The other evening I went to a local village hall in one of my favourite old parts of Oxford. It is a fine old building made of beautiful stone and nearby one of the most special Norman Churches in Europe. [...]
Album launches are interesting events: they highlight the excitement of spontaneous live performance at the same time as promoting a painstakingly-worked recording; they are celebrational events which give musicians an opportunity to demonstrate their excitement about a new work, but [...]
As Matthew Halsall obligingly explained at the outset, this sold-out show at the Norwich Arts Centre was a game decidedly of two halves. The first featured pieces mostly from the band’s new album “An Ever Changing View” (2023) his ninth, [...]
This is a superb follow up to Tori Freestone and Alcyona Mick’s acclaimed first duo album, Criss Cross – the lockdown allusion in the title partly accounts for the five-year gap since that release. It seems fair to say that [...]
The Oxford-based singer, singing teacher and jazz writer Alison Bentley died at the age of 65 in the early hours of last Friday morning, after a long illness, at her home in East Oxford. Saxophonist Jamie O’Donnell, a member of [...]
In this new three-part interview series, vocalist Nicky Schrire explores the intersection between the jazz and singer-songwriter genres. A jazz singer-songwriter herself, she often wonders what makes for a successful genre-blending song. And, inversely, when does an attempt at weaving [...]
