The protagonists of Jazz are constantly claiming that Jazz is the most open music of the 20th Century and more. The only genre of music that is open to and has absorbed all other styles. Surprisingly, Jazz has not been very open to women. While women stand shoulder to shoulder with men in Pop and Classical, Jazz stayed very much a man’s thing. There was place for the allegedly fairer sex at best at the piano or behind the microphone. That this situation was radically changed in the 70s is much too the credit of: Barbara Thompson.

In the aesthetic sense, Barbara Thompson was never a revolutionary. She didn’t develop any new style, attitude or concept. But that was also never her intention. She was more concerned with breaking up the „men-amongst-themselves“ mood and to draw her audience more deeply into her music than was usual in the eccentric Jazz of the 70s. Her trademark was gripping, inviting, but not compromising Jazz Rock. She ridded her Jazz of all reservations. Her unflinching openness made it all the easier for her to integrate all imaginable genres into her music, whether Classical, Pop or World Music, and to move light-footedly between the various contradictory schools and epochs of Jazz, without ever having to resort to programmatic thinking or logos. In that she brought that together, which was excluded elsewhere, she completed and refined on the ideas of her more experimental contemporaries. But in contrast to many of her male colleagues, Barbara Thompson found acceptance where Jazz normally didn’t have a chance. She broke with the American pattern early. She didn’t necessarily explore new terrain in European Jazz, but she did give it a new face, from which it still profits today.. From the very beginning, she cultivated a language which promised to be timeless and which could adopt the most diverse styles without distorting them. As such her compositions, ornamental, rich in arabesques and in which the not at all soft sound of the saxophone remains organic and leads back into the ensemble, have not lost their hypnotic fire.

A journey through Barbara Thompson’s music is a trip through time, during which the traveller cannot be one hundred percent sure in which epoch he has landed. During her flute, clarinet and piano studies at the Royal College of Music Barbara Thompson joined Neil Ardley’s New Jazz Orchestra as alto saxophonist in 1965. There, she met her future husband and life-long musical partner in many projects, the drummer Jon Hiseman. She played in various Jazz formations, but also accompanied Manfred Mann and was a founding member of the United Jazz & Rock Ensemble from 1975. In that year, she also founded her own band, Paraphernalia, with which she continued to play until the Millenium.

She recorded with Jon Hiseman’s band, Colosseum and worked the Glamour King, Andrew Lloyd Webber. In 1996, she was the first female Jazz musician to be made a Member of the British Empire (MBE). Five years later she was forced out of the active music business following an acute illness. She remains active, however, as a composer for i.a. the Apollo Saxophone Quartet, Evelyn Glennie and Mike Westbrook.

Although she took part in many unusual projects, she has always, from the beginning of her career, taken care not to run into dead-ends, but rather to relentlessly follow relevant paths. Her opera, „Omnia“, truly deserves this designation. Whoever is enthralled by the sound of one of Barbara Thompson’s songs or one of her albums will not be disappointed by any other of her songs or albums. In terms of personal discretion, sovereign technique and artistic infallibility Barbara Thompson has set a standard that only she can live up to.

Close To The Edge
Breathless
The Wave Police
Emerald Dusky Maiden
Sax Rap
Fear Of Spiders
Head In The Sand
Tatami
Chapter And Verse
Out On A Limb
Listen To The Plants
Frankfurt Fayre