Press
“ In this age of convergent politics and convergent art it's refreshing to know anarchy still has a champion, and his name is Carl Dewhurst. …he is such a pure, intuitive improviser… Like a liquid, Dewhurst fills any context, but never blandly so. ”
SMH October 2007
“ Dewhurst is an exceptional guitarist. He reinvents himself and his sound for different contexts, always playing with commitment, imagination and heart. ”
SMH 2005
“..one of the warmest and most versatile jazz musicians to emerge here in the past decade ”
SMH 2004
“ (Dewhurst)… is the hallmark of contemporary creativity.”
Drum Media 2006
“His sound carves the raw edge between jazz, blues, rock and funk.”
Drum Media 2005
“…extraordinary electric guitar (in what style or idiom can he not play with authority?)”
John Claire, SIMA review, 2007
Improvisation
Author: John Shand - Date: 10/03/2007
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald - Section: Spectrum
Page: 13
SHOWA 44
Ormus (Kimnara)
Drifting, humming guitar reminiscent of the swirls of Fripp & Eno open and recur on this beautiful second album of improvisations from guitarist Carl Dewhurst and drummer Simon Barker. Meanwhile, Barker makes tiny sounds on a close-miked, highly amplified kit - a sonic equivalent of David Attenborough filling TV screens with the footprints of ants.
Beyond this magnification of microscopic detail, Dewhurst's guitar is, unusually, tuned to Barker's kit. Vessel has lightly plucked bass strings creating a woody sound: a sailing boat on Barker's gently rolling sea of dark drums and cymbals. The foreground of Cyclonic is filled with edgy, insistent drums and gongs heard against distant, portentous guitar. The hard-rock aesthetic of the ironically titled Tread Lightly comes as a shock, (as, initially, does the barking guitar of Event), yet it, too, has been made with finger-tapped drums, and it settles happily - if brutally - into the total trajectory.
Fusae Ikeda's cover art matches the music's wonders.
Showa 44, comprising Carl Dewhurst on guitar and Simon Barker on drums, delivered a sonic tour de force in the Playhouse Theatre. Combining ambient sounds with ear-splitting electronics, the duo carved out an adventuresome route through the world of sound. Barker set up repetitive motifs via the use of gongs, as if he were gently throwing pebbles into a lake, while Dewhurst attacked his guitar like a latter-day Derek Bailey. This was jazz in extremis, melding the experiments of English stalwarts AMM with the force-field energy of a Sonic Youth.
CARL DEWHURST and SIMON BARKER
Showa 44 (Kimnara)
The music arrives like an unexpected punch, knocking you backwards and leaving you helpless for the rest of the assault. The onslaught comes from Carl Dewhurst's electric guitar and Simon Barker's drums, and launches Barker's new label dedicated to Australian creative music.
The piece Volumeze is at the manic rock extreme of a broad spectrum of approaches the two find in their nine improvised duets. Hill End, for instance, is pastoral with its warm, sparse, bass-string melody and a percussion commentary that could almost have been made by the wind.
Even the manic rock is devoid of cliche because the improvising is based on real interaction rather than reliance on vocabulary. Dewhurst and Barker lead, listen and are led, and that openness lets them venture into musical terrain where the full sonic possibilities of their instruments may be explored, but with experimentation being a means, never an end. Beauty and surprise are the ends - even if they are sometimes contained in a clenched fist. From ABC and specialist shops.
John Shand - Sydney Morning Herald
He and Carl Dewhurst display imaginations the size of continents and an extraordinarily intense rapport, taking daredevil listeners on improvised sonic adventures"
Limelight Magazine, August 2005
Fusion produces blasts of sonic heat
CARL DEWHURST QUARTET
[ Excelsior Hotel, June 1 ]
Ever since Elvis Presley's pelvic gyrations punted jazz from centre stage into the wings of popular music, rock and jazz have made uncomfortable bedfellows. A dozen years later they tried kissing and making up, although only a handful of artists extended the flirtation into a deep and meaningful relationship. The 1970s threw up countless examples of these star-crossed lovers generating the worst of both worlds: jazz musicians with a penchant for platform shoes, and rock musicians with a penchant for mass-producing notes.
Some of the best jazz-rock of recent times has come from Australian musicians with a genuine understanding of both forms, and with something fresh to say. Guitarist Carl Dewhurst , one of the warmest and most versatile jazz musicians to emerge here in the past decade, had a youthful infatuation with rock, which still bubbles to the surface given half a chance.
Six years ago his quartet recorded its first CD, Put Put Put, and in that time the band has evolved considerably: from cool jazz with a funky edge to paint-peeling blasts of sonic heat.
Here Dewhurst, keyboard player Stu Hunter , bassist Cameron Undy and drummer Warren Trout were launching their second CD, Live (Jazzgroove ), and raising the temperature a few more degrees. On Kenny B Dewhurst showed he could easily have typecast himself as a supreme blues guitarist, not just because of his ability to make the instrument cry, but also because of his delicate touch as filigree little runs faded to a vanishing point near the horizon.
Go the 80s was a monument to excess, with howls of distortion, bullying flams from the drums, thumping bass riffs and squalls of keyboard pandemonium. A new three-part suite called The Phoenix Trilogy was more avant-rock than jazz, although the rhythm section remained supremely supple as the guitar and synthesizer converged in a secret tryst where the identities of both were blurred. If the band took time to reach this pitch, it was worth waiting for.
They had been preceded by the debut of The Green Septet, a band led by guitarist Jess Green , which hopefully will turn out to be a sustainable environment for her brilliantly crafted compositions. A very auspicious beginning.
John Shand - Sydney Morning Herald, 3rd June 2004
