Duncan Hopkins

News & Reviews

Biography

British born Duncan Hopkins has been busy establishing himself as a double bassist, composer and arranger around the world, being likened to the best : “St.Catharines has given the jazz world one important composer...Kenny Wheeler. It may have another one ... in the person of Duncan Hopkins”. Globe and Mail and “(Duncan’s) strength’s lie in his writing and sense of textural organisation, which show him willing to stretch, push or otherwise challenge style and format.” Globe and Mail



Aside from his own projects, he has become a popular sideman for a wide variety of artists such as ; Dianna Krall, Mark Murphy, Lester Bowie, Kenny Wheeler, John Hicks, Peter Appleyard, Sam Noto, Ed Bickert, D.D. Jackson, Scott Hamilton, Warren Vache, Sam Rivers, George Masso, Tony Malaby, Bobo Stenson, Lorne Lofsky and arrangers Robert Farnon and Ralph Carmichael to name but a few. He was the last bassist in the famed Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass for several tours including Brazil and concerts including Carnegie Hall.



Duncan has toured extensively throughout Canada, Great Britain, Europe, Brazil and the United States. He can be heard on over forty albums, numerous CBC, BBC and NPR recordings with such groups as The Pat LaBarbera Trio/Quartet, Dianna Krall, Peter Appleyard, Robert Farnon,The John Tank Quartet, The Warren Vache Quartet, The Nikki Iles Trio, The Martin Speake/Bobo Stenson Quartet.

Duncan’s solo albums which feature all original material from the leader, have received international acclaim : Le Rouge (1994) “This CD is Excellent!” {Cadence Magazine NY, USA} and Kindred Spirits (1996) “..a high grade release where the writing...is as impressive as the playing.” {The Toronto Star}. Snapshots (2000) “Snapshots .... is an impressive and accessible CD of contemporary jazz....(it) lends the disc (to) an early 60’s Miles Davis Quintet feel {Downtowner 2000}. His European band The Anglo/Canadian Project has also been garnering a lot of attention for Secret (2002) “Make the effort to get this exceptional CD. {Phil Erenshaft Whole Magazine} and “very intelligent, sharp and very musical.” {John Fordham The London Guardian U.K.}



The newest addition to Duncan’s discography is the stunning Red & Brassy (2005). “Duncan Hopkins adds an inspired voice to Canadian jazz composition with his masterful Red & Brassy, offering a fascinating glimpse into the past, present and future in one invigorating breath.{ e-jazznews} and “This cd is a remarkable musical accomplishment - highly recommended!” {Wholenote Magazine Mar 01, 2006}



Duncan started his musical training at age four attending the Pattisons Music and Dance Academy in Coventry, England. After a move to Canada, Duncan studied classical piano at age ten. Over the better part of a decade he performed in the Niagara region singing in choirs including the Canadiana choir. At eighteen, an interest was sparked in the double bass and everything changed.



Duncan studied economics at Brock University in Canada and the degree of Bachelor of Business of Economics was conferred in 1989. Duncan began his study of bass and jazz from records and local musicians. After his degree however, Duncan moved to Montreal to attend McGill University’s jazz programme to study with bassist Michel Donato. In 1990 he attended the Banff Centre for the performing Arts and studied bass with Rufus Reid and composition with Kenny Wheeler. In 1991, Duncan was awarded a Canada Arts Council grant to study with Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson in Copenhagen Denmark. There he also met and studied with Red Mitchell and Kenny Wheeler. In 1993 Duncan was awarded a Chalmers award from the Ontario Arts Council to study bass and composition with Dave Holland in New York City. He continued his studies in New York for two more years. Following this he moved to Toronto to start a professional career always studying privately honing his skills.



Recent performances have included the debut of his brass band project “Red & Brassy” at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, guest artist at Roy Thompson Hall, performing for Canada’s Walk of Fame, several tours to England including dates at the Royal Festival Hall, festivals across Canada including Toronto and Ottawa. Duncan tours regularly with a variety of groups and performs over 150 concerts a year. Duncan teaches from home and also gives master classes at private and public schools alike and universities here and abroad. Duncan is currently professor of jazz studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England.



In addition to all of this, he can be seen in a recent movie by Atom Egoyan called “Where The Truth Lies” and he appears and wrote the music for a video entitled “Lost in the Library” featuring Canada’s poet Laureate George Bowering. There have been many articles written about Duncan but more recently in Double Bassist Magazine he was featured in a ten page feature called “Meeting jazz maestro Duncan Hopkins” and a feature in the Canadian Salvation Army’s national paper “Faith and Friends” regarding his music and recent collaboration with the Canadian Staff Band of the Salvation Army.



His latest endeavours include upcoming concerts of “Red & Brassy” in the U.K., as well as an orchestra concert with the Kingston Symphony Orchestra featuring music arranged by Duncan from the war years and a few of Duncan’s latest compositions. He is also a reviewer and author for Double Bassist Magasine in the U.K. The upcoming year will see a four part tutor series from Duncan entitled “How to Practise.”



Duncan has won several awards including the Jazz Du Prix in 1999 from the Montreal Jazz Festival and has been nominated for the Juno’s (Secret), the Durham Music Society’s awards (Snapshots) and was nominated in 2006 for bassist of the year from the National Jazz Awards.



Duncan splits his time between the U.K. and Canada. He currently lives outside London with his wife Fiona and their two small children.






Le Rouge Music 01-01-07

Double Bassist

Jazz and the Salvation Army are not words that regularly sit next to each other. On paper, the combination of Salvation Army brass band and jazz quartet had me salivating with thoughts of a freeform Abide With Me or a brass choir honking So What around a Christmas tree. Alas, the reality is a little more conventional: Red & Brassy is not a groundbreaking crossover, but a mainstream jazz quartet performing with the added colour of a polished big band (minus reeds) playing jazz charts.
British-born Canadian double bassist Duncan Hopkins’ woody tone, stylish improvising skills and consummate musicianship are already well established through his work with Nikki Iles and others, but this disc highlights his impressive compositional and arranging abilities. Hopkins uses the brass section with a loving and knowledgeable touch, informed by his father’s background in the Salvation Army. Scored for band alone, the rambunctious pastiche On the March is a mischievous nod to an unfortunate incident from the composer’s youth involving the meeting of bike and marching band. Hopkins’ homage to trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, The Eminent Emigrant, opens with moodily scored brass, before a miraculous crescendo of furious hard swing flourishes into one of the discs highlights.
Red & Brassy’s compositions and arrangements are all meticulously crafted and extremely effective in performance. The disc works beautifully as an attractive work of mainstream jazz.
Matthew Simpkins Autumn 2006 - Number 38

24dash.com

Duncan Hopkins Quartet - 'Red & Brassy'

This album is subtitled "Music for brass band with jazz quartet. Initially I regarded it with some suspicion, thinking, "that sounds awful, it will never work". Except of course it does. Hopkins is an excellent composer and arranger and this turns out to be a very enjoyable album.

Hopkins was born in England but moved to Canada as a child settling in St. Catharines, Ontario which by delicious irony just happens to be the hometown of a jazz composer who moved in the opposite direction. The great Canadian trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler has been a major figure on the British and European scenes for decades now and indeed Hopkins has dedicated a piece on this album to Wheeler, "The Eminent Emigrant".

Hopkins had a classical music education and through his family was also heavily involved with the Salvation Army. It was not until he was eighteen that he took up the double bass and really discovered jazz subsequently studying it at various colleges. One of his tutors was of course the venerable Kenny Wheeler.

"Red And Brassy" brings together Hopkins' childhood roots in Salvation Army brass bands with his more recently honed skills in jazz as a performer and composer. The album was recorded at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto in front of a live audience but the applause and the announcements between numbers have been edited out. Such is the quality of Ted Marshall's recording you would never think it was essentially a live album.

Hopkins deploys his regular jazz quartet of himself on bass together with pianist Adrean Farrugia, drummer Anthony Michelli and Roy Styffe on alto saxophone. The Canadian Staff Band of the Salvation Army is directed by bandmaster Kevin Hayward and is 27 musicians strong.

Hopkins' compositions are essentially modern jazz big band writing owing something in style to his mentor Wheeler. The bulk of the solos are undertaken by the quartet. Hopkins himself has a broad, woody tone, a big bass sound reminiscent of the Norwegian Arild Andersen. His solos have resonance and authority and his ensemble work is similarly assured. Farrugia is a versatile pianist, thoughtful and introspective on "Perspective" but sparkling elsewhere. Styffe's probing alto swoops and soars and Michelli drives things along combining power with inventiveness and exhibiting a particularly nimble touch on cymbals.

The quartet perform two pieces "Mojive" and "Four Year Old Steps" unaccompanied by the brass band. I assume the quartet is Hopkins' regular working group and they are an excellent unit.
The role of the CSB is mainly textural with only Steve Brown's plunger mute cornet on "White Pants, Red Suspenders" the only solo coming from their ranks. This is a tune reminiscent of old-fashioned big band swing. British readers are probably wondering what a Salvation Army band are doing playing a tune with a title like that! Stop sniggering at the back, the words mean something completely different the other side of the pond.

The CSB also get to play a piece sans jazz quartet. "On The March" is the only really traditional brass band piece on the record.

Hopkins' subject matter relates to both personal experiences and aspects of Canadian history. The inspiration behind the writing is comprehensively covered in his excellent album notes.
The ambitious suite "Sketches Of Upper Canada" which closes the album is probably the best synthesis of the two musical traditions and includes a quote from the British National Anthem "God Save The Queen".

Hopkins has put together an album which is both ambitious and enjoyable. The quality of writing and arranging is very high. It is still essentially a jazz record and as such is more likely appeal to a jazz audience rather than hard-core brass band fans.

I would certainly welcome the opportunity to hear Hopkins in other contexts not least with the quartet featured here who are excellent throughout.
By Ian Mann Published: 23/06/2006 - 12:28:19 PM

Wholenote

There are several things that make Duncan Hopkins’ latest recording stand out from the crowd. The first and most obvious is the combination of his quartet (Hopkins on bass, alto saxophonist Roy Styffe, pianist Adrean Farrugia and drummer Anthony Michelli) with the Canadian Staff Band of the Salvation Army. The CSB has recorded commercially before, with trumpet soloist Jens Lindermann with excellent results, however, this is the first record I can think of that fully integrates a brass band with a jazz group.

Hopkins’ compositions are the second outstanding feature - this cd does not come off as a jazz group backed by the band, but rather as a seamless melding of the quartet with the broad tonal palette and depth of sound of the brass band. My first thoughts on listening to the disc were that Hopkins must have been inspired by the music of Kenny Wheeler. As I discovered on reading the liner notes, one of the works is actually dedicated to this Canadian-born trumpeter/composer. One of the pieces, White Pants, Red Suspenders is written as a traditional big band swing number; another, On The March is a straight ahead piece for brass band alone. My personal favourites are Changing Tides and The Eminent Emigrant.

A project like “Red & Brassy” would be difficult to pull off in a studio setting, but this entire disc was recorded live at the Glenn Gould Studio. This cd is a remarkable musical accomplishment - highly recommended!
Merlin Williams Mar 01, 2006

e-jazznews.com

CD Review
Duncan Hopkins Quartet with the Canadian Brass Band
‘Red & Brassy’
Independent / 2005

Bassist Duncan Hopkins creates a rare breed with the blend of his mainstream jazz quartet and the Canadian Staff Band of the Salvation Army. The live recording was done during a concert performed a year ago at the Glen Gould Studio in Toronto.

Hopkin’s accomplished quartet of Adrean Farrugia (piano), Anthony Michelli (drums), and Roy Styffe (alto sax) meets, shakes hands, and gets down to the business of making rich, textural music with the Canadian Staff Band, who perform flawlessly under the direction of Kevin Hayward.

The CD is marked by the strength of Hopkins compositional talent and his facility for arranging. Not to mention he’s a fine player. Raised in the Salvation Army faith, Hopkins' 10 compositions reflect the brass underpinnings of the Salvation Army’s music, and cross-pollinates it with mainstream jazz in a dynamic fusion. Seven of the selections feature large ensemble, with two quartet outings and one band performance making up the nearly 70 minutes of original music.

The quartet is a solid jazz voice that melds seamlessly with the brass, providing a colourful palette for the composer’s brush, and carries a sense of classicism burnished into the contemporary sound.

From the first track ‘Changing Tides’, one becomes keenly aware of the flexible nature of the instrumentation, with it’s quiet bass/brass intro setting the mood for Styffe’s lyrical alto. Building tension and release with changing time signatures, Hopkins delivers a robust performance and confidently guides the ensemble through this hearty offering. ‘Welcome to Babylon’ is a full orchestral piece based on a sultry Latin feel and woven into a rich musical tapestry. Michelli’s mallets elicit a mystical nature, while Farrugia’s piano burns down like the desert sun. ‘White Pants, Red Suspenders’ takes a Big Band approach to swing blues, with Styffe’s alto deftly moving in and around the melody, and Steve Brown’s muted cornet on the end a delightful addition. Delivered at a brisk swing tempo, ‘Four Year Old Steps’ showcases the quartet members, with each taking articulate solos over the changes. Bassist Hopkins trades 8’s with drummer Michelli, and a touch of Latin puts the finish on the end. The final three tracks, ‘Rebellion’, ‘Allegiances’, and ‘A New Age’, are taken from a project of five movements from ’Sketches of Upper Canada’, which the artist wrote to celebrate the founding settlers of southern Ontario. These tracks are splendid examples of the composer’s ability to integrate the two distinct natures of the music ensembles, with the quartet telling the story as the orchestra frames the message.

Duncan Hopkins adds an inspired voice to Canadian jazz composition with his masterful ‘Red & Brassy’, offering a fascinating glimpse into the past, present and future in one invigorating musical breath.

For more information visit www.duncanhopkins.com
Cindy McLeod Feb 14th, 2006

The Toronto Star

Duncan Hopkins
Red & Brassy (Indie)
***1/2

Bassist Hopkins pulls off an unlikely crossover project here with his jazz quartet matched with the 27-strong Canadian Staff Band of The Salvation Army under Kevin Hayward. It's a live recording of a concert a year ago at the Glenn Gould Studio that underscores Hopkins' compositional talents, as well as an arranger, bandleader and solo performer. His father was a keen Sally Ann follower, so Hopkins' 10-piece program is not so strange. It leaves room for a band performance ("On The March") and two mainstream jazz songs played by altoist Roy Styffe, pianist Adrean Farrugia and drummer Anthony Michelli. Where jazzmen and brass bandsmen meet, the result is excellent, often invigorating integration, no hint of awkwardness or a forced sonic marriage. Particularly effective are "The Eminent Emigrant," the post 9/11 requiem " Eternal Rest Grant Unto Them," and three of the five segments of "Sketches of Upper Canada."
Geoff Chapman Jan 26, 2006

The London Guardian

Nikki Iles - concert review ****
Royal Festival Hall - London, England

The ascent of Nikki Iles, the diminutive British jazz pianist, to class act status has been a gradual business. But Iles now ranks with the best in the country for spontaneous invention, sympathetic listening, and creative development of a modern piano tradition that embraces Bill Evans, John Taylor and Paul Bley. she has just begun a British tour with the two Canadian partners - bassist Duncan Hopkins and drummer Anthony Michelli- from her Everything I Love album in 2002. For this first gig, Iles also invited saxophonist Stan Sulzmann along for the ride.

A typical John Taylor composition, with a ruminative top line and a skipping, Chick Corea-like Latin sub-theme, opened the proceedings. Sulzmann, on soprano saxophone, sounded a little tentative at first, the soprano’s wistful sound drifting in the big, busy space. But with her usual unerring ear, Iles came in after him with a sharp contrast, rumbling her way into an eventually effervescent solo with a fast-moving overture in the low register. Sulzmann’s Silver and Gold, brought him into the frame much more, with a forceful Stan Getzian solo on tenor sax.

Kenny Wheeler’s classic Everybody’s Song But My Own began as a smoky slow-burn and eased into swing, with the excellent Michelli catching the composers trademark ambiguity by holding the pulse in tantilising suspended animation at times, galvanising it with a rattle of tom-toms at others. Bassist Hopkins delivered a solo of fluid, seamless variations on the same tune. Iles’ compositional ingenuity and playful affection for quirkier corners of the tradition surfaced on the uptempo Unit 6 , a zigzagging bop conundrum that sounded like Lennie Tristano spliced with Thelonious Monk.
John Fordham March 14, 2005

Wholenote

EVERYTHING I LOVE
NIKKI ILES TRIO (Duncan Hopkins, bass; Anthony Michelli, drums)
Basho Records SRCD 5-2

Bill Evans’ intermingling conception of the always-evolving jazz trio is the framework used by this Anglo/Canadian combo (England’s Nikki Iles with Canadians bassist Duncan Hopkins and drummer Anthony Michelli, recorded in Toronto); two of the ten selections are his, and he did definitive versions of both the title tune and I Loves You, Porgy.

Further, it is fair to say that John Taylor and Enrico Pieranunzi (wonderful pianist/composers too little known on this side of the Atlantic) are close Evans acolytes. Iles plays Taylor’s Ambleside Days (and even more pointedly) Evansong; and Pieranunzi must have had you-know-who in mind while writing Don’t Forget The Poet.

After all is said and done Ms. Iles is not simply an Evans copyist though and it’s on her own tunes that her individuality is best heard: the angular, surging Fly’s Dilemma, and the out-of-tempo, musing So To Speake, dedicated to altoist Martin Speake.She plays with an admirable clarity at all times, but can rumble as well as caress.

These three make not just a jamming band, but a real trio, working on tour in the U.K. They play with an easy assurance and trust in each other.

This CD is one for those who despair about the current music being represented as Jazz: Raymond Chandler, in a novel’s preface said something like “Only a hack tries to break the mould....A true pro tries to go a s big as you can within the fold.
Ted O'Reilly Vol 9 #9 Jun 1’04 -Jul 7 ‘04

The Guardian

Nikki Iles, Everything I Love
(Basho Records)

You'll struggle to find Nikki Iles in the jazz reference books, but the Bedfordshire-born pianist has been a discreetly eloquent presence on the UK scene since the 1990s - often as an accompanist, whose understated, Bill Evans-inflected phrasing would generally be devoted to coaxing expressiveness out of others, but at the same time leave you wanting to hear more of her. Iles recorded a number of albums after 1996 with saxophonists Stan Sulzmann and Martin Speake and singer Tina May, but this trio disc, under her leadership, represents the clearest opportunity yet to hear her musicality in full flow.

It's a largely conventional acoustic jazz piano set, recorded with Canadians Duncan Hopkins (bass) and Anthony Michelli (drums). The repertoire includes Cole Porter and the Gershwins, two Bill Evans and two John Taylor pieces. The relationships within the trio are fluid and alert - at times the band suggests a more swinging version of Brad Mehldau approach, if without Mehldau's contrapuntal genius.

The context may be familiar, but the sharpness of the execution and the sense of purpose certainly aren't. Hear Iles's ringing, Paul Bley-like chords on her thundering original Fly's Dilemma, the rhythm section's urgent insistence under the title track, the pianist's mesmerising riff-dance on John Taylor's Ambleside Days, or the tender overlaying of harmonies and chord voicings on Bill Evans's Your Story. A formidable UK jazz presence rising to her full height.
John Fordham Friday February 6, 2004

There has been a fair amount of controversy in the jazz press of late concerning the relative merits of European and North American jazz, the defenders of the latter complaining about the ill-concealed chauvinism of the former’s champions, so it should be stressed that the European provenance of all the albums below is the result of accident rather than design: jazz is a universal language - some would say a musical state of mind rather than a rigid stylistic category - spoken with increasing fluency, if in intriguingly varied regional dialects, wherever the spirit of improvisation affects musicians.

The latest release involving UK saxophonist Martin Speake might have been specially made to illustrate this point: two Canadians, drummer Anthony Michelli and bassist Duncan Hopkins - each sufficiently attracted by Speake’s sound and overall approach to go to considerable lengths to play and record with him - and former duo partner, pianist Nikki Iles, form a superbly cohesive but pleasingly informal-sounding quartet on Secret (Basho SRCD 3-2). Compositional duties - the odd standard and a single Jobim tune aside - are shared by all save the drummer, and the resulting set is an absorbingly rich and varied affair, drawing as much on the plangent lyricism often associated with the ECM label as on the more straightahead, airily intelligent yet punchy swing of the West Coast jazz personified by the likes of Bud Shank and Warne Marsh. The band’s scrupulous attention to nuances of tone and timbre is not allowed to compromise either the fierceness of their interaction or the full-bodied power of their overall sound, and with both Speake and Iles in sparkling soloing form, this is a deeply satisfying, thoroughly entertaining album, impeccably performed.
Chris Parker July, 2003

Double Bassist

Sense and Sensibility
Duncan Hopkins is as at home with traditional jazz as he is with the avant-garde. Paul Cutts meets a bassist whose music marries experimental form to good old-fashioned feeling.

Coventry has never sounded so interesting. The hard-edged Midlands town has emerged on the album SECRET as a multi-layered, modernist melting pot, a mirage of drums, piano, alto saxophone and restless bass. It’s bassist Duncan Hopkins’ idiosyncratic and imaginative evocation of the place, a scurry of syncopation and out-of-kilter time signatures. Yet it’s held together by a highly developed sense of structure and real harmonic intelligence....

...This marked a period of intense study with some of the leading jazz bassists in the world. ‘I won an award from the Canada Arts Council to go to Copenhagen to study with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen,’ Hopkins explains. ‘Looking back now, I think I might have wasted some of my youth - but that year in Denmark was fabulous. NHØP has such a different style on the instrument, the fingerings, everything. Although I didn’t want to be him or sound like him - I want to be myself - it gave me a real insight.’

It was in Copenhagen that Hopkins also met Red Mitchell, one of the most unorthodox and inimitable jazz bassists of all time. ‘I just loved everything about Red’s style and his music,’ Hopkins enthuses. ‘It was something I will never forget. He tunes in fifths, so his fingering wasn’t much help to me at all! But he had such a unique voice - and his piano playing and writing was all as one. That really said something to me about how you need to have an individual voice, to be true to yourself. Red was great and encouraged me to experiment with tuning in fifths and to write and pursue new music.’

Not content with two leading teachers, Hopkins decided a move to New York for some lessons with Dave Holland would be useful, too. ‘Someone like Dave Holland is constantly stretching musical boundaries,’ Hopkins elaborates. ‘It’s forced me to study music more closely. It was Dave who told me to compose to improve my own playing, and encouraged me to write in odd time signatures’...
Other inspirational figures for Hopkins include Kenny Wheeler, the jazz trumpeter and frequent collaborator...
Paul Cutts Summer 2003

Double Bassist Magazine

Brand New and now available -
A major article on Duncan Hopkins including half a dozen photos and two pieces of music including a transcription of one of his bass solos.
Samples of the magasine are available at www.classicalworldofmusic.com
Subscriptions and single purchases are available on-line or through the subscriptions department.
phone: +44 141 302 7700, fax: +44 141 302 7798.
Paul Cutts Summer 2003 : Number 25

Whole Note Magazine

Make the effort to get this exceptional CD, the product of an improvised Anglo-Canadian quartet. This is the first time that I have heard Britain’s Martin Speake, and he plays with some of the most gorgeous alto sax sounds in contemporary jazz, even when venturing into Ornette territory. Speake’s musical route verges on the cinematic; a rock-loving high school dropout who went on to classical saxophone training and ultimately became a professor at the Royal Academy of Music. His playing encompasses the mainstream, free improvisation and Indian classical music.

Speake’s Canadian partner in crime is Toronto bassist Duncan Hopkins, an economist who first picked up the bass at age of 18 and mastered his craft via old-fashioned mentoring with some of the top folks in the business. He met Speake while the latter was teaching at the Banff Centre. Ten years later, while on a family visit to the U.K., Hopkins contacted Speake out of the blue. Speake suggested that they invite Candian drummer Anthony Michelli, who was touring the U.K. as a part of Steve Koven’s trio, into the picture. The quartet was rounded out with British pianist Nikki Iles.

Secret focuses on compositions by each of the four quartet members, and the sparks fly. Iles’ plaintive Westerley, in particular, is utterly haunting and captivating. What is most impressive about the album is how the four members of this brand new partnership are so finely attuned to each other’s musical minds and nimble fingers.
Phil Ehrensaft on SECRET Oct 8-Nov 7, 2002

The Guardian

Martin Speake / Nikki Iles / Duncan Hopkins / Anthony Michelli
Secret (Basho Records) ****
When four jazz musicians manage to record almost 80 minutes of memorable music in five hours straight, it's likely that magic was in the air. This set was put together in October 2000 at the end of a UK tour for the quartet led by alto saxophonist Martin Speake and pianist Nikki Iles, and it has precisely the open fluency you might expect when four sophisticated improvisers have had plenty of chances to figure out how their partners tick. Speake, the UK's Lee Konitz in his bop-rooted expressiveness, and the formidably creative Iles are joined by Canadians Duncan Hopkins on bass and Anthony Michelli on drums. Most of the compositions are originals, with Antonio Carlos Jobim's Luiza and the standard The Thrill Is Gone, on which Speake plays with a resigned spaciousness and haunting evocativeness of
tone. But for all its coolness, this set doesn't lack strength or vigour - as you can hear on Hopkins' cool-boppish Oncology and on Iles's cop-show groover Fly's Dilemma. Not music to blow you out of your socks, nor intended to - but very intelligent, sharp and very musical.
June 2002

The Toronto Star

Anyone attending the thrusting session in the big tent engineered by bassist Duncan Hopkins earlier in the evening, with its searing solos from brassmen John MacLeod and Mike Malone and fiery alto work by Roy Styffe, would have understood how the sound of jazz is moving forward....Here the writing was sophisticated while keeping emotions up front, teetering on the edge of the avant-garde perhaps, but a fine example of Toronto talent at full creative tilt.
Geoff Chapman June 28, 2000

SOCAN

Kindred Spirits is one sumptuous disc!

The Globe and Mail

There's something of Dave Holland, among other select influences, in both the playing and band of Canadian bassist Duncan Hopkins. The St. Catharines, Ont. Musician's strengths lie in his writing and sense of textural organization, which show him willing to stretch, push or otherwise challenge style and format (not to mention his musicians personalities), whatever the risk of generating a degree of congestion in the music as a result. His Toronto band, with trumpet and flugelhorn player John MacLeod, alto saxophonist Ray Styffe, pianist Dave Restivo and drummer Kevin Dempsey, give his eight pieces on Kindred Spirits a range of performances, from uptight (Forlorne) and somewhat forced (May Mourning) to quite fluid (Oncology, Ben's Bounce). So the quintet's consistency is open to question here, but that is about all.
Mark Miller on 'Kindred Spirits' May 11/96

Cadence Magazine

While absolute standards and preconceived expectations are always dangerous, particularly in an artform relying on extemporaneous inspiration, one "truth" I observe is that Kenny Wheeler is always worth hearing. And so he is. Bassist (and presumably Canadian) Hopkins has put together a skilled and inspired ensemble on Le Rouge. As expected, Wheeler plays with taste, imagination and spirit. Trombonist Hasselback also impresses as do the leaders urgent, pulsing lines. With Sherwood's agile spiraling piano inventions providing harmonic support, the band cooks more often than not. The recording is laid back but dynamic: a fine studio job. From almost any angle, this CD is excellent.
Carl Baugher on 'Le Rouge' June 1994