Flashback to the 80s: Courtney Pine in the Jazz Warriors charming the audience with his Coltrane sound and sharp suits. The 90s: Pine persuading the audience to listen to his ‘new music’, with hiphop, DJs and scratch. Fast forward to [...]
The fierce heat in Soho Square felt as if we’d just stepped off a plane, but Ronnie’s was cool and inviting as ever. Pianist Lynne Arriale looked very cool and composed too, as she played The Nearness of You with [...]
How to descibe Lalah Hathaway‘s voice? Rachel Ferrelle said it’s like ‘rich, melted organic chocolate’. And the devoted audience at the Jazz Cafe were eating out of her hand, wanting to dance, but also not wanting to miss a note. [...]
‘Donate to the future of jazz,’ quipped Ernie Watts, promoting his new album Oasis, ‘and receive a free CD.’ From the gig’s opening notes we were racing with him and his remarkable band on an exhilarating journey into what felt [...]
Jonathan Kreisberg‘s band is on a European tour- he told us they’d been travelling by snowmobile and donkey, but last night’s gig was just up a tightly-winding staircase in an atmospheric pub room . There was a full house and [...]
The iconic Oxford Playhouse was home to several Jazz Festivals in the early 90s. This time the Jazz Festival (which receives no subsidy) co-hosted this extraordinary band with the theatre itself. Charlie Parker and the be-boppers wrote new tunes to [...]
Trumpeter Abram Wilson brought a little bit of New Orleans to Oxfords’s very English Randolph Hotel. By the end of the show, the audience were on their feet cheering as Abram walked out still soloing and the band carried on [...]
The magnificent Randolph Hotel (where Larkin took tea with friends, and – some people fantasize – Alice in Wonderland could have murdered Inspector Morse) was the perfect setting for ‘Larkin’s Jazz ‘ and afternoon tea. Some of the musicians even [...]
Cycling up the hill in the rain (in Oxford style) to the gig, I was thinking about the band’s name- it suggested something eccentric and English, like a Django Bates album title, and wasn’t sure what to expect. I arrived [...]
Irrational exuberance. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it was a jazz musician who first came up with the phrase. Alan Greenspan, the Julliard School alumnus and former band colleague of Stan Getz and Johhny Mandel first used it in December 1996…when he was [...]
