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The Terence Collie Quartet’s gig at Pizza Express in Dean Street on Saturday 4 May had attracted a substantial audience. Bearing in mind that it was 1pm on a Saturday, and on a rare warm sunny day in London, it [...]
Here’s a paradox. Strangely, it seems easier to tell the story of Shabaka Hutchings’s music, and of the recent radical departure in it, by explaining what it isn’t rather than what it is. First, cast an eye over last night’s [...]
It just took a swaying bass line that immediately made bodies move in sympathy, pattering brushes on the snare leaning on the offbeat, a rising and falling pentatonic pattern with trumpet and trombone blending with a signature harmony, and the [...]
“I think the jazz community seriously underrates Makoto [Ozone],” wrote Gary Burton in his 2013 autobiography ‘Learning to Listen’, “probably because he is from Japan, and even though he comes to the US and Europe regularly for concerts.” In the [...]
The final day of the Parabola programme was a good demonstration of the variety and vitality that this venue has always delivered. Very few people will have liked the whole programme, but nobody will have left without hearing something inspiring. [...]
As part of the celebrations of European Capital of Culture in Bad Ischl and the Salzkammergut region, the beautiful Austrian equivalent of the Lake District, pianist Roberto Magris from Trieste brought together an international group of like-minded musicians (or “long-standing [...]
Marking the centenary of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and pianist Makoto Ozone became the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s latest guests in a performance of Tommy Smith‘s re-orchestration of the landmark composition. Gershwin’s was one of the first works to bring together [...]
Brad Mehldau (*)’s reconnection with Jorge Rossy, the drummer in his piano trio for a decade until the early noughties, goes along with a reconsideration of some of his older writing – looking back at it, perhaps, and finding it [...]
One of the regular highlights of the Cheltenham programme is this project, where students from the Birmingham Conservatoire are joined by students from overseas. This year, those students came from Siena and Hamburg. Several of the participants in this project [...]
In complete contrast to Friday, Saturday in Cheltenham dawned in bright with warm sunshine, much to the delight of the audiences. The Saturday Parabola programme featured five very different events, starting with the regular student project which Cheltenham produced with [...]
