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Tales of the Skald is the first album from drummer Stephen Henderson‘s quintet, Modern Vikings, which has existed with unchanged personnel since 2018. The group includes his band mates Fergus McCreadie and David Bowden from the award-winning Fergus McCreadie Trio [...]
Having seen this duo’s YouTube videos and deciding not to read this album’s press release on first listen, putting this record on was a big surprise. Those early videos were stripped back, piano and tap with some left-hand bass and, [...]
Where do they serve the best pizza? In London. Don’t laugh. First let me tell you why: it’s because it is ‘spiced’ with jazz. Since 1969, Pizza Express on Dean Street, founded by Peter Boizot, has combined the roles of [...]
Like many who first heard the voice of Milton Nascimento on Wayne Shorter’s 1975 album Native Dancer, it was a moment hard to forget: that infinitely flexible, highly-pitched instrument whose sensitivity and sensuality seemed burned into the consonants of each [...]
Perpetual Mutations is an instrumental album of the highest quality; it doesn’t waver. I became aware of Antoine Fafard’s music through his electric bass playing and work with drummer Gary Husband on the 2016 album Sphere. What I wasn’t expecting [...]
Lakecia Benjamin’s new set, as the name suggests, is a live re-tooling of music from her much lauded, triple Grammy-nominated 2023 album Phoenix (Whirlwind Recordings). Riffing on the music from that set, she weaves in additional influences, brings on guests [...]
Joni Mitchell has been famous for almost sixty years. Her early albums such as Blue, Court & Spark and Hejira soundtracked the lives of many who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though only one single, “Big Yellow [...]
On No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin, bassist and band leader Meshell Ndegeocello distils the personal and artistic influence that James Baldwin has had on her into a seventeen-track set that reverberates with the themes of the writer’s [...]
