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Peter Slavid attended the concerts on Saturday 5 October at this year’s Newcastle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music. He writes: The penultimate day of this, now well established festival saw a fine triple bill in the wonderful Literary and [...]
Bernd Zimmermann and Susanne Pohlen’s New Colours Festival is now in its third year. The promoters – who also present the monthly series FineArtJazz – are determined to show that Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr does have interesting things to offer, [...]
Samara Joy’s eponymous first album (Whirlwind, 2021) was one of the most impressive debuts by an artist that I’ve ever heard. It had everything – Joy’s incredible voice, the extraordinary guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the swinging rhythm section of double bassist [...]
This was the concert as conundrum; Kit Armstrong and Michael Wollny are two very different pianists. Alfred Brendel has praised Kit Armstrong’s “understanding of the great piano works that combines freshness and subtlety, emotion and intellect”, whereas Richard Williams has [...]
Luminescence is an ongoing collaboration between saxophonist Tommy Smith and the Edinburgh-based visual artist Maria Rud. As Smith improvises, Rud paints, the ever-changing images projected for the audience to see. In his accompanying notes, Smith says two other factors are [...]
What a wonderful opportunity for the Royal Academy of Music jazz students this was: a few days’ work culminating in this one-off concert with the double bass and composer legend that is Dave Holland. Now, unbelievably, 78, the evergreen maestro’s [...]
Wakefield Jazz have been hosting top quality gigs for over 30 years at their Wakefield Sports Club home, and Friday night’s event was no exception. Following a successful performance at The Vortex on Wednesday, Alexander Hawkins and Marco Colonna brought [...]
This, the opening gig of the 2024 Southend Jazz Festival set an assured, good-time tone with a superbly played evening of predominantly pre-bop blues standards and straightahead jazz blowing. Trumpeter Pete Horsfall‘s Mighty Like The Blues project is a quintet [...]
Peter Bernstein commented “There’s an old joke in show business. You play a venue twice – once on the way up and once on the way down”. Fortunately for us, he had miscalculated and this was actually the third time [...]
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 [...]
