Matthew Herbert and His Big Band Return

Matthew Herbert will release his latest Big Band album There's Me and There's You in October. A collection of protest songs, the album has been promised to put together a bit of "lush jazz instrumentation, soulful vocals, fascinating rhythms and a secret underground arsenal of outlandish samples." That much, of course, is what we've come to expect from Herbert. (Honestly, what would a Herbert album be without the sampled sound of 70 condoms being scraped along the floor of the British Museum?) But what makes this particular release different from his 2001 album Goodbye Swingtime is the reliance on lyrics, which center around various controversial topics like the war in Iraq, torture, climate change, and religion. Heavy stuff.And it's stuff that is done in heavy collaboartion with Eska, a London-based artist who has worked with David Sylvian and Tony Allen, among others. in ra