jazz
Sebastian Scotney
Seattle-born Allison Neale’s alto saxophone sound is instantly appealing. Her playing has the light wispy, airy quality from the "cool", "West Coast" school of Paul Desmond. One day last year, she spent just six hours (10am-5pm minus an hour for lunch, I gather) with three other top-flight jazz musicians at Angel Studios in Islington – shortly before it closed, in fact. The result, Quietly There (Ubuntu Music) is a completely delightful album.Neale’s totally assured sense of how to convey melodies finds the perfect complement in New York guitarist Peter Bernstein. And if there are echoes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up. “Turnamat” is by Skarbø Skulekorps, an oddball Norwegian jazz outfit.“Surrender” is as impactful. On this, over just-short of five minutes, the sax player Bendik Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The usual summer vinyl release slump doesn’t seem to apply this year. During the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for vinyl has risen rather than fallen and theartsdesk on Vinyl reflects that again this month with another monster round-up of reviews, covering everything from extreme metal to country’n’western to contemporary jazz.VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Come Stay With Me (Come Play With Me)August 2020’s Vinyl of the Month is an Arts Council-backed compilation on bright red vinyl from Leeds label Come Play With Me. It’s designed to help support the contributing artists from the area as they deal Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Norwegian singer Solveig Slettahjell has a feeling for slow. Her 2001 debut album was called Slow Motion Orchestra, and in the years since then she has turned her very fine sense of how to convey the essence and the meaning of songs at a very measured pace into her calling card.She has explained what draws her to slowness: “When I slow down the tempo, I can hear the sound in the words, there are so many little details when you play and sing slowly. These little details fascinate me.”In the early days when she was taking on the mantle of Norwegian jazz singers such as her teacher Sidsel Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Music awards shows are a strange beast: part window display, part industry conference and part party. Especially if you don’t have Brit Awards or Mercury Prize budget to create a whizz-bang spectacle, the ceremonies can be an interminable pileup of attempts to earnestly celebrate both musicians and behind-the-scenes figures, in front of a room full of increasingly drunk and impatient people.The pandemic, though, requires something different. With the announcements and performances on a live video stream, and extra interviews and video clips on an app, the Association of Independent Music had Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Whether explicitly or indirectly, what’s written on a master tape box can tantalise. Revealing part of a picture creates a desire to want to know more. Take the example seen above. It’s for an album by South African alto saxist Dudu Pukwana. The annotation gives a date of July 1968 and the client is Witchseason, the company run by manager/producer Joe Boyd. The recording took place at Sound Techniques, the independent Chelsea studio favoured by Boyd for his other clients. He’d worked there with Pink Floyd in 1967. Around the time of this session, Boyd had brought Fairport Convention and The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“These are African rhythms, passed down to us from the ancient spirits. Feel the spirits, a unifying force. Come on, move with the spirits. Stand up. Clap your hands. Groove with the rhythms. Get down. Get off.”So begins “African Rhythms”, originally released in 1975 as the opening cut from an album of the same name by Oneness Of Juju. It was issued on Black Fire, their own label.As a thematic mission statement, “African Rhythms” lays it out. As a musical mission statement, “African Rhythms” was equally explicit. With its clamorous percussion bedding, the track is driving, funky, jazzy and Read more ...
Barney Harsent
There’s a moment halfway through Khruangbin’s latest album that succinctly sums up the melting-pot model this band have made their own. It’s “Pelota”, a Spanish-influenced song, based on a Japanese film, played by a Texan three-piece with a Thai name. It’s also very, very good indeed.If Khruangbin is a name new to you, then you’ll need to know that, on their previous three albums (including Hasta el Cielo, 2019’s dub reworking of their second, Con Todo El Mundo), they have dabbled in dub reggae, Middle Eastern psychedelia, 1960s Thai music, funk and soul. For a band who seem to be happy Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Swallow Tales is a great album. It took three musicians fewer than five hours on one afternoon in New York studio in March 2019 to make. But there again, it also took them more than 40 years.John Scofield became aware of bassist Steve Swallow in the 1960s when he was a teenager. Swallow was on some of the first albums that the young guitarist owned. Scofield then became his student at Berklee College in Boston, the age difference between them just over 11 years. “He was an established great and I was a rookie,” he recently explained in an interview. Scofield and Swallow first recorded a pair Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The music of monstrously successful emo-pop sorts Paramore is globally massive but is far from everyone’s cup of angst-lite. There is something polished and squeaky clean about them, Teflon fluoro-goth with an off-putting whiff of decent boy/girl-next-door niceness. This writer, then, comes to the debut album of lead singer Hayley Williams with Everest-sized prejudices. Unbelievably, these must be cast aside, for Petals For Armor, despite its stinky title (had to get one dig in!), is a vibrantly funky, imaginative and more-ish album.From the writing credits, Williams appears to have put it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dinosaur’s Mercury-nominated debut was a jolt of 1970s Miles and James Brown electricity. This third album steps back into the familiar comforts of acoustic jazz, with a cool inquisitiveness combining trumpeter-leader Laura Jurd’s rural Hampshire roots, conservatoire-schooled compositional rigour, and a sometimes New Orleans rasp that reaches right back to Louis Armstrong.“Slow Loris” is Sisyphean blues, climbing ever upwards as Elliot Galvin’s piano sprawls cat-like across pulsing bass, ending in shadowy 1920s clubland, then Crescent City funeral brass. The title track’s ice-pick piano Read more ...
peter.quinn
We can all do with a dopamine hit right now, given the current lockdown, and those feel-good hormones kick in the instant you hear Yussef Dayes’ tight backbeat on the opening title track of What Kinda Music. A collaboration between drummer and producer Dayes and fellow south-east London-based producer and singer-songwriter Tom Misch – whose "Disco Yes" was one of Barack Obama’s favourite tracks of 2018 – the album is released today via the iconic Blue Note Records.The duo’s judicious mash-up of electronica, hip hop, jazz and prog – containing echoes of everything from Sweetback to another Read more ...