself (though some segue into others), yet, like late Turners, they are also suggestive rather than solid, to an airy suspended thinness: chords, Messiaen-like, hover and decay, melodies elide and fall: some songs are vividly deconstructed like Lennon/McCartney's 'Because', some split apart before us like the extraordinary take on Strayhorn's 'Johnny Come Lately'. And beneath it all, the blues, as on 'For Terenzi', roll and tumble.
Starcross Bridge is a rail crossing close to the Westbrooks' Dawlish home. One side the sea, the other a cosy pub. And that's what this release brings us: wide wild vistas on one side, hunkered down delight, warm with detail on the other. But as a devoted Ellingtonian, Westbrook may also have in mind the Duke's 'Star-Crossed Lovers'; either way, the album is a love letter to Westbrook's muse, his wife Kate, their relationship as entwined, inspired and inspiring as the eternally young Romeo and Juliet's.
Andy Robson - Jazzwise
Four Stars
Four Stars
Four Stars
Four Stars
Mike Westbrook