“they’ve developed a sonic telepathy that makes them simply one of Europe’s best bands”
★★★★ Andy Robson, Jazzwise Magazine for ‘Try Me’ and MY IRIS
“Trish Clowes is one of the brightest stars to have emerged during the so-called British jazz boom of the past decade or more…The playing is rarely less than inspired. Clowes’s tone on tenor, which she plays exclusively here, is a study in controlled vulnerability, at once warm, tender and assured… she is a musician of great sensitivity and strength.”
Philip Watson, The Irish Times, 4.5 STARS for ‘Journey to Where‘
“They road tested some of their new pieces exuberantly in a brisk set, that bristled with energy and invention…their artistic partnership seemed simply a logical extension of earlier work.”
Jon Turney for UK Jazz News, on EYES UP with Dave Douglas, live at Cheltenham Jazz Festival 2024
“Besides the individual virtuosity, what was most striking was the compositional range of the unflinchingly contemporary material… Eyes Up is far too potent a combo to be a one-off project”
Ian Patterson for All About Jazz, live review of EYES UP with Dave Douglas at Bray Jazz Festival 2024
“a major talent”
From San Francisco Jazz’s ‘Rising Women Instrumentalists’ list
“a rich mix of cinematic landscape evocation, funky guitar grooves, dreamy reveries spun off minimalist patterns and fluently uncliched improv”
4 STARS & Album of the Month for ‘A View with a Room’ from John Fordham, The Guardian
“A View with a Room confirms Clowes as one of the most interesting voices on the effervescent British scene”
All About Jazz Italia
“With her astringent tone and flexible take on harmony she delivers stimulating explorations.”
4 STARS for ‘A View with a Room’ from Barry Witherden, BBC Music Magazine
“a mysterious yet utterly gratifying exercise in collective harmonic interplay, post-bop lyricism, and modal inquiry balanced by elegant, exploratory, and intimate improvisation”
4 STARS for ‘A View with a Room’ from Thom Jurek, AllMusic
“dizzying heights of lyricism and emotional expression… The level of musicianship and shared intent, leads to a telepathic like interplay within the quartet… Trish Clowes has thus delivered an exceptional album”
Gareth Allen, At The Barrier
“This is music of communication and community… It’s all captured in the magical opening title track.”
4 STARS & Editor’s Choice for ‘A View with a Room’ from Andy Robson, Jazzwise
“an incredible band”
Jamie Cullum, BBC Radio 2
“A triumph for Clowes and for My Iris”
Live review of MY IRIS at Wigmore Hall, from Andy Robson, Jazzwise
“a beguilingly inventive mix of shadow and luminosity… lyrical warmth tempered by certain shady spookiness”
4 STARS for ‘A View with a Room’ from Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman
“A high intensity, mercurial workout provides further evidence that Clowes is an improviser to be reckoned with”
Downbeat Magazine
“Clowes demonstrates a deep understanding of Cutler’s fascinating musical language throughout”
BBC Music Magazine (Claire Jackson), from a 4 STAR review of Joe Cutler’s ‘Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii’ (2020)
“British saxophonist Trish Clowes, meanwhile, deftly unites old and new, building melodic filigree over Vivaldi’s sure harmonic foundations.”
Apple Music write-up for Clowes’s ‘Sleep 1’ (Vivaldi adaptation) on Orchestra of the Swan’s album ‘Timelapse’ (2021)
“Trish Clowes doesn’t just play the saxophone, she reinvents it.”
Rochester City Newspaper
“a band’s band … high speed melodic chases, punchy avant garde jams, spacey organic textures and even Weather-Report-inspired rock fusion… and Clowes, singing on the beautifully meandering epic ‘Free to Fall’.”
New York State Music
“Listen, and then listen again, if only to remind yourself that this beautiful other worlds really does exist.”
Fiona Talkington on Ninety Degrees Gravity
“we are once again awed by a musician whose composition and improvisation bristles with uncommon genius and can hardly wait for more…”
Raul da Gama, JazzdaGama
“exhilarating and darkly funky”
John Fordham, the Guardian, 4*
“musical wizardry”
Fiona Ord-Shrimpton, All About Jazz, 4.5* for MY IRIS
“…veering between velvet and violence. Clowes has complete mastery of the tenor… Her lightning ability to transfer complex thought to action was equalled by the other virtuoso players”
Chris Kilby, bebopspokenhere blog, MY IRIS live on tour 2019
“Strong on both group interplay and compositional skill this is one of the most outstanding UK jazz albums to be released this year.”
Stephen Graham, Marlbank, on Ninety Degrees Gravity
“The jazz of the future… My Iris is the title of the new album, in which Trish Clowes narrates her big and small stories and subtly blends them with modern jazz that is miles away from the sometimes tormenting free-jazz. The time in the townhouse flies by, so moved one is listening to this quartet”
– Michael Peter Bluhm, Augsburger Allgemeine, MY IRIS live in Germany
“An on-the-top concert… What a finesse in the arrangements… rhythmically interlocked parallel worlds… With great pleasure, they threw themselves into the highly concentrated layered pieces, dropped into melancholy streams without a net, juggled with musical genres courageously, but always with the necessary humility. A very strong concert of the series – maybe on the top.” (Google translation)
– Udo Eberl, Südwest Presse, MY IRIS live in Germany
“Everything Clowes does has an invigorating purposefulness… her clever way with small things can open a big space, pregnant with possibility. One day she will surely inhabit it.”
– Ivan Hewett, the Telegraph, 4* for MY IRIS Album Launch
“Whatever planet Trish Clowes and her band were on when they recorded this, I want to be there! Innovation, wit, wisdom, elegance – My Iris is already a contender for Album of 2017”
– Fiona Talkington, BBC Radio 3
“With just four players, the variety of tone colour is quite remarkable, and the playing of Clowes on tenor and soprano saxophones, Ross Stanley (piano and organ) Chris Montague (guitar) and James Maddren (drums) is impeccable.”
– Dave Gelly, The Observer, 4* for MY IRIS
“With an agile, melodic imagination and an economy of ideas learned from Wayne Shorter, Clowes is a fluent improviser, and this set of original tunes was clearly intended to liberate rather than dictate”
– Cormac Larkin, The Irish Times, 4* for MY IRIS
“the Englishwoman’s quirky songwriter’s ear, subtly sleepy tenor sax sound and bright intensity on soprano are anything but cerebral”
– John Fordham, The Guardian, 4* for MY IRIS
“To achieve that range of sounds with a jazz quartet requires rare skill. How much other contemporary music has such adventurous or eclectic intellectual horizons?”
– Matthew Wright, The Arts Desk, 4* for MY IRIS
“What’s going on in this band equates to some kind of magic…with the release of My Iris, an album with such a compression of articulated vision, I can’t believe she isn’t going to be recognised as a critical European player and composer. Trish Clowes’ soprano and tenor saxophones are already TC (Top Cat)… This is a music of substance… Trish Clowes has thrown down a challenge to herself with this album. The bar is set, there is no way back from this height, neither can she stop still. There will have to be something else to come. My Iris buys her some time.”
– Steve Day, SandyBrownJazz blog
“consistently fascinating”
– Rob Adams, Herald Scotland
“Amazing tribute to Wayne Shorter… Pocket Compass can be interpreted as a sign post to the highly individual music of a newcomer… A wonderful introduction, and most warmly recommended.”
– 5 STAR review for Pocket Compass from Jürg Sommer at Schweiz am Sonntag (Switzerland)
“improv saxist and composer on a creative roll… Clowes’ intuitive one-twos with pianist Gwilym Simcock so closely echo Shorter and the Herbie Hancock of old that it’s almost uncanny”
– 4 STAR review for Pocket Compass from John Fordham at the Guardian
“a young woman brimming with the surprise and ever-inventive singularity of her magic.”
– Article for the Morning Star by Chris Searle
“Clowes’ The Fox, the Parakeet and the Chestnut – despite its child’s-tale title – bubbled with savvy surprises, from multiphonic effects blown into the piano’s soundbox, to breathy tenor-sax sounds against purring brass, and a strutting cello theme underpinning whimsically gliding sax ruminations. If those tentative 1920s genre-benders of symphonic jazz had witnessed the flexibility and relaxation shared by the jazz and orchestral players in this conversational setting, they wouldn’t have believed it.”
– 4 STAR review from John Fordham at the Guardian for 2014 EFG London Jazz Festival concert, Clowes’ BBC Radio 3 Commission
“Her themes and harmonies are angular and quirky, and she shares Thelonius Monk’s talent for building an overall sense of inevitability out of surprising details. As an improviser she achieves a similar melding of the unexpected and the inexorable”
– 4 STAR review for Pocket Compass from Barry Witherden at BBC Music Magazine
“Clowes’ third album condenses and refines her exquisite control of instrumental colour”
– 4 STARS for Pocket Compass from Matthew Wright at the Arts Desk
“Trish Clowes is one of the most agile and original jugglers of improv and adventurous composition to have appeared in the UK in recent times”
– John Fordham, the Guardian
“Trish Clowes is a fiercely talented jazz saxophonist”
– Ivan Hewett, the Telegraph
“This is British Jazz at its best… I suggest you go and see her now before it’s difficult to get in the room, I assure you she is a great great talent.”
– Jamie Cullum
5* for EMULSION III Festival, “Theatrical use of space exalts jazz-classical festival to greatness”
-Matthew Wright, the Arts Desk
“The set of the quintet constantly changed, with surprising twists and memorable moments. There were elegant and sensitive songs, subdued and delicate one moment and fiery and ecstatic the next. It was originality and fine improvisation that made this one of the most interesting performances of the [Brecon Jazz] festival.”
-Anthony Weightman, AAA Music
“[Gershwin’s Lullaby] was a highlight of the night, thanks to saxophonist Trish Clowes… Her own style recalled the even earlier tones of Lester Young, which made it a fascinating follow-on from her own soprano excursion in tribute to her hero Wayne Shorter, Wayne’s Waltz, its triple time a challenge to anyone wishing to trip the light fantastic. Her main orchestral composition, Sketch, having its live premiere, seemed well-named and her description of its organic sculptural creation suggested that was intended.”
– Keith Bruce, Herald Scotland
“Trish Clowes’ music has its share of poetry, mystery, mystical, symbolist beauty… full of surprises, maturity, original structures and sensitivity…In several years, you’ll still listen to this album.”
– Jean-Claude Vantroyen, Mad le Soir (google translation)
“… Clowes that showcases a tenor voice persuasive and sour, a sinuous phrasing and borderline stretched out in time, a bit ‘like Lee Konitz and Stan Getz had gathered on the same instrument… The three movements of “Iris Nonet” – suite dedicated to his grandmother, he writes in the liner notes Clowes – are a vivid, structured, intense, at times moving testimony of this musical vision… Crystalline talent to watch here.”
– Vincenzo Roggero, All About Jazz – Italy
“In September 2012, tenor saxophonist Trish Clowes became a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, the first female jazz artist to be recognised by the scheme. Right on cue, Basho Records released her second album, And in the Night-time She Is There, as a timely reminder of the talents that led to her being selected for such recognition.”
– John Eales, BBC Music
“Powerful, lyrical and with a sound-world that ranges from the austere to the ecstatic”
– Peter Quinn, the Arts Desk
“Clowes has a way of being expressive without cuffing the listener in the ears. This leads to some dramatic moments with a subdued tone… a contrast that is quite enchanting.”
– Bird is the Worm
