A packed 606 club welcomed Byron Wallen to the stage on the final Saturday of the 2023 EFG London Jazz Festival with a new musical venture. Wallen is a musical adventurer and singular voice on the UK scene, and his [...]
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the great tenor saxophonist Ben Webster’s death, pianist and arranger Alex Webb and saxophonist Tony Kofi have collaborated on a celebration of Webster’s life and music. The aptly named “Big Ben” premiered at Watford [...]
Promoting their new album on ECM, A Time to Remember, and on the verge of a tour in the Far East, this quartet received an ecstatic reception at this smart basement venue in King Street. Swiss/Albanian Elina Duni is a vocalist [...]
LJN provides by far the deepest and most comprehensive coverage of the EFG London Jazz Festival. And yet we only cover about a tenth of what is on offer. So we asked writers and friends (*) to remember – in [...]
Dance of the Elders is the third ECM trio album led by Austrian guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel. It follows on from Angular Blues (2020), which had the same line-up of Scott Colley on double bass and Brian Blade on drums; and [...]
I’ve been listening to Bitches Brew for half a century, as well as Miles’ subsequent takes on it and, of late, to its fresh and vibrant reimagining by London Brew, which had me looking forward to its much-heralded festival performance. [...]
In this week’s edition of Mondays with Morgan, jazz journalist Morgan Enos reviewed the latest iteration of the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition at NJPAC in Newark, New Jersey. Links to the venue’s and finalists’ websites can be found [...]
Special commissions often have their moment, then vanish these days – often, or perhaps especially, large scale ones. So it was a special pleasure to hear Marius Neset’s formidable Geyser, premiered at the BBC Proms last year, reprised at this [...]
It’s five years since Nikki Iles premiered her Jazz Orchestra at the Vortex in Dalston in the 2018 EFG London Jazz Festival. On that occasion she thanked the venue for her ‘first gig’, albeit she already had a formidable reputation [...]
