jazz
Matthew Wright
Emily Saunders has crafted a reputation for cool, sophisticated songs blending Brazilian themes and rhythms with a clean, precise, almost Scandinavian delivery. On this, her second album, she includes electronic sounds and distorted vocals, moulding the typical Latin aesthetic to her own musical identity with great confidence. Saunders composes music and lyrics, and also produces, so has been able to build a soundworld both unified and unique. Her lyrics are much more substantial than is frequently the case in these genres: a slickly rhymed combination of dense, highly coloured imagery Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Jazz and politics go way back. Throughout its history the music has been involved with underground resistance movements in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It was inextricably entwined with civil rights campaigns in the United States and it played a part in the struggle against South African apartheid. In 2012, a host of jazz heavyweights (among them Roy Haynes and Joe Lovano) came out in support of Barack Obama in the run up to the US elections and it was that event that provided the inspiration for last night’s Barbican spectacular, Jazz For Labour: A Concert For Fairness and Diversity, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Jazzerbaijan”, the giddy publicity tag attached to last night’s double bill of Azeri jazz at Ronnie Scott’s, was sounding soberly appropriate by the end of a dazzling display of generic shape-shifting by the young Isfar Sarabski Trio. A packed and exuberant audience thrilled to his sound, which seemed to transcend generic boundaries with a breath-taking lyricism and fluency. The first set, an accomplished, if perhaps more familiar sound from the Amina Figarova Sextet, had a more consistent Western focus, though Azeri music still featured in Figarova’s playing and compositions.Jazz in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Russian saxophonist Zhenya Strigalev, whose band of stars Smiling Organizm has now released its second album, cuts a rather romantic figure in jazz, hopping from continent to continent, his saxophone as calling card. Along the way, he has accumulated an outstanding band of mainly American players, including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland, though there’s still a quirky, rootless individualism about much of this album that sounds like a band whose origins cross oceans. Where Strigalev’s compositions really stand out is in the blending of Read more ...
Thomas Rees
You know what really grinds my gears? Bands that only have one. One gear, one level of intensity. For a good hour of last night’s set, diminutive diva Alice Russell, the voice behind countless Quantic hits and that cover of “Seven Nation Army” that no one would shut up about back in 2005, was guilty of just that. She was flatlining at mid-intensity, lost in the no man’s land between tension and release and it was a shame, because everything else about her set, the first of two sold out shows at Camden’s Jazz Café, was hard to fault.For starters, Russell’s voice is the real deal. It’s powerful Read more ...
peter.quinn
Gloriously feel-good, unashamedly retro, uniformly urbane, the Nicola Conte Combo presented a set that was bursting with fantastic melodies last night at Ronnie Scott's. Performing music from last year's Free Souls and his 2011 album Love & Revolution, listening to the Italian DJ, producer and guitarist's music is rather like falling into a jazz wormhole, a wondrous peregrination through the past, from the finger-snapping soul-jazz of Horace Silver (the great "Shades of Joy" surely nods to Silver's classic "Song For My Father") and the all-embracing polystylism of Archie Shepp, to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s celebrated jazz colossus Jan Garbarek hadn’t played the north Norwegian city of Bodø for 15 years. Moreover, he and his group took the stage of the spanking new Stormen concert house as the openers of Bodø Jazz Open, the city’s four-day festival of all that is and isn’t strictly jazz. If there was any pressure, it didn’t show. Resolutely composed during his hour and three-quarters on stage, Garbarek also said nothing. Given his stature, the waves of power intermittently surfacing in the music and the nature of the event, there was only one possible outcome – a standing ovation. And Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Magma: Köhntarkösz, Köhntarkösz Anteria, Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré“They were a Seventies phenomenon,” said snooker ace Steve Davies of Magma. “But they were a bit too far out there for most people, even if you liked progressive music. I didn't dare put them on the communal record player at sixth-form because they would have been booed off. Maybe it's because they were French.”Magma – the band Davies declared his “true obsession” – are still going strong under the guidance of their visionary drummer Christian Vander. John Lydon was another fan. The vinyl-only reissue of three of their albums, 1974’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
Pianist Jason Moran's Grammy-nominated tribute to the legendary pianist, singer and composer, Fats Waller, effortlessly captures the joyousness and melodic beauty of the Harlem stride master's music. Joining Moran is vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello, and from the über-slow jam of “Ain't Nobody's Business” to the utterly seductive grooves of “The Joint Is Jumpin” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, the kind of galvanic presence that she brings to the project takes the material to entirely new emotional places. There are coruscating instrumentals, too, including a barnstorming solo spot for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
With just over two weeks to Christmas, thoughts might be turning to which of the deluge of 2014’s reissues might be suitable as a gift, worth putting on your own wish-list for Santa or even merit buying for yourself. So if help is needed, theartsdesk is happy to provide a one-stop guide to the essential reissues covered so far this year.Normal service will resume next week with a look at John Grant’s old band The Czars. The week after we will consider Millions Like Us, a box set dedicated to, as it is helpfully subtitled, “the Mod Revival 1977–89”. Following that will be a collection Read more ...
Matthew Wright
John Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme, recorded 50 years ago next week, is second only to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue as a revered document of jazz recording. Inspired by Coltrane’s spiritual awakening on overcoming his addiction to heroin and alcohol in the late 1950s, it has (by his standards, at least) a relatively simple structure, following a four-note motif through four movements with the quasi-religious titles "Acknowledgement", "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm."The spiritual intensity of Coltrane’s tone, and the aspects of the prodigious technical accomplishments of the final years Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Expectations can be dangerous when it comes to live music, but sometimes managing them is easier said than done. Go and see a band like Jaga Jazzist, a genre-crossing collective of Norwegian multi-instrumentalists who skyrocketed to fame in 2002 when the BBC named A Livingroom Hush jazz album of the year, and you expect it to be big. Especially when it’s the group’s 20th anniversary tour and you arrive at Union Chapel to find the queue stretching around the block.As we filed in, I was in rock gig mode, prepared to leave with mild tinnitus, a few new bruises and a stupid grin plastered Read more ...