Solo recording and performance.

"Backwards" Extreme recordings 2007

From the fine cover art on this CD, through the 'real time' untampered production values, to the artist himself, BACKWARDS is anything but! Scott Tinkler is a jazz trumpeter from Australia, a highly regarded musician with many awards in his home country, but with the release of this exciting new CD be becomes something more.

BACKWARDS is a solo album: Scott Tinkler has created a full CD of experimental music, alone in the studio, with only a few other instruments (piano used by stroking the strings, bass drum, cymbal, and a bucket of water) in his private space, instruments he himself plays as part of his music. The result is a sound few of us have ever heard before. The opening track suggests the sound of a didgeridoo ("a wind instrument of the Indigenous Australians of northern Australia sometimes described as a natural wooden trumpet or 'drone pipe'. Musicologists classify it as an aerophone" according to the dictionary). On other tracks he shines as a trumpeter of enormous range, adding the sound of dripping water, of zither-like piano strings, of echoes from the bouncing of his sound off a cymbal, and of using dissembled parts of his trumpet to make the instrument create strange tones.

Is this classical music or jazz? It is impossible to classify experimental music such as Tinkler has created on this solo venture and that fact may just be the next step from jazz into classical music we have all been pondering. Some of our finest composers today will doubtless become familiar with this groundbreaking album and incorporate Tinkler's ideas into works for orchestra. For those whose interest in music is broad and open to 'new work', this album is most certainly one of the landmarks in contemporary experimentation - a rewarding aural experience.

Grady Harp, May 07