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All recent Jazz News from around the UK and beyond.
The Drawing Room of Brown’s Hotel in Albermarle Street in the evening is an intimate and wonderfully welcoming space. It’s best known as one of London’s best destinations for tea in the daytime. But in the evening its different: a [...]
This 3-day event was a meeting of 10 musicians, where five from the UK were invited to work with five musicians living in Portugal, as part of the annual festival organised by Jazz ao Centro Clube Coimbra. The event’s imaginative [...]
Here’s one of those warming surprises as the nights draw in: a beautifully measured quartet album that displays a wit and intelligence in its mission to experiment with polyphony while still making for a hugely listenable set. It is also [...]
The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with alto saxophonist, composer, and arranger Alden Hellmuth. Her new album, Good Intentions, featuring guitarist Lucas Kadish, trumpeter Josh Evans, bassist Kanoa Mendenhall, and drummer Timothy Angulo, was released 6 September via [...]
Berlin, Berlin, we’re on our way to Berlin!(*) Every autumn we go to the jazz festival, which was considered for a long time the most important festival in Europe, if not the world. In its early days it was closely [...]
Sunny Jain’s music is a celebration of cultural diaspora, taking inspiration from the scores of Bollywood classics and Spaghetti Westerns, Indian folk traditions, and improvisation. The result? A heady fusion of jazz, rock, and sheer, unbridled energy. A drummer and [...]
When I last heard Sweet Honey in the Rock weaving their vocal magic their guiding light Bernice Johnson Reagon was still a powerful force on stage. Reagon’s death in July this year has added a sober note to the group’s [...]
In 2022, Mexican American saxophonist Diego Rivera was commissioned by Chamber Music America to compose a jazz suite. He drew inspiration from la ofrenda (‘the offering’), namely an altar in a Mexican family’s home to remember loved ones on Las [...]
A new Festival in London! It’s always exciting to witness – and capture through my lens – a fresh addition to the city’s vibrant music scene. The inaugural POSK Festival of Jazz Voice at Jazz Café POSK brought together an [...]
Object Of Unknown Function is multi-intrumentalist Brandon Seabrook’s second solo album, coming ten years after his first, Sylphid Vitalizers. It features Seabrook on an array of instruments, electric and 12-string guitars, vintage banjos and even cassette recordings used as an [...]
On his third outing for the Blue Note label, alto-Sax maestro Immanuel Wilkins serves up his most ambitious record to date. Blues Blood is an expansive suite of tracks woven together by themes of personal and ancestral memory and above [...]
Frontwoman to Hejira, who honour and celebrate the music of Joni Mitchell, with several EPs under her belt, as well as the experience of all kinds of big festivals (Glastonbury, Field Day, Wilderness, Secret Garden Party, Cambridge Folk Festival, Latitude…) [...]
The spotlight shone on Nai Palm as Eventim Apollo welcomed Melbourne-based band Hiatus Kaiyote back to London, in the wake of their fourth studio album “Love Heart Cheat Code” (Brainfeeder/ Ninja Tune) released in June. If, like me, you’ve listened [...]
Scintillating, celebrated Britjazz marvels Empirical call in at Newhampton Arts Centre in Wolverhampton for a keenly awaited gig – with a fresh line-up. The reconfigured band comes to the Midlands minus vibraphone player Lewis Wright, who had been a stalwart [...]
Peter Slavid attended the concerts on Saturday 5 October at this year’s Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music. He writes: The penultimate day of this, now well established festival saw a fine triple bill in the wonderful Literary and [...]
Bernd Zimmermann and Susanne Pohlen’s New Colours Festival is now in its third year. The promoters – who also present the monthly series FineArtJazz – are determined to show that Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr does have interesting things to offer, [...]
Samara Joy’s eponymous first album (Whirlwind, 2021) was one of the most impressive debuts by an artist that I’ve ever heard. It had everything – Joy’s incredible voice, the extraordinary guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the swinging rhythm section of double bassist [...]
Hudson Hall almost wasn’t here. The arts organisation and venue is housed at the historic Hudson Opera House, constructed in 1855, initially as Hudson’s city hall. In 1975, the last cement plant shipped out of town and neglect staked its [...]
“I have a long relationship with Ronnie Scott’s,” remarks vibraphonist Joe Locke, who next plays there with his working American quartet on October 29, one day before the venerable London jazz club celebrates its 65th anniversary. As on his last [...]
This was the concert as conundrum; Kit Armstrong and Michael Wollny are two very different pianists. Alfred Brendel has praised Kit Armstrong’s “understanding of the great piano works that combines freshness and subtlety, emotion and intellect”, whereas Richard Williams has [...]
Sarah Weller is the Head of Music at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London.There are few positions in the UK music industry to equal the authority of her position at one of the leading jazz clubs of Europe. With a multi-faceted [...]
Luminescence is an ongoing collaboration between saxophonist Tommy Smith and the Edinburgh-based visual artist Maria Rud. As Smith improvises, Rud paints, the ever-changing images projected for the audience to see. In his accompanying notes, Smith says two other factors are [...]
What a wonderful opportunity for the Royal Academy of Music jazz students this was: a few days’ work culminating in this one-off concert with the double bass and composer legend that is Dave Holland. Now, unbelievably, 78, the evergreen maestro’s [...]
Wakefield Jazz have been hosting top quality gigs for over 30 years at their Wakefield Sports Club home, and Friday night’s event was no exception. Following a successful performance at The Vortex on Wednesday, Alexander Hawkins and Marco Colonna brought [...]
I was probably only a toddler when I first heard Nelson Riddle. My Grandfather would have Sinatra/Fitzgerald records playing all the time, but it wasn’t until my late teens that I knew him by name. My housemate at music college [...]
This, the opening gig of the 2024 Southend Jazz Festival set an assured, good-time tone with a superbly played evening of predominantly pre-bop blues standards and straightahead jazz blowing. Trumpeter Pete Horsfall‘s Mighty Like The Blues project is a quintet [...]
Peter Bernstein commented “There’s an old joke in show business. You play a venue twice – once on the way up and once on the way down”. Fortunately for us, he had miscalculated and this was actually the third time [...]
The avant-garde has won the battle for jazz history, the critic Phil Freeman observed recently. The 1960s, it’s agreed, saw the loud stirrings of a new approach to jazz. Though disturbing to some at the time, its proponents, such as [...]
Catherine Russell’s duo album with pianist Sean Mason “My Ideal” (Dot Time) from earlier this year is a gem. I reviewed it for The Arts Desk (link below), and have gone on listening to it for pure pleasure, often wondering [...]
Kalpadruma (which means ‘tree of life’ in Indian-origin religions) is an ensemble led by saxophonist/composer Asha Parkinson, a rising star who reached the semi-finals in the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year in 2016, 2018 and 2020, and who [...]
The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and Ropeadope’s CEO, Louis Marks, and president, Fabian Brown. The pair are ringing in the anniversary of this multifarious label with a scrolling multimedia documentary, a series of panel discussions, [...]
“Our aim is that when audiences leave, they feel like they know us and that they’ll come back and see us again.” Top UK swing orchestra Down for the Count is returning to Cadogan Hall with an iconic show on 12 October. Lovers of [...]
