improvisation
Matthew Wright
The third Emulsion Festival, curated jointly this year by Trish Clowes and Luke Styles, turned out to be more of a collage of original colours, when the second day of programming concluded at Village Underground last night. Yet the varieties of performance all shared a commitment to novel combinations of sound, technique and feeling, and drew collectively on inspiration from Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World” to the classical chamber ensemble to create an absorbing spectacle of multi-genre music that was both emotionally and technically compelling. The Village Underground itself was the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Crazed magnificence, off the cuff improv, pinpoint timing. And that was just MC and trombonist Ashley Slater's on-stage banter. In one of the most hotly anticipated jazz gigs of 2014, the return to the Ronnie Scott's stage for the seminal and utterly singular big band Loose Tubes – almost a quarter of a century after their valedictory residency in September 1990 – surpassed all expectations. Following hot on the heels of their gig at the Cheltenham Jazz festival on Saturday, the jazz band's radical polystylism – referencing everything from Charles Ives and traditional music to samba and Read more ...
peter.quinn
In jazz, 2013 belonged to Wayne Shorter. In recognition of a remarkable six-decade career as a saxophonist, educator and composer, Shorter, who turned 80 in August last year, received a lifetime achievement award from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz – only the second time in the Institute’s history that it has bestowed such an honour (Quincy Jones being the first recipient in 1996). There were yet more awards from the Jazz Journalists Association: Lifetime Achievement in Jazz, Soprano Saxophonist of the Year, and Small Ensemble of the Year. Then there were the numerous headline Read more ...
peter.quinn
Now in its eighteenth year, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra (SNJO) demonstrated last night why it's considered one of Europe’s finest big bands. Brilliantly directed by tenor sax player Tommy Smith and featuring the great Brian Kellock on piano, the band performed music from their acclaimed In The Spirit of Duke released earlier this year. The recording not only features some of the greatest music written in the last century but also captures the Ellington Orchestra sound down to the tiniest detail.Ellington’s suites have long been part of SNJO's repertory programmes, so the Duke's music Read more ...
peter.quinn
Harp glissandos, trilling flutes, the heft of a swinging brass section. Yes, last night's Jazz Voice once again kick-started the EFG London Jazz Festival in typically exuberant fashion. Arranged, scored and conducted by the indefatigable Guy Barker, its epoch-spanning celebration of jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones was hosted for the second time by Victoria Wood.First performed in the 1953 film Calamity Jane by Doris Day, Clare Teal's terrific interpretation of the much-recorded standard “Secret Love” provided a textbook lesson in phrasing and singing a legato melodic Read more ...
peter.quinn
A little more than a year after the death of acclaimed jazz trumpeter and composer Abram Wilson, his former manager and widow Jennie Cashman Wilson has teamed up with EFG London Jazz Festival producers Serious to stage the only London tribute concert in memory of her husband.Taking place on 20 November in the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, the concert provides an opportunity to see some of Wilson’s former bandmates from both the UK and the States celebrate his life and music. Originally from New Orleans, Abram Wilson had lived in the UK for the past 10 years and was working on a number of Read more ...
graeme.thomson
In February 2010 I spoke to Lou Reed about his return to Metal Machine Music, a typically incongruous endeavour. Not content with touring his "difficult" 1973 suicide-song-cycle Berlin in 2008, he had decided to re-release his notorious 1975 "guitar symphony" and take his Metal Machine Trio on the road to perform entirely improvised instrumental music inspired by the spirit of the original album.Metal Machine Music was the moment when it was widely agreed that Reed lost the thread of an already meandering plot. Four sides of treated, vari-speeded guitar feedback recorded in his apartment, he Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry. Divided into 18 separate tracks, but heard as one continuous arc of sound, we enter into the leader's all-encompassing “panoramic sound quilting”, as she calls it, a reference both to her family’s handicraft heritage but also to the collage-like juxtaposition of her materials.Over a bowed pedal note in the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Think of the ingredients you look for in a great jazz record – inspired, exploratory improv, the complete reinvention of standards, ear-catching arrangements, sonorities you've never heard before – and this new big band recording from Mike Gibbs delivers them all. By the bucketload.In a career that's spanned four decades, the 76-year-old composer, arranger and trombonist has worked and recorded with many of the music world's leading lights including Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel, Kenny Wheeler and Django Bates. This latest addition to the Gibbs discography Read more ...
peter.quinn
Squeaking toy pigs. Tea pots. Bicycle pumps. Yes, the dynamic Brazilian composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal was back in town, making a rare appearance at Ronnie Scott's. Described by Miles Davis as “the most impressive musician in the world” - he first gained international recognition by playing on Miles's 1971 album Live-Evil - Pascoal's riotous polystylism incorporates jazz, rock and Brazilian music (MPB, bossa nova, chorinho, forro) to create what he calls musica universal or 'universal music'. However you label it, it's one of the most joyous noises in Read more ...
peter.quinn
The great jazz singers are also the great storytellers. Last night, listening to Cassandra Wilson sing “Wichita Lineman”, that single, devastating couplet - "And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time" - conjured up an individual's entire life story. Seamlessly traversing genres in fresh and creative ways, performing a set that juxtaposed Cesária Évora's “Angola” with a completely impromptu “A Foggy Day”, the Jackson, Mississippi vocalist, musician, songwriter and producer confirmed her own compelling storytelling gift.When Wilson took to the stage after a scene-setting Read more ...
James Williams
The Meltdown Festival has always been a fascinating proposition, getting a living legend in their field to curate their own personal festival line-up, and present all of their idiosyncratic choices to London in the refined and retro-futuristic surroundings of the Royal Festival Hall. It throws up some fascinating curation, and while Yoko Ono has clearly had a hand in presenting some of the more agit-pop and esoteric acts on the bill this year (think Peaches, the ferocious Bo Ningen and a newly reformed Cibo Matto) it is clearly her son Sean Lennon who has taken it upon himself to populate the Read more ...