improvisation
mark.kidel
Toumani Diabaté is the world’s greatest and best-known kora player. Plugged in deep to a musical tradition that goes back over seven centuries, this griot or jali takes his custodial role very seriously, but he is also an adventurer who has stretched the repertoire of his ancient strings by listening avidly to music from an astonishingly wide range of sources.All of this was already obvious when he first came to Bristol in 1987, to take part in a number of WOMAD-sponsored activities which were the subject of a Channel 4 film I was making at the time. Toumani, a fresh-faced 22-year-old, came Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
peter.quinn
This Edition Records debut from pianist Andrew McCormack and saxophonist Jason Yarde is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank. While this is only their second release in the duo format, a follow-up to the 2009 album My Duo, their attention to the smallest detail of phrasing and dynamic has been steadily honed since the days of playing together in seminal groups J-Life and Tomorrow's Warriors, dating back to the 1990s.The new album ranges from the rolling, Jarrettesque vamp of album opener "D-Town" to the duo's elaborate unpacking of "Embraceable You Read more ...
peter.quinn
While the physical and mechanical elements of its production are common to all, the sound of a person's voice is as individual as a fingerprint. Launching her Brazilian-themed solo album Lágrimas de um pássaro (Tears of a Bird) in the intimate surroundings of Soho's Pizza Express Jazz Club, Heidi Vogel's extraordinarily rich and complex vocal timbre proved capable of completely seducing the senses.You sensed from the very opening bars of Tom Jobim's “Modinha” that the material, musicians and audience were in perfect harmony. A singer who is as naturally sympathetic to the Brazilian idiom as Read more ...
theartsdesk
If the cards had fallen differently Luke Haines might have been as big as Blur. As frontman of The Auteurs he was briefly tipped for Britpop greatness, so it is no surprise that he likes the idea of alternative histories. This special show, The North Sea Scrolls, was all about them, as Haines, former Microdisney linchpin Cathal Coughlan, writer Andrew Mueller and cellist Audrey Riley mixed spoken word with punchy lo-fi melodies.According to this bizarro version of the past, narrated by Mueller while Coughlan and Haines shared vocals, record producer Joe Meek was once minister of culture, Read more ...
peter.quinn
“In jazz music you have the freedom, you have the expression. You have the visceral and you have the intellectual. Everything can be expressed through jazz, and is expressed through jazz and through the medium of improvisation. This is the highest form of being able to create music.” Speaking at the opening press conference of this year's Copenhagen Jazz Festival, that definition of jazz from the 80-year-old saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins seems as self-contained and eloquent as any other I've heard.Presenting the music in an amazing array of settings – from coffee houses, churches and city Read more ...
peter.quinn
Bassist, vocalist and composer, Esperanza Spalding is one of the most exciting things to happen to jazz in recent memory. Born and raised on what she has called “the other side of the tracks” in Portland, Oregon, Spalding grew up in a single-parent home. Encouraged by her mother, she began playing violin at the age of five and gained a place in the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. By the time she left, 10 years later, she had risen to the position of concertmaster. By then, she had also discovered the bass, and all of the non-classical avenues that the instrument opened up for her: funk, hip- Read more ...
peter.quinn
A jazz concept album exploring the historical origins of Europe. No, not the synopsis of a new Christopher Guest film – although how I'd love to see Fred Willard in that - but an ambitious, far-reaching new recording from sax maestro Courtney Pine. Except, Courtney doesn't play any sax at all. In one of several firsts, Europa hears him blowing up a storm through the delightfully rich, woody timbres of the bass clarinet, an instrument he fell in love with when he heard Eric Dolphy play on John Coltrane's seminal 1961 recording, Live at the Village Vanguard.Pine is a musician who is constantly Read more ...
peter.quinn
A recent Grammy nominee for his 2009 album Historicity, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer is one of an increasing number of young jazz artists who refuses to be corralled by genre. Iyer's work traverses a continuum that embraces everything from hip hop to orchestral music. Tirtha, his latest project, sees three great traditions seamlessly flowing into one another to create something vital and entirely personal.The album presents a fascinating three-way dialogue between jazz, Hindustani (north-Indian classical) and Carnatic (south-Indian classical) music. Also featuring tabla virtuoso Nitin Read more ...
joe.muggs
Avant-garde art, by its very nature, always treads a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and between entertainment and alienation. Thankfully this is something understood very well by the joint curators of Friday night's show at the Vortex Jazz Club: Baron Mordant of the Mordant Music record label and Jonny Mugwump of the Exotic Pylon website and radio show. As the names perhaps suggest, these are people versed in the potential deep silliness of what they do, even as they take it very seriously indeed – and their event certainly ranged far and wide between the weird, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Club music has always been hard to keep track of, and never more so than in the current climate of constant genre meltdown and cross-fertilisation. Which is why the DJ's art is more important than ever, particularly in the case of scene figureheads like the indefatigable Gilles Peterson – known for over 20 years as a patron of all things jazzy, but lately proving brilliantly adept at reaching all corners of what he refers to as “left-field dance music”. Shows like his are ideal – necessary, even – for nurturing, contextualising and showcasing new generation genre-agnostic talents like Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There’s an interesting back story to The Trip. Before Rob Brydon was “discovered” by Steve Coogan’s Baby Cow production company in 2000, he was a workaday comic and Coogan was then at the height of his Alan Partridge-induced success. Since then Brydon has become a household name, not least for his role as Uncle Bryn in Gavin and Stacey, while Coogan these days features in the media more for his, er, interesting private life than his undoubted comedy genius, which some critics suggest has been on the wane.In 2005, director Michael Winterbottom brought the two comics together in A Cock and Bull Read more ...