The acorn was a discussion between Jonathan Nason and John Bowman, two residents of the village of Kings Bromley, a few miles north of Lichfield in Staffordshire. The sapling was a modest jazz club which first met a year ago [...]
While some well-established city jazz venues may be struggling to keep their doors open, here’s an encouraging story from an unexpected corner of the country. Kings Bromley, a small village in Staffordshire, held its inaugural jazz club night in March [...]
Mark Murphy… Jon Hendricks… Donald Fagen… For those of us not far from author Peter Jones in both years and taste, it’s a perfectly logical sequence. The title of Jones’ first foray into musical biography was This Is Hip: The [...]
As a descriptor the label “jazz fusion band – it appears in the Yellowjackets’ Wikipedia entry – has always struck me as limiting and a touch inappropriate. Sure, they were clearly in the fusion neck of the woods when they made [...]
Jazz musicians Cassie Kinoshi, Soweto Kinch, Yazz Ahmed and Tim Garland are among composers each receiving Paul Hamlyn awards of £25,000 with no strings attached. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation has announced it is making 20 awards of £25,000 to a [...]
The wooden Maridalen church, a former mission house from the 1880s, lies in a valley north of Oslo and not far from the shores of Lake Maridal. Saxophonist Anders Hefre, trumpeter Jonas Kilmork Vemøy and double bassist Andreas Rødland Haga [...]
This album is the result of a session in Sofienberg Church in Oslo at the beginning of March 2020, which Håkon Kornstad subsequently mixed and produced in his home studio. Whether the original recordings were intended to form part of [...]
For this, the third and last of our year-end lists, UKJN contributors and friends remember their favourite recordings of 2018. Tom Barford – Bloomer (Edition). Before this record was released, saxophonist Tom Barford told me to stop worrying about how [...]
For this, the second of our three year-end lists, UKJN contributors and friends remember their best gigs of 2018. Natacha Atlas, St George’s Bristol. A car crash on the M4 meant no sound check, no rehearsal time – but one [...]
The first of our three annual lists consists of nominations by UKJN writers and other friends in the industry for musician or band of the year: Iain Ballamy Quartet. A very personal choice, unrecorded (so far), sporadically gigging, a regular [...]
