Album review: Eddie Parker’s Airborn Featuring Rob Luft (Pig Records)

Eddie Parker (flutes, keys, piano); Rob Luft (guitars); Dave Manington (bass); Jay Davis (drums)

Some albums reveal themselves almost immediately. Others keep moving just as you think you have them worked out. Eddie Parker’s Airborn belongs firmly to the latter.

There is an extraordinary amount going on here. Odd metres, recurring melodies, shifting ensembles, baroque flute, electric and 12-string guitars, passages of genuine beauty rubbing shoulders with jazz-rock muscle and moments that seem deliberately designed to wrong-foot you. 

Yet remarkably little of it feels like hard work.

That may be Airborn’s greatest achievement: this is complicated music that doesn’t feel complicated.

Parker has never been an obvious candidate for musical pigeonholing. A founder member of Loose Tubes, his career has included work with Bheki Mseleku, the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble and his own Debussy Mirrored Ensemble. He calls himself a qualified eclectician, with influences stretching from Schoenberg to Santana.

The danger with that kind of musical CV is an album that spends an hour showing us how many different things its creator can do. Airborn never feels like that. Its influences have been absorbed too deeply for such obvious showing off.

Parker even points out in the sleeve notes that Schoenberg calculated 479,001,600 possible combinations of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, before dryly adding that this recording contains exactly some of them. It tells you rather a lot about the man and the record. There is serious musical thinking here, but Parker isn't above having a laugh at its expense.

At the centre of Airborn is his fascinating relationship with guitarist Rob Luft. Luft recalls first sharing a stage with Parker at Ronnie Scott’s when deputising for John Parricelli in Loose Tubes. He talks of being struck by Parker’s writing and, particularly, his ability to move naturally between the worlds of 1970s jazz fusion and twentieth-century classical music.

You can hear exactly what he means.

Luft, meanwhile, is the perfect accomplice for such a composer. Of course he can play — spectacularly so — but virtuosity is almost the least interesting thing about him here. What makes his contribution so compelling is his relationship with sound. Guitar can shimmer around Parker’s flute, suddenly acquire teeth or stretch into something almost orchestral. His electric and 12-string guitars aren't simply solo voices; they alter the landscape around everyone else.

Parker describes Luft’s soundworld as an entire solar system. Hyperbole perhaps, but listen to Airborn and you understand what he means.

Prelude opens the door quietly. Baroque flute emerges over bowed fundamentals before the harmony begins to blossom around it. This isn't simply an atmospheric introduction. Parker is planting the musical DNA from which much of what follows will grow.

That becomes important because Airborn really isn't fourteen separate tracks. It is a journey.

The Airborn pieces provide much of its forward motion, while four short Interludes — Sextet, Quartet, Duo and finally Solo — continually change our perspective. Some last barely long enough to settle before disappearing. Rather than fillers, they work almost like little changes of camera angle, stripping things away or reframing ideas we have already encountered.

The 29-second Interlude: Sextet is a perfect example. It doesn't need to develop into anything because that's not its purpose. It is punctuation.

By Interlude: Quartet, material from Prelude has returned transformed. Parker describes those harmonies as shimmering like gossamer on a summer afternoon and suggests picturing yourself on a boat on a river. There is indeed something suspended about it, a moment when Airborn seems happy simply to float before somebody starts the engine again.

And then comes Rock Latin.

Any danger that all this talk of Schoenberg and recurring harmonic structures might be getting a little cerebral disappears fairly rapidly. 

Parker jokes about his habit of wearing all white on stage as a nod to the 1970s and hopes that one day Luft will turn up with a double-necked Gibson.

The humour is genuine, but so is the playing. Rock Latin has muscle, heat and some glorious seventies swagger without ever becoming a nostalgia trip. Parker isn't recreating fusion; he's remembering what was exciting about it and handing that energy to a thoroughly contemporary band.

And it is quite a band.

Dave Manington's double bass and Jay Davis's drums are essential to why all of this works. Music this rhythmically restless could easily become an exercise in musicians counting very carefully. It never does.

Manington provides weight without anchoring the music to the floor, while Davis has the invaluable ability to make complexity feel physical. You don't necessarily know where the beat has gone, but somehow your foot keeps looking for it.

That quality becomes increasingly important as the album develops.

To Plant A Tree changes the emotional temperature completely. Parker's inspiration is beautifully simple. In an uncertain and sometimes unpleasant world, planting a tree is an act of hope — an investment in a future you may never personally see.

The music doesn't milk the sentiment. That's what makes it work. There is patience here, a feeling of something gradually taking root rather than announcing its importance. After some of the album's denser passages, it feels rather like opening a window.

Then comes Wonky Clockwork, which may be one of the most accurate track titles on the album.

Things tick, turn and appear occasionally to trip over themselves. Rhythms land somewhere just to the side of where instinct tells you they should, yet the machinery never actually breaks. There is wit in the writing and in the playing — a reminder that sophisticated music doesn't have to stand around looking serious.

Which makes Cortège all the more effective.

Parker has prefaced the piece in performance with the thought that if protest with words is criminalised, every note he plays becomes a protest.

Suddenly the album acquires weight. Davis's drumbeat becomes processional, almost inexorable, pushing the music forward as the atmosphere darkens around it. Earlier complexity that felt playful now seems to have acquired another purpose. What was curiosity begins to sound more like resistance.

It's one of the album's most powerful moments precisely because Parker hasn't spent the previous hour being solemn.

By Airborn 5, rhythm is mischievous again. Parker insists you can dance to it, although he warns that your feet may have to change from right to left with each bar.

He's right on both counts.

There is something rather wonderful about music capable of tying your feet in knots while still making them want to move. And that, perhaps, is the difference between complexity used to impress and complexity used to create something.

You don't need to count Airborn to enjoy it.

Through all these changes Parker's flute remains the album's most recognisably human voice. He uses flute, bass flute and baroque flute alongside keyboards and piano, and the changing colours matter. Jazz flute can sometimes be lazily characterised as light, decorative or pastoral. Parker reminds us how much more the instrument can be.

His flute can float, certainly, but it can also cut, question, provoke and carry considerable emotional weight. Against Luft's endlessly changing guitar textures, the pairing becomes one of the record's great pleasures.

Recorded at Porcupine Studio in London in December 2025, with Nick Taylor engineering and Alex Bonney responsible for mixing and mastering, the recording gives all of these details room without clinically separating them. With music this busy, clarity matters. You can follow one musician through a passage if you choose, or pull back and hear the quartet as a single, constantly changing organism.

And then, after Interlude: Solo has stripped things back almost to nothing, Parker has one last destination in mind.

Oke Quixote is his nod of admiration to Kenny Wheeler. It is a fitting destination because Wheeler's music similarly understood that sophistication and beauty were never mutually exclusive. Parker describes the piece as a final escape-velocity jaunt into infinity before returning to the original elements.

And that return matters.

After all those detours, odd metres, different instrumental combinations, changes of mood and shifts of musical language, Airborn quietly reveals that Parker knew where he was going all along.

That's the trick at the heart of this album.

The compositions provide the map, but the musicians never sound frightened of wandering away from it. Parker says Luft, Manington and Davis teach him something whenever they play together, and that openness is audible throughout. This doesn't sound like three musicians dutifully executing a composer's clever ideas. It sounds like four people discovering what those ideas might become.

Airborn is progressive without becoming impenetrable, technically formidable without being showy and serious without losing its sense of humour. Somehow Schoenberg and Santana inhabit the same universe, baroque flute finds common ground with electric guitar, protest sits alongside playfulness and an odd time signature can still make you want to dance.

Most importantly, nobody seems particularly interested in standing still.

Just when you think you've worked out where this music belongs, it lifts again, changes direction and escapes whatever box you were preparing to put it in.

For music this carefully grounded, Airborn spends a remarkable amount of time in flight. Glenn Wright