I must confess that I came to this album with a good deal of positive bias. Chick Corea’s output in the early-to-mid 1970s was a formative part of my musical education and those classic LP records, the Light as a [...]
Unlike many classical, rock and pop concerts, where the audience is there to hear old favourites, the jazz gig, with improvisation at its heart, is always about ‘the new’. On Wednesday night at the excellent Vortex club in Dalston, an [...]
Just before Christmas, John Fordham of The Guardian judged Face to Face to be one of the 10 best jazz albums of 2023, and he’ll get no argument from me on that. Unlike those big band records which involve several [...]
It’s easy to criticise the BBC for not putting more jazz on radio and TV but whilst the quantity of programmes may be questioned, the quality of their jazz output remains consistently high. Saturday’s edition of J to Z, hosted [...]
Yes, this is THE Dave Stewart – songwriter, producer and guitarist; probably best known for his and Annie Lennox’s pop band, Eurythmics. But readers already half-raising an eyebrow of scepticism, fearing an over-engineered piece of techno-fusion can relax: this album [...]
One of the defining features of the recent EFG London Jazz Festival and this year’s BBC Proms was the impressively broad and inclusive range of composers and performers from right across the musical spectrum. Gone, hopefully forever, are the days [...]
