Chip Wickham didn't release his first solo jazz album until he was 42. Even for a jazzman, that is a long time to go without stepping into the spotlight. After two decades as a go-to wingman for everybody from the vibrant vibraphonist Roy Ayers to the affable Mathew Halsall, he finally assembled a cohort out of his talented roster of friends and cut a record, the Spanish influenced La Sombra. A cool outcropping of playful model jazz that centered Wickham's superb, spiritually–tutored, Lateef-esque flutistry, and permitting it to have the top-billing that it always deserved. La Sombra has a certain track that goes by the name "A Red Planet," a number with a particularly Blue Note-shaded groove and a tight, tap-dancing beat. Much like the rest of the album, it carries a weighty sense of intrigue, in its search for meaning on hot sun-bleached beaches, clouded with salt-infused air. Though similar in name, it's an entirely different creature than what you will find on Wickham's latest album, Blue to Red.
Blue to Red is the Manchester multi-instrumentalist and producer's third solo outing, and one that tells the story of a planet in distress. While Blue to Red carries over much of the menagerie of breezy optimistic, middle-eastern influences from his 2018 Shamal Wind, it is much more direct and forthright in its approach to spiritual jazz than its predecessors. This is largely owed to Wickham's attempts to imbue the record with his cares and concerns for the people of planet Earth is it enters a period of mass extinction and rapid atmospheric upheaval. While Earth will certainly never look like Mars, such as the title implies, it may very well become a place where it will be difficult to find a place to live that doesn't feel like an oven for a third of the year, or a drink of water that doesn't have go through a desalination process before imbibing, or where each sip isn't a gamble with industrial runoff and heavy metal poisoning.
"Route One" cuts to the quick with a punctual beat, courtesy of Sons of Kemet drummer Jon Scott, which pulls along an inquisitive bassline and a flowy sprite of Hancock reviving keys, a procession kicked off by Wickham's instructive, tempo-setting flute playing. Simple and straightforward, it is nearly the most unadorned track on the album, both in concept and in addressing the album's themes. It is second in these respects only to the opening title track, "Blue to Red," an unseasonably warm and sober cut that marches forward in contemplative weariness, led by the sharp alluring call of Wickham's performance, pushed along by the lively flutter of Amanda Whiting's harps, which ripple past the ears with such fidelity that you'll swear Alice Coltrane is sitting behind you, fingers caressing the strings of her instrument, getting the hooks of its vibrations just under the lips of your ear lobes. "Double Cross" takes the themes of the album a little further, picking up the tempo following a whinnying cry from Wickham's flute, from there his breathwork begins to cuss and grumble in a kind of one-man argument with his instrument, a tussle that continues until he passes the track over to a spat of prog-funk keys, which shamble and holler like they are dodging incoming space rocks, before passing the song back to Wickham for an edifying, breathless finale. As a counterpoint to this track, the galaxy ranging "Interstellar" keeps a similarly nimble pace, while managing to keep its mind's eye confidently trained on the stars in the sky. The soothing procession of the magnificent "Might Yusef" winds down the album, unfurling through delicate harp strokes and a refreshingly restful flute melody like a flower in the early hours of the morning, yawning so as to soak in the sunlight between its soft lips and folds.
Blue to Red is a cosmic panoramic that attempts to take the entirety of the human condition as found on this wet little marble into its prevue. The starting point of a mission to reach through the psychic barriers of the mind, to extend a guiding hand that can lead us to a future where the Anthropocene marks the beginning of ascension to a more enlightened age. A pleading rescue effort to deflect our trajectory towards a necrotic age of accelerating calamity. While the choice of what to do seems obvious, it is far from clear, and yet to be determined which path mankind will wander.
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