This nine-piece jazz-fusion collective are midway through a tour marking their fourth album, ‘Find Your Flame’, which has gone down a storm since its release at the beginning of the month. Having seen the group deliver a memorably energetic set [...]
(Jazz) piano, harmonica and accordion: three instruments with distinctive musical associations that don’t immediately suggest themselves as harmonious bedfellows in a chamber music format. How might such divergent instrumental “personalities” work together? Could their qualities converge to form a “new” [...]
Angélique Kidjo’s status as one of today’s greatest living artists was decisively validated earlier this year, when she was awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize for international recognition of excellence in music (alongside the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and the [...]
“I never thought that my trance music could happen with a classical orchestra. Because of these guys, it’s happened”, claimed the Moroccan guimbri player Mehdi Nassouli shortly before the concert, gesturing as he spoke to the Israeli conductor Tom Cohen. [...]
“Well, it certainly doesn’t look like a jazz audience”, I overheard someone say during the interval of Friday evening’s concert at King’s Place with The Sixteen and the British jazz pianist Julian Joseph. While I was not tempted to jump [...]
Resistant to categorisation, Jussi Reijonen’s compositions merge together such a wide range of musical styles and ‘languages’ that one feels an urge to parse each work and assiduously breakdown its constituent parts (which range from Arabic maqamat to a spacious [...]
As LJF celebrated its thirtieth birthday with a sold-out show of electronic jazz (or ‘jazz-dance’) at the 6000-capacity venue Printworks on Saturday (REVIEWED HERE), another jazz milestone was being celebrated in more intimate fashion in Clerkenwell: the 20th anniversary of [...]
Founded in 2015 by the jazz vocalist Ahmed Harfoush, the Egyptian Jazz Projekt has a mission to restore the rich melodic soundworld of 1950s and 1960s Egypt, revitalising classic songs by drawing on popular jazz idioms. And yet, as Harfoush [...]
“Marcel went to Australia for a few days in early 2020 and we saw him a year and eight months later,” chuckled the French Lebanese multi-instrumentalist and composer Bachar Mar-Khalifé from the Barbican stage, as he mused on the relief [...]
