JAN KOPINSKI tenor / alto saxophones
STEVE ILIFFE keyboards
KARL BINGHAM bass
STEFAN KOPINSKI bass
STEVE HARRIS drums
Originally sold as a 2-disc box set, you can now enjoy the complete Bounce album in one digital download!
PINSKI ZOO – Celebrate 25 years of kicking down the barriers and sticking doggedly out for individualism with a new album – “AFTER IMAGE” – this new double cd is a collection of live tracks from tours between 2003 – 2005.
PINSKI ZOO- feel with more interest in music outside the box, it’s the right time to put out a comprehensive live album which catches the band in full flow and hear the originators at work. -2 cd’s with over 2hours of the most representative and original versions of the band. A twin bass rhythm section and no holds barred playing.
PINSKI ZOO -The true UK originals of free funk or power fusion…..call it what you like this cult-like band are almost impossible to categorize – they swing from virtuosic jazz to gritty funk with freedom and movement, veering into leftfield territory and snap back into grand melody without blinking. A highly potent and controversial force on the late 80’s /90’s UK jazz scene with a unique fusion sound, they foreshadowed later styles, and were linked with harmolodic outfits, such as Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time.
B B C M U S I C M A G A Z I N E
PINSKI ZOO: exciting, danceable and darkly atmospheric.With its members involved in extracurricular projects, Pinski Zoo hasn’t released an album since the stunning De-Icer, captured live in 1993. After Image, drawn from concerts across England between 2002 and 2005, has been worth the wait.
The classic quartet has for some while been augmented by Kopinski junior on additional bass. He and Bingham constitute a sharp, well-focused unit, threading lines of clarity and strength through the band’s crowded, swirling, polytonal canvas.
PZ is still uncategorisable (I’d plump for post-punk-funk-harmolodicism if pressed), still uniquely exciting, danceable and darkly atmospheric, still powers irresistible pulses without stooping to tediously inflexible beats, still conjures nebulous, magical, mysterious soundscapes from forbidding ranks of hardware, still enchants with tender melodies plucked from the rowdiest melee… Jan Kopinski’s saxes as gorgeous and passionate as ever.
PERFORMANCE *****
SOUND *****
www.allabout jazz.com
Pinski Zoo, by contrast, made no concessions to the broader marketplace…or to anything at all. They served up a raw, unfiltered mix of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler-inspired tenor saxophone improvisations and rough-sex funk. And they peeled the socks clean off your feet.
The performances are as thrilling and unpredictable as any on the band’s early-’80s breakout recordings. Utterly faithful to their original, post-Coltrane route to the jazz/funk shotgun marriage, Kopinski and Iliffe’s playing is as shocking and in-your-face as it was back when they were freshmen.
Pinski Zoo are still out there and still on cracking form. Organic, no-surrender, spiritually uplifting music, After Image is probably the best album the band has released to date. After 25 years at the barricades, that’s an astonishing achievement.
CHRIS MAY (August 2006)
JAZZ REVIEW
Pinski Zoo have been playing their own concoction of post-Coltrane, post-Prime Time and post-Albert Ayler abstract funk since the early 1980s. This two-CD anthology pulls together material from live gigs, recorded over a three year span, into a sort of idealized Pinski Zoo performance.
Tenor man Jan Kopinski and keyboard player Steve Iliffe were in the group’s original incarnation, while Bingham and Harris joined in the mid-80s. Add Stefan Kopinski on electric bass and the basic group aesthetic is unchanged. Pinski Zoo is bigger than any single member.
