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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 [...]
The band Söndörgő is often described as a World Music band, and indeed has won numerous awards under that category. For me its firmly in the tradition of modern European jazz. It combines deep ethnic Balkan roots with exciting improvisation. [...]
The final day of the Parabola programme was a good demonstration of the variety and vitality that this venue has always delivered. Very few people will have liked the whole programme, but nobody will have left without hearing something inspiring. [...]
One of the regular highlights of the Cheltenham programme is this project, where students from the Birmingham Conservatoire are joined by students from overseas. This year, those students came from Siena and Hamburg. Several of the participants in this project [...]
In complete contrast to Friday, Saturday in Cheltenham dawned in bright with warm sunshine, much to the delight of the audiences. The Saturday Parabola programme featured five very different events, starting with the regular student project which Cheltenham produced with [...]
The Cheltenham Jazz Festival has has always presented a wide range of jazz and genres of near-jazz music in the main festival. But for those who like their jazz at the more adventurous end of the spectrum, there is no [...]
In the period starting sometime around 2006, Scandinavian jazz saw an explosion of outstanding power trios. Over the next 10 years we saw the emergence of Bushman’s Revenge, Elephant 9, The Thing, Krokofant and many more. One of the best [...]
Back in the 1960s and 70s the boundaries between jazz and folk were much more blurred than they are today. Jazz, folk and blues acts appeared on the same bill, and the musicians often played in each other’s bands. Probably [...]
In the 1970s, the arrival in London of South African musicians fleeing apartheid, had a radical impact on British jazz. Led by Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath the music combined infectious rhythms, lyrical melodies and ferocious improvisation in ways that [...]
