jazz
Album: Slowly Moving Camera - Silver ShadowFriday, 19 July 2024
With a title track that sounds like the theme tune of the best TV series of your life – only it doesn’t exist yet – and some star guest jazz players joining the core trio of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts, and Elliot Bennett, Slowly Rolling... Read more... |
Album: Catherine Russell and Sean Mason - My IdealFriday, 12 July 2024
Voice and piano. The combination can have a simplicity, a conversational freedom, a rightness about it, as it does here. “My Ideal” (Dot Time), with its eleven songs from the early days of jazz up to the 1950s, is already being placed alongside... Read more... |
Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop - The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year review - setting the record straightSaturday, 06 July 2024
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.In this fine, clear-eyed biography, Paul Alexander documents Holiday’s propensity for feeding the media inaccuracies and tall tales, her enthusiastic... Read more... |
Album: Kiiōtō - As Dust we RiseSaturday, 06 July 2024
As Dust we Rise ends with “Quilt,” a percussion-driven lamentation bringing to mind the New Orleans stylings of Dr. John. The album begins with “Hem,” where stabbing piano and strings interweave with a pulsing, wordless chorale. After a while, a... Read more... |
Album: Madeleine Peyroux - Let's WalkMonday, 24 June 2024
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Margo Guryan - Words and MusicSunday, 16 June 2024
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 84: Ibibio Sound Machine, Dave Clarke, Eliza Rose, Billy Idol, Bodega, Mui Zyu and moreWednesday, 12 June 2024
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell... Read more... |
Album: Barry Adamson - Cut to BlackSaturday, 18 May 2024
Always looking dapper and always sounding cool, Barry Adamson is a man who nevertheless seems to be perpetually of another time. Giving off the vibes of a one-man Rat Pack with a dash of the legendary Lee Hazelwood, his music certainly doesn’t have... Read more... |
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, ListeningMonday, 22 April 2024
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great jazz pianists, was called Songs from Home, released on the New York indie jazz label Palmetto Records towards the end of 2020. Silent, Listening, released this month on... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl: Record Store Day Special 2024Friday, 19 April 2024
Record Store Day is tomorrow! At theartsdesk on Vinyl we’ve been sent a selection of exclusive RSD goodies. Check out the reviews, then check out your local record shop! See you amongst it.THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S CHOICE CUT OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL... Read more... |
Album: Jonny Drop • Andrew Ashong - The Puzzle DustFriday, 19 April 2024
As I sat down to write this review, the sun came out. It was a salutory reminder of the importance of context: where I’d previously thought “mmm, that’s pretty nice”, now it was more “mmmmmmm, that’s pretty niiiiiice!” That’s not just a suble... Read more... |
Back to Black review - rock biopic with a loving but soft touchFriday, 12 April 2024
Sam Taylor-Johnson has fashioned her biopic of Amy Winehouse with great care and affection, but sometimes, as she shows her subject discovering, love isn’t quite enough. The superb jazz-inflected singer from north London, who in 2011 joined the... Read more... |
