All recent Jazz News from around the UK and beyond.
Please, please will the UK jazz community do something fitting to mark the 80th birthday of Jim Mullen this November. Declare the guitar great a national monument…give him the freedom of a city like Glasgow or London…a gong…a nice tall [...]
The finalists for this year’s Tina May Young Jazz Musician, a competition produced by the Worshipful Company of Musicians, are announced *Immy Churchill * Sylvie Noble * Lucy-Anne Daniels * Emily Masser * Ava Joseph ————————————- The event takes place. [...]
The dreary months of lockdown bore fruit for many musicians, pushing them to seek innovative means of engaging with their followers– and often finding a new, online global audience while so doing. Pianist Emmet Cohen is one such performer: his [...]
Visitors to Europe’s jazz festivals have been finding that the number of UK and UK-based musicians playing has continued to dwindle. An exception is Inntoene. This gem of a boutique festival in the Innviertel region of Upper Austria (nearest town [...]
“My very talented (and slightly crazy) friend Emily Masser is walking 130 miles from Swanage Jazz Festival to Pizza Express Soho in 5 days. She’s doing it to raise money for Nigel Price’s fantastic charity, Grassroots Jazz which does great [...]
The Monheim Triennale in the Rhineland in Northern Germany is a unique festival. It has a three year cycle, consisting of Sound in the first year, in which a number of installations are created; The Prequel in the second year, in which the Signature [...]
In the second of our Love Supreme round-ups, Evie Hill, who was there for the whole festival, picks a few of her favourite acts from the weekend… Another year, another beautiful time at Love Supreme Jazz Festival in East Sussex. [...]
Len Weinreich’s new series starts with a reflection on Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier No matter how hard one blows, the clarinet is not a particularly loud instrument. By 1920, its role in a New Orleans’ jazz band was pretty [...]
It’s always a great pleasure to hear the music of major American jazz stars, and Norway’s Kongsberg Jazz Festival certainly featured a strong contingent, including guitarist John Scofield, organist John Medeski,,drummer Joey Baron and trumpeter Dave Douglas. There was a [...]
The following is jazz journalist Morgan Enos’s interview with flautist, composer, and bandleader Elsa Nilsson. She’s a member of Esthesis Quartet – alongside pianist Dawn Clement, bassist Emma Dayhuff, and drummer Tina Raymond – whose new album, Sound & Fury, [...]
This is the first of UKJN’s two round-up reports of Love Supreme. Adam McCulloch attended the Saturday 5 . We hope to add more photos later… A slight drizzle and scudding low cloud on the South Downs breeze hastened festival [...]
In late 2023, pianist James Pearson was appointed Musician in Residence at Girton College, Cambridge. Pearson is such a whirlwind of activity, it is the kind of news that has been easy to overlook. Never knowingly un-busy, he combines the [...]
Alina Bzhezhinska, the London-based Ukrainian jazz harpist who was inspired by Alice Coltrane, and Tulshi, an Ibiza-based Scottish producer, mix engineer and DJ who specialises in various forms of house music, might seem unlikely collaborators. But in fact Bzhezhinska has [...]
These two live reviews also preview the forthcoming release of albums on the BMC label. In its 10 years of existence, Velvet Revolution, with its unusual line up of saxophone (Daniel Erdmann, the initiator), vibes (Jim Hart), violin (Theo Ceccaldi), [...]
Kai Hoffman, the singer, songwriter and band leader who is also the artistic programmer of the Herne Bay Jazz & Swing Festival is a great proponent of making jazz reach out to everyone. As she says, “In the era of [...]
Ray Brown — His Life and Music, by bassist, podcaster, and author Jay Sweet, paints a vivid and engaging portrait of the jazz world as experienced by a journeyman bassist who rose to become one of the most respected and [...]
This special concert, a highlight of the 2025 Montreal International Jazz Festival, marked the centenary and the unique legacy of the city’s very greatest jazz musician. It was in two parts: First was a small group playing some of Oscar [...]
David Beckett is a good friend of UKJN and has been visiting, writing about and photographing the Montreal Jazz Festival for many years. Here are his thoughts on the 2025 edition: Living just over the American border, in the state [...]
About eight kilometres north of central Paris lies the elegant suburb of Enghien-les-Bains, which has, for the past twenty five years, hosted an annual jazz festival across its various cultural venues (including Europe’s largest floating stage). This year’s festival opened [...]
Singer Marianne McGregor has been making an impact on the jazz scene in Scotland over the past few years. Her debut album Good Morning Warning appeared in 2020, she was voted best vocalist 2021 and 2023 in the Scottish Jazz [...]
“A courageous and inspiring fixture in the summer’s cultural landscape.” Ralf Dombrowski attended the first weekend of the 43rd Suedtirol Jazz Festival Alto Adige. Here is his reflection on what makes this festival uniquely appealing – in an English version [...]
London bassist Dill Katz, who died on 13 June, aged 79, was an exceptional musician who touched profoundly the lives of innumerable listeners and fellow musicians. Katz began his musical life as a guitarist playing in a Shadows-influenced school band, [...]
Eight-piece neo-soul group Orchard performed music from their debut EP Where We’re Calling From – with some absolutely lush vocals from Evie Hill. This versatile band – who will also be at Love Supreme Jazz Festival this weekend – covered [...]
It is an under-explored truism that in a relationship the thing that brings you together is the same thing that will ultimately drive you apart. Thus, we find that with the re-release for the first time on vinyl of Polar [...]
Inspired by Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic series (1944–1983), ACT Music’s founder Siggi Loch started the label’s Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic series in 2012, with the aim of bringing together musicians from jazz and beyond, performing live in the [...]
“I do feel proud of it…It feels like a good representation of me,” says Jim Watson of his new solo piano album, the first disc in his own name since 2001… The millennium had not long arrived when Jim Watson, [...]
Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company has updated and will be reviving its popular Miles Davis concert with a top-flight orchestra. The show was first performed in 2019, and this concert will again see trumpeter Freddie Gavita in a central role… [...]
Since moving to New York in 2014, Israeli-Belgian harmonica player Yotam Ben-Or has established himself as one of the most exciting young artists on the scene there. He has built on the innovations of Toots Thielemans, Howard Levy, Gregoire Maret [...]
The jazz community mourns the sudden passing of South African jazz trumpeter, Fezile “Feya” Faku who passed away on Monday 23 June 2025 at the age of 63. Feya was in Switzerland, about to perform for the week at Basel’s [...]
Here’s an intriguing question. How can an album win an award for Best Traditional Western music at the Western Heritage Awards …and simultaneously be ranked 7th in The Times’ top jazz albums of 2024? The conundrum was answered by Hilary [...]
Scottish keyboardist Peter Johnstone was encouraged to form the quartet that appears on this album by New York-based vibes virtuoso Joe Locke after they worked together on a Scottish National Jazz Orchestra tour. As the SNJO’s resident pianist Johnstone has [...]
Pianist Nico Widdowson has the authenticity and the Yorkshire grit – he was born in Leeds but grew up in North Wales – to bring both humour and anger to the stage. In the polite surroundings of his Worshipful Company [...]
