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Elton Dean

Elton Dean, who died at 60 on February 8th 2006, was a totally unique musician : at times lyrical and moving, at others explosive and unsettling, his approach of saxophone playing was totally his own, besides the fact that he favoured a little-used member of the sax family : the saxello, an hybrid between alto and soprano, with an instantly recognizable sound. Over the years, Dean lent his immense talents to bands like Soft Machine, Soft Heap, In Cahoots and L'Equip'Out, as well as many jazz ensembles featuring Keith Tippett, Hugh Hopper, Pip Pyle, Mark Hewins and John Etheridge.

Elton Dean was born in Nottingham in 1945. He started taking piano and violin lessons at a very early age, and bought his first saxophone when he reached 18. At that point, he'd become interested in jazz listening to the radio and records, particularly traditional English jazz, Sidney Bechet, Eddie Condon, etc. By the mid-60's, Dean had started playing in London pubs, and became a professional musician. In 1966-67, he played alongside trumpet player Mark Charig in Long John Baldry's band Bluesology (whose piano player borrowed his and Baldry's first names to start a career as pop singer under the name Elton John), Georgie Fame's Blue Flames and Marsha Hunt's backing band. Late in 1967, Dean and Charig met pianist Keith Tippett and trombone player Nick Evans, thus the formation of the Keith Tippett Sextet, which played in various clubs in 1968-69 and recorded two albums for the Vertigo label.

In the Autumn of 1969, Tippett's brass section of Dean, Evans and Charig was absorbed into Soft Machine. While the latter two left after only a couple of months, Dean soldiered on, and for two years was part of the band's most vividly remembered line-up, alongside Robert Wyatt, Hugh Hopper and Mike Ratledge. He played on the studio albums Third (1970), Fourth (1971) and 5 (1972), as well as many radio sessions and European tours, resulting in later archive albums such as Peel Sessions. While in Soft Machine, Dean also formed his own jazz group with Neville Whitehead (bass) and Phil Howard (drums), releasing his eponymous debut on CBS in 1971 (with Ratledge guesting), and played with Barry Guy's Jazz Composers' Orchestra and Keith Tippett's 50-piece Centipede.

The Elton Dean Group had already metamorphosed into Just Us, which saw Elton reunited with Charig and Evans, by the time he left Soft Machine in May 1972. It carried on as a semi-professional ensemble until 1975, by the time the rhythm section had changed to Harry Miller and Louis Moholo on bass and drums respectively. In 1973, Dean toured Holland backing Loak Dikker, and in March 1974, immediately after a French tour with Hugh Hopper's Monster Band, replaced Charlie Mariano in the Dutch progressive rock band Supersister, touring extensively with them until their break-up in July. Back in England, he joined Chris MacGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, touring Europe with them for two years.

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Album Review

Elton Dean Quartet: On Italian Roads (Live in Milan 1979)

Read "On Italian Roads (Live in Milan 1979)" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro


Registrato (su cassetta) il 25 febbraio 1979 al Teatro Cristallo di Milano, il nastro di questo concerto ha dovuto attendere la bellezza di quarantatré anni, ma alla fine, grazie alla caparbietà e alla dedizione alla causa di Riccardo Bergerone, che dell'odierno CD (in impeccabile digipack a sei facciate) condivide la responsabilità delle note di copertina con Roberto Ottaviano, è oggi disponibile per i nostri lettori e le nostre orecchie. Ed è un'autentica festa, perché, al di là ...

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Album Review

Soft Machine: Facelift France and Holland

Read "Facelift France and Holland" reviewed by Maurizio Comandini


Sotto l'ombrello robusto chiamato Soft Machine si nascondono in realtà parecchie band. All'inizio l'interesse del gruppo, nato nel 1966 in quel di Canterbury (anche se loro non vogliono essere considerati come esponenti del cosiddetto Canterbury Sound), era per una sorta di pop-rock patafisico, che poi ha iniziato a dilatarsi verso la psichedelia, il rock progressivo, il jazz moderno, la musica creativa, l'avanguardia. Questa eccellente proposta della Cuneiform, etichetta che davvero merita un plauso particolare per l'abilità dimostrata nel riuscire a ...

Album Review

Soft Works: Abracadabra in Osaka

Read "Abracadabra in Osaka" reviewed by Claudio Bonomi


«Nel 2000 mi venne questa pazza idea di aiutare il mio vecchio amico Elton Dean a organizzare una reunion dei leggendari Soft Machine...» Inizia così il racconto di Leonardo Pavkovic, patron della Moonjune Records, al giornalista Chris M. Slawecki di All About Jazz sulla genesi dei Soft Works, quartetto composto da Elton Dean, Allan Holdsworth, Hugh Hopper e John Marshall che, nel 2002, diede alle stampe l'album Abracadabra. Allora, si trattò di una delle prime reincarnazioni ...

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Album Review

Elton Dean's Ninesense: Happy Daze + Oh! For The Edge

Read "Happy Daze + Oh! For The Edge" reviewed by Mark Redlefsen


This reissue of two Ninesense recordings, from the late British saxophonist Elton Dean, creates a gateway back to the London jazz scene of the 1970s. Digging into bands that he played with previously outside of his work with Soft Machine, he formed the nine-piece Ninesense with Keith Tippett, along with several other members of that pianist's bands, as well as other players that passed through the ranks of late South African pianist Chris McGregor's band, Brotherhood of Breath, like drummer ...

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Album Review

Command All Stars: Curiosities 1972

Read "Curiosities 1972" reviewed by Nic Jones


That infinite moment with which a lot of the music AAJ covers is preoccupied is amplified here, rife with a depth which far outstrips the casual manner in which the music came together. Afforded the relative luxury of three days of studio time in February 1972, some of that time's most creative individuals on the British scene came together to work both spontaneously and collectively. The results, even while inevitably reflective of that casual approach, demonstrate the primacy of that ...

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Multiple Reviews

Elton Dean / Steve Miller Trio / Soft Heap: British genre-benders

Read "Elton Dean /  Steve Miller Trio / Soft Heap: British genre-benders" reviewed by Clifford Allen


Though non-idiomatic is a term often thrown around when referring to post-1960s British improvisation, the more apt one might be cross-idiomatic, insofar as significant players have worked across genres with regularity. Take alto saxophonist Elton Dean, for example. He was part of the three-horn front line of pianist Keith Tippett's group, which was co-opted by the Soft Machine (a band for whom even the term “progressive rock" doesn't do justice). Though trumpeter Marc Charig and trombonist Nick Evans eventually left, ...

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Album Review

Elton Dean & The Wrong Object: The Unbelievable Truth

Read "The Unbelievable Truth" reviewed by Nic Jones


Poignant doesn't cover it. This was one of Elton Dean's last gigs before his death and all the qualities that made him such a distinctive voice on alto sax and saxello--his wit, his ascetic, unsentimental lyricism and the like--are caught in abundance and in the company of a band who do a whole lot more than simply provide a framework for his invention.

“Millennium Jumble (The Wrong Object)" is a case in point. Dean's saxello work in particular was always ...

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Recording

Elton Dean's Ninesense Suite (Jazzwerkstatt, 2011) ****

Elton Dean's Ninesense Suite (Jazzwerkstatt, 2011) ****

Source: Free Jazz by Stef Gijssels

This is a little bit of a strange album, with two bands performing with a year difference, and each playing one long improvisation of respectively fourty and thirty minutes. This first track was recorded exactly twenty years ago in Germany, and features a British-German band consisting of Elton Dean on sax and saxello, Alan Skidmore on tenor, Mark Charig and Harry Becket on trumpet, Nick evans and Radu Malfatti on trombone, Keith Tippett on piano, Harry Miller on bass and ...

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Obituary

Former Soft Machine Saxophone Player Elton Dean Dies

Former Soft Machine Saxophone Player Elton Dean Dies

Source: All About Jazz

British jazz saxophonist Elton Dean died on the evening of February 7th, 2006, in a London hospital. For the last year in particular he had been suffering from heart and liver related health problems. He was 60.

Dean first gained acclaim as a member of the Keith Tippett Group, led by the English pianist and featuring the horn section of Dean, Marc Charig and Nick Evans, in 1969. Later that year, Dean, Charig and Evans were hired by Soft Machine ...

Michel Delville
guitar, electric

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

Elton Dean's...

Ogun Records
2024

buy

Jazzloops / The...

Cherry Red Records
2023

buy

Facelift France and...

Cuneiform Records
2022

buy

On Italian Roads...

British Progressive Jazz
2022

buy

Abracadabra in Osaka

MoonJune Records
2020

buy

Remembrance

Elton Dean Tapes
2013

buy

Videos

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