When I’m reviewing a record, I’ll often comment on how professional the production sounds. It’s always noted as a positive—from a quick word search of past articles, I’ve never once used the words “too slick” or “too polished.” I’ve even commented, once or twice, on how a band’s stylistic choice of retro recording techniques has been to the detriment of the listening experience.
So I wasn’t fully expecting to like Tradding Uncharted Ground, it being “recorded outdoors while actually walking around the 2024 Royal Lancashire Agricultural Show… a field recording in the purest sense” (from the liner notes). But what The Jelly Roll Jazz Band have created here—deliberately or serendipitously—is a fascinating format which makes me nostalgic for my childhood (we vacationed almost exclusively in the UK) and gives overseas listeners an amusing insight into rural English life. Oh, there’s also some decent jazz in there…
The album opens with a distant PA mentioning a beer tent, a pig market, and livestock farming displays, before the boys—Michael A. Grant on clarinet and cymbal, Dan Wackett on banjo, James Ure on sousaphone and squeezy pig—launch into Ary Barroso’s “Brazil.” Their set list, which we hear them discussing as they wander between songs, also includes favorite numbers by Bechet (“Si Tu Vois Ma Mere”), Jones and Kahn (“I’ll
