In 2011, the venerable Cuneiform label released Flashpoint: NDR Jazz Workshop April ’69, an audio and video document of John Surman‘s live ten-piece jazz orchestra delivering five hard original tracks that reveal his canny depth and diversity as a young composer, arranger, and bandleader. The saxophonist was busy throughout 1969: He’d just completed recording his second album, How Many Clouds Can You See (released in 1970) and played on 11 additional albums in 1969, including John McLaughlin’s Extrapolation.
2025’s Flashpoints and Undercurrents amounts to a historic document. It contains the five selections from the 2011 release — here, all are extended takes — and replaces the video with a second audio disc from the same sessions that…
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There’s an ineffable sense of mystery to this collection of previously unreleased material from saxophonist John Surman and vocalist Karin Krog. Recorded over three days in 2013, abandoned when the theatre project it was commissioned for never came to fruition, and finally unearthed by Trunk Records, Electric Element sees the duo (along with Surman’s son Ben) abandon traditional jazz entirely in favour of a set of wonderfully weird vocal and electronic experiments.