jazz
Tim Cumming
Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.So I’m here at home again, hunkering down, listening to the songs from The Eternal Rocks Beneath, astonished again at their Read more ...
Nick Hasted
José James regularly steps away from the straight jazz singer berthed for years at Blue Note, pining to be an R&B voice for broader black audiences. Covering both Freestyle Fellowship and Rashaan Roland Kirk on his debut The Dreamer (2008), his sensibility straddles sounds and eras which are anyway intimately linked.This Christmas album is, though, aimed straight at the easy listening heart. The Fifties of Nat “King” Cole, Ella and Sinatra at their most frictionless, as well as Blue Note’s more straightahead jazz moments, fill the grooves. The sublimated shadows Gregory Porter found on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we ride towards the holiday break on our magic reindeer, it’s time for one last theartsdesk on Vinyl, a seasonal special that, if you scroll down, contains all the usual up-to-date music reviews but, before that, takes a look at Yuletide-themed releases, reissues and heritage fare that might make great presents. As ever, all musical life newly pressed to plastic is here. Dive in.VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASONPatrik Fitzgerald featuring Lemur No Santa Clauses (Crispin Glover)This year’s VINYL OF THE FESTIVE SEASON top pick is by long lost new wave troubadour Patrik Fitzgerald. It’s only his Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening moments don’t suggest what’s coming. A solo flute is followed by a few spoken phrases from a treated voice. What’s being said? It’s impossible to work it out. Is it a warning? An electric guitar’s strings are stroked with a cello bow. Then, other instruments enter the picture – shimmering electric piano, a trio of saxes, pitter-pat, raindrop percussion, throbbing bass guitar. About five minutes in, a pause arrives after which hard-edged spiralling guitar tops a swirling musical vortex. The storm has arrived. A squall is in the air, and on the stage.“Sun on a Dark Sky” is the Read more ...
Paul Weller, Barrowland, Glasgow review - Modfather holding back father time with old and new tricks
Jonathan Geddes
There was a brief lapse in this lengthy set when Paul Weller stood up from the piano, walked towards centre stage and then pivoted back the way he came, having realised he was moving a song too early. “That’s the trouble with getting old, you forget shit” observed the 63-year-old drily, but the two hour set itself was a testament to Weller’s continued creativity, if also his stubbornness too.It was a sprawling trawl though his varied career, including a handful of tracks from his old bands, the Jam and the Style Council. The latter was represented early, and the blend of zestful melody and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSimo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)The latest from French producer Simo Cell is a bass-boomin’ post-trap six tracker that doesn’t play it straight at all. These are the kinds of tunes that should be heard on a giant sound system so that the earth itself rumbles. The enormous head-annihilating spacious tech-dub of “Farts”, a highlight, sits easily Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although it’s indirect, the overall feel of In Order To Know You points to where jazz and soul meet – a space analogous to that occupied by The Rotary Connection, Seventies Curtis Mayfield, Neneh Cherry, the early Camille and the warmer end of trip-hop. It’s an impression fostered by shuffling drums, interlacing brass and undulating strings. Nonetheless Deep Throat Choir's second album is explicitly – as their handle acknowledges – about the voice, the merging of voices. Eleven voices. Sometimes in unison behind a soloist, at other times weaving in and out of each other.On the title Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Saxophonist Kenny G knows exactly what buttons he needs to press to upset the jazz faithful. He is quoted as having said of his new album New Standards (Concord): “The jazz community is gonna hate it. And that doesn’t concern me.”There is quite some history of antagonism here. Turn the clock back to 1999 and the album Classics in the Key of G, and we hear Seattle-born G, né Gorelick, playing over the classic Louis Armstrong recording of “What a Wonderful World”. Hackles were raised, to put it mildly. Guitarist Pat Metheny, for example, called it “a new low point in modern culture – Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Miles Davis stole Charles Lloyd’s band, and much else. It was Lloyd’s classic quartet with Keith Jarrett on piano, drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Cecil McBee, not Miles, who were the first jazz act to play San Francisco’s Fillmore and gain an avid rock audience; their album Forest Flower: Live In Monterey (1967) sold a million, making Lloyd, with his Afro and hippie threads and exploratory, spiritually balmy sound a star. Playing acoustically, he built jazz’s bridge to rock, only for Miles to lure Jarrett and DeJohnette away, and Lloyd himself to seemingly vanish into the Californian Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Take Jazz Seriously,” wrote Maurice Ravel after his American trip in 1928. This past week of the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival has seen that advice itself being taken seriously, with a bunching of projects and premieres. Jazz musicians have been welcomed in to work with London orchestras. The fruition of months of preparatory work has been on show.Soweto Kinch’s White Juju is a 75-minute “artistic response to a year of pandemic, racial animus and culture wars”, consisting of 10 pieces. It received a loud, prolonged, vociferous and very enthusiastic reception in a nearly-full Barbican Hall. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Where do you draw – how do you draw? – a credible line between jazz and “classical” music in 20th-century America? With the reliably boundary-busting Britten Sinfonia, trumpeter Alison Balsom mixed and matched works from different formal lineages in her packed programme at Milton Court, “An American Rhapsody”. From Stravinsky and Ives to Gershwin and Miles Davis, open-minded and big-hearted dialogue blossomed, led by the sure, sweet and versatile voice of her own “genre-defying instrument” – as she called it in one of the informal chats with conductor Scott Stroman that threaded the items Read more ...
peter.quinn
A fascinating song list that juxtaposed originals with musical theatre, pop songs, Brazilian music and more. An inventive, listening band – take a bow Glenn Zaleski (piano), Alexa Tarantino (flute), Marvin Sewell (guitar), Yasushi Nakamura (bass) and Keito Ogawa (percussion) – who supported singer and song in the most empathetic way possible. And a central performance that combined strength and vulnerability, humour and irony, a strikingly beautiful timbre, and an absolute focus on the lyrics and the story.Vocalist, composer and three-time Grammy winner Cécile McLorin Salvant, together with Read more ...