jazz
peter.quinn
While some vocalists build an entire career on a 'one-timbre-fits-all' approach, one of Claire Martin's greatest strengths is the way in which she brings all of the different colours of her voice into play such that each song is allowed to resonate in the most powerful way.This was the second of two nights at Ronnie Scott’s which saw the award-winning vocalist performing material from Believin’ it, Martin’s twentieth release on Linn Records and her first album with her new all-Swedish trio: pianist Martin Sjöstedt, bassist Niklas Fernqvist and drummer Daniel Fredriksson, with Johan Ramsay Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bill Evans Trio played London’s Ronnie Scott’s from 1 to 27 December 1969 as a co-billing with Blossom Dearie. The season would have remained less than a footnote if it were not for a French fan identified only as ”Jo” in Evans in England’s booklet. He took an Uher reel-to-reel tape recorder into the club and placed it under the stage-side table he and a friend occupied. It sat on his knees and was hidden under the tablecloth. A Beyerdynamic microphone was hooked up to the Uher.This was no mean feat. The Uher model mostly in use at the time was the Report 4000 (pictured below left). Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hosted by Jazz FM presenters Chris Philips and Jez Nelson, and taking place in the historic surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall, this sixth edition of the Jazz FM Awards celebrated the dynamism, passion and vitality of the UK’s young jazz scene, with SEED Ensemble leader Cassie Kinoshi picking up Breakthrough Act of the Year, rising jazz singer Cherise Adams-Burnett receiving Vocalist of the Year, and the similarly youthful Poppy Ajudha proving a popular choice as Soul Artist of the Year.Adams-Burnett’s touching duet with Blues Artist of the Year winner, US singer-songwriter Eric Bibb, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The joint is jumpin’ at Southwark Playhouse, now hosting an irresistible Fats Waller-inspired, Manhattan-set musical revue (a co-production with Colchester’s Mercury Theatre, where it opened last month). Though originating in the Seventies, this sizzling show benefits from a fresh infusion of talent, with actor Tyrone Huntley making his directorial debut, and Strictly Come Dancing pro Oti Mabuse making hers as a musical theatre choreographer.Murray Horwitz and Richard Maltby, Jr. supply the book, but this early jukebox musical is blessedly free of a story awkwardly pegged to existing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When poetic London MC Loyle Carner first appeared a couple years ago he was hailed for his fresh take on UK hip hop. Compared to the street-centric machismo of much grime music, he offered a welcome insight into a more sensitive 21st century masculinity that was a hit with both arts media sorts and the public. His second album, named for a Stevie Smith poem, contains two songs titled after virtuoso chefs (“Ottolenghi” and “Carluccio”), and one dedicated to his mother. It will do nothing to dent this reputation for emotional articulacy.Carner doesn’t so much spit verses as let them flow out of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is increasing urgency, commitment and assuredness about the way Laura Mvula performs her music. The context for her performance here was Love Supreme's day at the Roundhouse. As the event's main headliner and the stand-out performer, she really delivered the goods on Saturday night.Mvula explained that she has not been gigging much since she stopped touring her second album The Dreaming Room a couple of years ago, but rather wanted to work on new material. However, the real interest in this performance stemmed from what has happened to her performing manner. If there was once a certain Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career. She once told theartsdesk that even in her early 20s, faced with the global hyper success of Come Away With Me, “I think I was smart enough to know at the time that it was money in the bank: ‘You can do what you want now, so do it.’” And what she wanted, fantastically, was essentially to be the musician she already was only more so: steadily getting deeper into country melancholy, lounge jazz dreaming and other romantically-lit hinterlands of the American psyche. And now, 17 years on, well Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's kind of vertiginous to realise that the revivalism of acid jazz was way closer to its 1960s and '70s source material than we are to it now. But the patterns that were laid down by the DJ sessions of Gilles Peterson and people like him back in the 1980s abide. Jazz fusion, spiritual jazz, hard bop, obscure soundtracks, Blue Note records: all have continued to demonstrate their immediacy on dancefloors. And recently, a generation of prolific and prodigious musicians have come to prominence whose interest in jazz is not as some musty, dusty memory of the past, but as part of London's club Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martinů: The Complete Music for Violin and Orchestra Bohuslav Matoušek (violin), Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Christopher Hogwood (Hyperion)You can't overdose on Martinů: four reissued discs of concertante music for violin and orchestra might sound heavy going but I challenge anyone to get bored. There's an embarrassment of riches here, most of it seldom heard in the UK. You could do worse than start with the sublime Rhapsody-Concerto, soloist Bohuslav Matoušek switching to viola. Martinů characterised his lyrical late period as marking a shift from “geometry to fantasy”, and here the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs. Now firmly established in the jazz firmament, their heterodox sound appeals far beyond the standard audience; it owes an enormous debt to John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders but goes far beyond even their most Read more ...
David Nice
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Only 11 years Lenny's junior, and living to the much riper age of 89 – his 90th birthday would have been on 6 April – André Previn was a film composer and arranger at the start of his 70-plus-year career, a jazz pianist in a class of his own, and another fine conductor who also took his mission to educate seriously (and to entertain not so seriously, as underlined by that appearance on The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, destined to be endlessly recycled now).Something of the fire had gone out of his conducting by the time I met him in his Reigate Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The tapes from which Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions is sourced were found in a suitcase Eric Dolphy had given to musical polymath Hale Smith and his wife Juanita before setting off on a European tour in 1964. What was handed over by the prodigious multi-instrumentalist for safekeeping has never before been fully explored by an archive release. Dolphy did not return from that tour. He died on 29 June 1964 in Berlin from the untreated effects of diabetes.Musical Prophet, then, is freighted with meaning. It represents a series of recordings which were important to Read more ...