Eventually is guitarist Jacob Young’s fourth album as a leader for ECM Records. Following previous recordings with ECM stalwarts including pianist Marcin Wasilewski’s trio, trumpeter Mathias Eick and the late drummer Jon Christensen, this release finds Young’s quiet, subtle style [...]
It is always a treat to hear a new album from Swiss-Albanian singer Elina Duni. Duni was born in Tirana, Albania, and has become known for her sensitive performance of traditional Albanian songs. Her earlier albums on ECM Records featured [...]
Guitarist David Preston has assembled an excellent quartet here, comprising Kevin Glasgow (electric bass), Sebastian Rochford (drums) and Kit Downes (keyboards). The opening track, “O. Winston”, immediately proclaims that the album means business, with Glasgow’s bass suggesting a hint of [...]
Joe Lovano has, quite simply, been one of America’s most accomplished tenor saxophonists for over 40 years, and after a long stint on Blue Note he mostly records on ECM Records where his style is now more than ever at [...]
The album London Brew is the culmination of a project featuring leading London-based musicians responding to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew on its 50th anniversary in 2020. The previous year, American publisher and executive producer Bruce Lampcoy had noticed that Electric [...]
It was in 2014 Sami-Norwegian saxophonist Mette Henriette recorded her debut album in Oslo for ECM (review link below). It was a truly impressive double CD of thirty-five mostly meditative tunes, notable also for the fact that there were so [...]
Over the last two decades, Dhafer Youssef has been one of Europe’s most reliably intriguing and innovative musicians. He combines proficiency on the oud with a truly remarkable voice that swoops through the octaves. Although his chosen instrument and singing [...]
Drummer Tom Skinner has been a significant force in British jazz for over a decade. He first came to the public eye as a member of Hello Skinny; then later as co-leader and drummer with the enormously successful Sons of [...]
For his first full-length studio album for Ubuntu Music, Portrait, London-based pianist and composer Bruno Heinen has gathered together a truly outstanding quartet he calls The W. As he told Sebastian in an interview in May 2022 (LINK BELOW), this [...]
In 2019, during what now seems a very different age and a long time ago before the pandemic, tenor saxophonist Dave O’Higgins and then relative newcomer guitarist Rob Luft recorded an album of songs written by John Coltrane and Thelonious [...]
