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A new restaurant and live music venue offering “jazz, soul, gospel, reggae and much more”, Soul Mama, will open next month at The Gantry Hotel, Stratford with an opening season programme which includes Yellowjackets (3 Nov, two houses) and Bill [...]
Where do they serve the best pizza? In London. Don’t laugh. First let me tell you why: it’s because it is ‘spiced’ with jazz. Since 1969, Pizza Express on Dean Street, founded by Peter Boizot, has combined the roles of [...]
Like many who first heard the voice of Milton Nascimento on Wayne Shorter’s 1975 album Native Dancer, it was a moment hard to forget: that infinitely flexible, highly-pitched instrument whose sensitivity and sensuality seemed burned into the consonants of each [...]
Perpetual Mutations is an instrumental album of the highest quality; it doesn’t waver. I became aware of Antoine Fafard’s music through his electric bass playing and work with drummer Gary Husband on the 2016 album Sphere. What I wasn’t expecting [...]
Lakecia Benjamin’s new set, as the name suggests, is a live re-tooling of music from her much lauded, triple Grammy-nominated 2023 album Phoenix (Whirlwind Recordings). Riffing on the music from that set, she weaves in additional influences, brings on guests [...]
Joni Mitchell has been famous for almost sixty years. Her early albums such as Blue, Court & Spark and Hejira soundtracked the lives of many who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though only one single, “Big Yellow [...]
On No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, bassist and band leader Meshell Ndegeocello distils the personal and artistic influence that James Baldwin has had on her into a seventeen-track set that reverberates with the themes of the writer’s [...]
The US alto player, cultural omnivore and all-round creative force John Zorn may have been a circus ringmaster in his other life. Invited to showcase multiple projects at Jazzaldia this year, the prolific composer mustered six different combinations from eight [...]
I was in the building when Killer Mike got arrested at the Grammy Awards. Well, sort of: I was in a darkened “war room” at Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena, exhaustedly working the show amid a sea of glowing screens, as [...]
Named after a magic number with both mathematical and mystical significance, 137 is what used to be called a supergroup playing a very contemporary and experimental update on what used to be called jazz-rock. Adrian Utley of Portishead plays guitar; [...]
If the title of this, the debut album by the quartet of London-based saxophonist Sam Norris, suggests that the listener should approach the music with a degree of patience, that wouldn’t begin to reveal the full complexity of the conceit. [...]
After six decades, the annual festival in the breathtaking Basque seaside town San Sebastián (Donostia) has a tried and tested mix in its schedule. Overseas visitors take in a well-judged selection from the US artists on Summer visits to Europe. [...]
MoonDial is the third solo album Pat Metheny has recorded on baritone guitar, of which he’s had three built for him by the renowned Canadian luthier Linda Manzer. (She also built many of his other instruments, including his famous three-necked, [...]
Could this year’s Sarah Vaughan Centenary be the gift which keeps on giving? Zara McFarlane has drawn inspiration from it to produce what is surely the best album of her career, “Sweet Whispers: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan” (links below), so last [...]
BBC Radio Scotland is announcing a second competition for its Young Jazz Musician of the Year. Applications open today 29 July and close on 15 September The press release gives background: “The award is intended to encourage and highlight the wealth [...]
“You think you can outlast the E Street Band?!”, Bruce Springsteen asks incredulously, some three hours and five minutes into the first of two massive shows at Wembley Stadium. “We’ve been doing this for 50 fuckin’ years!”, he bellows. Indeed, [...]
The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and guitarist and composer Miles Okazaki. His new album, Miniature America, released July 19 via Cygnus Recordings, features vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, pianist Matt Mitchell, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, tenor saxophonist/flautist [...]
Gaume Jazz reaches its 40th edition in 2024. Which is all the more impressive because the festival resolutely remains outside the mainstream, and has had the same artistic director, Jean-Pierre Bissot, since the start. It takes place in the village [...]
Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival: Playtime with Byron Wallen, Soweto Kinch Trio, Matthew Kilner Quartet, Laura Jurd Quintet, Norman Willmore Sextet, Tim Garland’s Lighthouse Trio It’s the middle of July, and the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival comes around again: [...]
On this unearthed live recording, Heartcore records delivers a time capsule, transporting the listener to the heady days of 1990s live jazz in New York. Kurt Rosenwinkel delighted audiences every Tuesday during an eight-year residency at Smalls club. This extraordinary [...]
This Proms concert was dedicated to the songs on the three albums that Nick Drake recorded in his short life. It was a fitting tribute to the legacy of his music, 50 years on from his death at the age of 26, [...]
Allow me to suggest why this album, so extrovert, exuberant and life-enhancing, carries a poignant postscript. Sometime during 1968, 70-year-old Louis (always ‘Lewis’, not ‘Lou-ee’) Daniel Armstrong, internationally celebrated as ‘Satchmo’, is warned by doctors that he’s no longer superhuman [...]
Alto saxophonist Sam Braysher has a liking for the less familiar work of the American Songbook composers, a body of music that’s seldom performed in the twenty-first century and rarely heard played by jazz musicians. This doesn’t mean that it [...]
First night in Buxton, and a double bill of Madeline Bell and Judi Jackson. Having interviewed Judi Jackson prior to the Festival (link below), I could already visualise what to expect: barefoot in the likeness of her idol Nina Simone, [...]
South Africa has become a reliable source of emergent jazz talent in the last few years. Blue Note records’ fabled roster now includes artists such as saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane and pianist Nduduzo Makhathini. UK-based players like Shabaka Hutchings have sought [...]
The following is an interview between jazz journalist Morgan Enos and saxophonist, composer and educator Jeff Coffin, currently in Dave Matthews Band, formerly of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. His new album, Only the Horizon, was released 19 July via [...]
I have heard Brigitte Beraha twice in the past few weeks, and can’t help feeling that there is something special going on: if such a thing as perfect singing exists, Brigitte Beraha, on her own terms, is surely getting even [...]
After Ralf Dombrowski’s report of the opening weekend of Suedtirol Festival 2024, Oliver Weindling reports on its closing days Oliver Weindling writes: Suedtirol Festival’s change of artistic directors, from Klaus Widmann, to the present triumvirate of Max von Prest, Roberto [...]
