Solo albums by musicians from established bands can be interesting beasts - not least when discovering which route they’ve decided to take with their own music. Will they be conservative and carry on with no deviation from the normal; will they run for the hills and bring something completely different to the table; or will they take a middle road and just fiddle around the margins of their day job?Flea – former Beavis and Butthead favourite and bass player for US rock megastars, Red Hot Chilli Peppers – has very much jumped ship from the day-to-day with his first solo album. For Honora is by Read more ...

Blackpool Cool is the third and last album by Glasgow’s Head. Issued in 1977 on the band’s own Head Records label, it was preceded by 1973’s GTF and 1975’s Red Dwarf. Blackpool Cool is rare – and sought after. A first pressing in OK shape will cost at least £70. One in close-to mint condition – if one can be found, that is – can fetch £220. Head issued no singles. The reissue of this Scottish jazz band’s final release is welcome.This particular Head are not to be confused other bands of the same name, from the proto-trip-hoppers formed by former Pop Group member Gareth Sager to the Read more ...

Over the years, Ronnie Scott’s, one of the premier jazz clubs in the world, has hosted some truly transcendental music. There’s something about the horseshoe layout of the seating that promotes exceptional intimacy. When the music zings and the audience feels it, there is a positive feedback loop which elevates the event beyond the merely ordinary.Steve Coleman and Five Elements, although still jet-lagged, in the early stages of an intense European tour, rose to the occasion, with an incandescent set that had the punters bewitched and – for Ronnie’s – unusually quiet. Unlike many other star Read more ...

Although the bulk of the 20 tracks collected on Eternal Journey - The Arrangements and Productions of Charles Stepney were originally issued between 1967 and 1971, the period evoked by this compilation dedicated to the titular musical polymath is not limited to the late Sixties and the early Seventies. There is an early Nineties character too.That was when a lot of what’s heard on the compilation reached a fresh listening audience. Twenty or-so years after they were first released, Terry Callier’s “What Color is Love,” Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleur” and Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul” Read more ...

“Jazz,” exclaims an audience member just after Plantoid launch into “Ultivatum Cultivation,” tonight’s second song – also the second song on the band’s recent second LP Flare.He’s got a point. What’s emanating from the stage at East London’s Moth Club is more a candidate for a description as jazz rather than the math rock – or even the prog rock – tags often cropping up when trying to pin down Plantoid. Jazz: in this case a take on the genre fusing a Miles Davis Bitches Brew sensibility with, in contrast, softer things; things suggesting a familiarity with Gary McFarland’s Sixties Read more ...

VINYL OF THE MONTHWest Virginia Snake Handler Revival They Shall Take Up the Serpents (Sublime Frequencies) Image Californian producer Ian Brennan walks, loosely speaking, in the footsteps of groundbreaking (and controversial) father and son song collectors, John and Alan Lomax, who, between them, gathered an essential storehouse of American folk music in the early-to-mid-20th Century. Like them, he’s interested in the cultural context of roots music and he’s ranged across the world, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan. His recent 2023 Parchman Prison Read more ...

“Fuck Thatcher, fuck neoliberalism.” After these words from the stage, an audience response. “Fuck Thatcher” echoes the approving shout from the darkness.The performer expressing his views is the Sheffield-based folk-rooted stylist Jim Ghedi. What he’s said has not come out of the blue. There is context. He is introducing “Ah Cud Hew,” a song included on his In the Furrows of Common Place album. He learnt it from Ed Pickford, a County Durham singer and songwriter with a family background in coal mining. The song – “I could hew” – is about the decimation of the coal industry during the Read more ...

MILES., a two-hander with Benjamin (Benji) Akintuyosi as Miles Davis and trumpeter Jay Phelps in a host of roles, including himself – is a show which works remarkably well.Remarkably, yes. Akintuyosi only made his professional acting debut in this role in a run of the show in Edinburgh last summer. Jay Phelps is above all known as a fine trumpet player and a music producer rather than as an actor. And the subject, Miles Davis – this show is carefully placed just ahead of the centenary of his birth in late May – was a complex and in many ways a disputed figure.One reason why the show is so Read more ...

Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...

The opening track  – “Ālibek’agnimi” (“አልበቃኝም” in its original title) – is a cool, close-to six-minute soul instrumental on which the organ suggests an at-least passing familiarity with Booker T. Jones. The tempo is slow, the moodiness enhanced by a smoky, wandering saxophone.Next, the similarly lengthy “Ānichī keto gidi yeleshimi” (“አንቺ ከቶ ግድ የለሺም”). Slightly less leisurely, its clipped guitar follows a reggae pattern. Again, despite a section of keyboard vamping and stabbing brass, the saxophone is what stands out. Wandering up and down the scale it then settles, fusing Read more ...

Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper, Marianne Faithful, Teresa Stratas, Cathy Berberian, Dawn Upshaw, Brigitte Fassbaender, Louis Armstrong, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Sting, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald. It would be difficult to imagine a more varied list of interpreters of just one composer’s work, but this is only a small selection of the artists who have performed and recorded Weill’s music. But what is it about Weill’s work that is so universally appealing, and so adaptable, making as much sense sung by Tom Waits as it does by Ella Fitzgerald or Anne Sofie von Otter?I’ve been drawn to Read more ...

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 ...