Jazz
Sebastian Scotney
This album is such a remarkable document, and on so many levels. Perhaps its main "story" is that it could well be the very last studio recording by Jack DeJohnette (1942-2025), having been made during sessions on two successive days at a studio near the great drummer’s home just outside Woodstock in upstate New York, at a time when he was already avoiding travel, and, as it was to turn out, not quite a year before he died.DeJohnette was indisputably one of jazz’s greats and the sheer wonder of his musicianship shines through on this wonderful record. As Ethan Iverson has written, among jazz Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Aaron Copland’s gleaming, monumental Fanfare for the Common Man was written to mark the USA’s entry into World War II. Those thunderous drums and soaring trumpets symbolised the moment when America formally announced itself as the greatest power in the world and its most ardent champion of democracy. How poignant, then, to hear it as a resonant opening to this year’s BBC Proms, in a programme that celebrated America’s 250th anniversary while reminding us that we no longer know what this superpower stands for. Nonetheless, in the moment, the crashing tam-tam and the crescendoing brass provided Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If, like me, you’re not a dedicated jazz listener, sometimes when you dip back in even the most straightforward playing can take your breath away. Go to a small jazz club in any city in any given week, and chances are you can find some unassuming musicians, from music students to over-70s who’ve been doing it their entire lives long, doing superhuman things. They might not be breaking any boundaries or going stir crazy, but however familiar or simple the material they’re jamming on might be, the feats of memory, dexterity and borderline telepathic interlocking with one another can be as far Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Whereas the more venerable European jazz festivals, founded from the 1960s onwards, are typically faced with challenges of mid- or later life, Montrachet Jazz is a newcomer and is different. 2026 was just its second edition, but its early steps are bold and impressive. Not only is a very clever artistic vision already in place, but it is also one which authentically complements and enhances the unique magic of its setting.Location is everything, and truly there is no place like Puligny-Montrachet. For lovers of dry white wine, this is, literally, hallowed ground. The village is within Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I tell people this is my first and last big band album,” says Helen Sung about Oracles. The Houston-born pianist received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and that enabled her to bring what she has called this “dream project” to fruition, to write and record a whole programme of music for big band. The new music she says, “pays homage to the jazz masters whose music, wisdom and generosity changed my life,” and that gratitude fuels an album which is an upbeat celebration of several of the jazz luminaries whom she has known, learnt from and been inspired by.If Oracles doesn’t get a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a whole wide open area of leftfield music that belongs entirely to Chicago. The 1960s social radicalism and futurist musical experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and its parent organisation the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), fused into punk and alternative attitudes with the founding of labels like Thrill Jockey and Touch & Go, fed the jazz-electronic-dub-“post-rock” genre meltdown of bands like Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet/Orchestra in the 1990s, and is still vividly present in a sprawling and endlessly Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Puppini Sisters brought their signature blend of close harmony singing to Islington’s Union Chapel on Friday, the opening night of a three-week UK tour marking their 20th birthday and the release of their seventh studio album, titled – naturally enough – The Birthday Party. There was nothing Pinteresque about the evening, just unalloyed joy onstage and off. “The Andrews Sisters on acid”, “The Spice Girls of jazz” and “Swing Punks” – this effervescent trio, whose fans include King Charles and Michael Bublé, are all those and more. With their retro-glamour aesthetic (reflected by a few Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Edward Simon shows again on this new album of re-imagined songs from Venezuela what a very fine pianist he is. His touch and inventiveness, his command of counterpoint and voice-leading are never short of jaw-dropping, and what he does remarkably well here is to create a succession of specific, authentic moods from songs that have a personal resonance.Simon is from that golden generation of musicians who studied as teenagers at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) – Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel and the late Joey De Francesco. Simon arrived there as a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I have enjoyed Scenes From Above (Blue Note) more than any other album from Julian Lage since Modern Lore (Mack Avenue, 2018). There are many reasons for that, but the simplest is that it reunites the jazz guitarist with the drummer on the earlier album, the magnificently empathetic Kenny Wolleson.Wolleson has written of the importance of the drummer bringing her/his sense of structure and placement to music, and the way he consistently helps to shape its flow is ever-present, whether he is contributing to an irresistibly strong groove, as on “Talking Drum”, making a pulse-less texture Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
John Patitucci, one of the world’s great bassists, was an irreplaceable pillar of the unsurpassable Wayne Shorter Quartet for two decades. On one level, his new, Grammy-nominated disc ‘Spirit Fall’ (Edition), a trio album with saxophonist Chris Potter and drum magician and fellow Shorter alumnus Brian Blade, is merely a snapshot: the album was recorded with ideal and close colleagues in the course of a single day. But after repeated listens, it feels like a much stronger statement than that, maybe even an "apologia pro vita sua", the first-hand, updated story of what makes Patitucci so Read more ...
peter.quinn
For a beautiful treatment of Matsuo Bashō's celebrated haiku “A frog jumps in”, the dreamlike stream-of-consciousness of “I am a volcano”, the delightful, multilayered vocal harmonies in “Take this stone” and more, Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Oh Snap is my Album of the Year. A remarkable collection even by Salvant’s exalted standards, the sudden textural dropout and devastating climax of “What does blue mean to you?”, inspired by Toni Morrison’s Beloved, was a coup de théâtre.Christian McBride and his Grammy-winning big band’s powerhouse collection, Without Further Ado, Vol 1, offered Read more ...