The true finale to the 2022 London Jazz Festival was an evening of completely new music from the mind of New Jersey-born drummer, composer and bandleader Mark Holub, at his spiritual home in the newly refurbished Vortex Jazz Club. The [...]
UKJN provides the most extensive review coverage of the EFG London Jazz Festival. By far. This year we will have done over thirty of them. We have also asked our writers and other friends (*) to comment in brief on [...]
It was Dhafer Youssef’s birthday. “Don’t remind me,” smiled the Tunisian oud-player and vocalist, with winsome humour- he didn’t want to “celebrate his oldness.” But the audience showed their devotion to him with Happy Birthday anyway, and Youssef responded with [...]
The evening started with a bundle of promises as singer Emma Smith, vibrant in shocking pink and singer/trumpeter Georgina Jackson in electric blue, bounded onto a stage already occupied by a 16-strong big band buzzing with energy and primed to [...]
Don Cherry was a pioneer. After his work with Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s and 60s, he went on to play with John Coltrane and the New York Contemporary Five as well as recording two outstanding albums on Blue [...]
New York native Catherine Russell performed in London for the first time at Dean Street Pizza Express on the final night of this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, bringing to a close more than fifty gigs in their three London [...]
There is certainly a great deal of fine music on the international jazz scene – but once in a while a performance is so overwhelmingly wonderful that you know it will stay in the mind forever. And this was the [...]
As LJF celebrated its thirtieth birthday with a sold-out show of electronic jazz (or ‘jazz-dance’) at the 6000-capacity venue Printworks on Saturday (REVIEWED HERE), another jazz milestone was being celebrated in more intimate fashion in Clerkenwell: the 20th anniversary of [...]
The Norwegian Daniel Herskedal may be the most Nordic of all the fine players Scandinavian jazz has brought us in recent decades. The sound of his two instruments – his bass trumpet somehow inherently elegiac, his tuba punchier but still [...]
When Melody Gardot last performed at the Royal Festival Hall, in 2018 (*), Guy Barker was up on stage with her. This year he’s two seats in front of us, part of the enthusiastic audience welcoming this fabulous singer back [...]
