Tom Skinner's Kaleidoscopic Visions reaches the streaming services

Tom Skinner's Kaleidoscopic Visions, his second album under his own name and his first since Voices of Bishara in 2022, is on the streaming services from 17 October. The drummer in The Smile put it out on LP, CD and download on 26 September through Brownswood Recordings and International Anthem, holding streaming back three weeks, as he had said when he announced it in July.

The label's notes say “Margaret Anne” is named for his mother, Anne Shasby, a classical piano prodigy who gave up a concert career in the face of misogyny and passed on to him what he calls the gift of music⁶. “Auster” is dedicated to the late novelist Paul Auster.

Skinner produced the album himself, BrooklynVegan reported, and the label says he wrote most of it on guitar, his second instrument. The exception was the title track, the first piece he wrote for it and the first single. Based around an intuitive piano improvisation, it set the tone for my approach and the sound I wanted to achieve in the creative process.⁴

The first side is instrumental, played by his live Bishara band, with Portishead's Adrian Utley on electric guitar on two tracks. On the second side Meshell Ndegeocello, whom Skinner says he first saw at Glastonbury in 1994 as a teenager, sings on “The Maxim”, the longest track at about ten minutes, and Yaffra, the London keyboardist and singer Jonathan Geyevu, on “See How They Run”.

His London show is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 21 November, in the EFG London Jazz Festival, with Utley and Yaffra joining him.

Tom Morgan, reviewing it for Treble, found a calm, approachable record that wins without raising its voice, with Skinner's drums seldom out in front and “The Maxim” at its centre.

Kaleidoscopic Visions

Tom Skinner, “Kaleidoscopic Visions”· Tom Skinnerwatch on youtube →