Five Countries - Edition press release

Edition Records presents

“Five Countries” – Neil Yates

Neil Yates (Trumpet, Flugelhorn, Tenor Horn, Whistle, Voice, Loops) 

Zsolt Bende (Classical Guitar)

Cormac Byrne (Bodhran, Cahon, Pandhera, Cymbals, Additional Percussion)



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Trumpeter Neil Yates makes his EDITION Records debut with Five Countries, one of the most beautiful and wide-ranging records you will hear this year. With Romanian guitarist Zsolt Bende and Irish percussionist Cormac Byrne, Five Countries features a set of compositions that crosses national and musical boundaries with consummate ease and confidence.

Why Five Countries?

It describes these musicians places of birth, places of migration and places of domicile. Each musician feels a responsibility to the music of their birth lands
and to those where they now chose to live. More than that these three artists know that music, like people, will migrate and, in turn, enrich those peoples and cultures they make contact with.
That’s how jazz was born.

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The music of Five Countries migrates –

like traditional musicians taking their music from Ireland and Scotland to America or from Romania and Hungary to Spain. It takes the sounds of their Five Countries to places and cultures familiar and less so. Songs like Flutter and Flight or the gentle dancing of Izabella’s Dream (for Bende’s lovely daughter) might carry you to Spain with their echoes of flamenco. Slipreel/Thyme And Tide might remind you first of a bar you know in Galway but hints as well towards North Africa. Remember too that sailors carried these tunes far and wide. Even a tune with its own defining sense of time and place like Storm on the Irish Sea swirls at times like a Mediterranean squall.

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​This is music of quality borne of passion by three musicians each with their own personally crafted and uniquely honed sound. While Neil Yates performed on Dave Stapleton’s ‘five star’ album Catching Sunlight (EDN1005), Cormac Byrne and Zsolt Bende are new to EDITION Records. Their talents will be reaching new ears and finding new demand for their rare skills.

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Let Five Countries take you walking through Frozen Forest near Budapest in the depths of a severe and unforgiving Hungarian winter. Its icy silence is cleansing too. Remember that this place has been owned in history by many empires – Mongol, Ottoman, Austrian and Soviet. Know it as place where roads cross and people come to trade, to work, to escape persecution or just a better life. Listen then to Freedoms Lost, not so much a lament as a refusal to accept the loss of things most precious – the right to be free and to associate with others without fear. Five Countries is the music of a world already there – if only we will make it happen..

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 "Rainy Harbour"

Five Countries - Live at London Jazz Festival​

Five Countries - SOUNDCLOUD​