It was cold and wet tonight on Southend seafront, but I found a warm & welcoming Georgian lounge which resounds to live jazz from local & national musicians every week. And to my delight, the 6-piece Mandala were playing some [...]
Here’s one of those warming surprises as the nights draw in: a beautifully measured quartet album that displays a wit and intelligence in its mission to experiment with polyphony while still making for a hugely listenable set. It is also [...]
This, the opening gig of the 2024 Southend Jazz Festival set an assured, good-time tone with a superbly played evening of predominantly pre-bop blues standards and straightahead jazz blowing. Trumpeter Pete Horsfall‘s Mighty Like The Blues project is a quintet [...]
Popping into my local, so to speak… Like so many seaside towns, Southend-on-Sea is wearing the malaise of over a decade’s austerity and *cough* certain political decisions, its High Street sprouting vape and phone shops while big names soldier on [...]
I’ve been listening to Bitches Brew for half a century, as well as Miles’ subsequent takes on it and, of late, to its fresh and vibrant reimagining by London Brew, which had me looking forward to its much-heralded festival performance. [...]
“Too much beauty can be distracting.” Well, that’s easy for Cécile McLorin Salvant to say (as she did to Jess Gillam on Radio 3’s This Classical Life, about the exigencies of virtuosity) but when you’re faced with another evening of [...]
Actually…no. I’m not going to review this wonderful gig. It’s already had the best possible review it could have, here on London Jazz News 9 months ago. I swear that Mike and the band read Duncan Heining’s excellent description of [...]
a) The Westbrooks’ Granite Band, 2021b) with Uncommon Orchestra, 2023 How do you keep hope alive in dark times? During lockdown, the Westbrooks turned to Ellington’s salve, to “write another blues”. It was his way of dealing with racism, and [...]
The American Songbook has long been mined by artists from across the spectrum. Four years after Rickie Lee Jones (aka The Duchess of Cool) came to fame in 1979 with her sassy jazz-inflected Chuck E’s In Love, Linda Ronstadt and [...]
Here’s an album of great virtuosity, pitch-and-beat-perfect in every respect, and accompanied with Dan Bilawsky’s detailed and enthusiastic liner notes, which – if you could read them – would do my job for me. So allow me to encourage you [...]
