Jack Body - Press

"Jack Body is innovative, exploratory, serious and light-hearted - often all at the same time."

(Rod Biss, Sunday Star Times)

"The programme's apotheosis was Jack Body's interminable Fourteen Stations, for which [pianist] Poynton changed his clothes, removed his shoes and socks, played for a while with his hands behind his back, donned black gloves, and stared at his shadow on the wall."

(Conrad Wilson, The Herald)

"World music and new-age spaciousness cohabit in Jack Body's Arum Manis…..The amplified quartet weaves a contrapuntal web around the taped fiddle, and matches its rough-hewn, abrasive tone…."

(Allan Kozin, New York Times)

["……in Carmen Dances] Body makes demands above and beyond the merely instrumental. The musicians clapped….and ululated jungle style, with primal zest. In the final bars, all is vanquished by a bleating mobile phone."

(William Dart, New Zealand Herald)

"I'm not alone in rating this Wellingtonian as the finest of our currently active composers."

(Ian Dando, New Zealand Listener)

"I confess that the Jack Body work in this quartet concert, the third of his pieces which I heard in the course of this festival, didn't please me any more than the other two had done."

(Geoffrey King, Music in New Zealand)

"Body is a thought-provoking composer as he showed at the International Festival of Arts with Alley, but he is also, by far, our cleverest composer, and his fantastic ear found the ideal result for a rarely-to-be-repeated occasional piece."

(John Button, Dominion)

"Jack Body is the world's greatest undiscovered composer"

(Other Minds Festival, San Francisco)

[Of Invocation] "Subtlety, calm, ecstasy, beguiling Island rhythms, it was a rich concoction over which brandy was poured and set audaciously alight."

(Lindis Taylor, Evening Post)

"Jack Body's 15-minute fire dance, Pulse….was a full-frontal representation of its name, a great concrete mixer of a work into which fragments of Berlioz and Beethoven were deliberately thrown. It was, of its sort, a virtuoso showpiece, based on the principle that too much is not enough."

(Conrad Wilson, The Herald)