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“What are you reading?”, a visitor asks? Oh, a book about Pat Metheny (visitor looks blank) explaining how his music works. Visitor: “Well, if the music needs someone to explain how it works, then obviously it doesn’t really work the [...]
While jazz traces its roots to Louisiana, the story of the music’s evolution is typically told along the lines of a melding of European and African musical influences. Congo Square and the bordellos of Storyville are frequently and superficially depicted [...]
Jazz, even lovers of the music may agree, is a minority sport. (Yes, I know the Ezras won the Mercury Prize, but still…). By the same token, jazz journalism is more marginal still. If the number of people making some [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Early Jazz: A Concise Introduction, from Its Beginnings through 1929, by Fumi Tomita. (SUNY Press, 232pp. Book review by Andy Hamilton) Fumi Tomita teaches jazz at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was active as a bass player in the [...]
I suppose there must have been other moments in life when I felt as giddily happy as seeing Sonny Rollins dive head first into a heroic opening solo on “Falling in Love with Love” at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in [...]
“When we think of ‘jazz’, we’re thinking of music that was, from its beginnings, a radical act of resistance against some of the most brutal and dangerous parts of American life.” Chris Searle quotes these words of US pianist Cory [...]
Collective biographies should happen more often than they do. They afford escape from fetishising individual achievement, a richer portrayal of a milieu. And they demand a discipline that biographers of individuals – serving up doorstep-sized volumes stuffed with detail in [...]
Some years ago, a London magazine commissioned a piece describing the Jewish contribution to jazz from journalist Mike Gerber. As he explains in the introduction to his new book, he diligently went in search of high quality leads, and rang [...]
