jazz
Matthew Wright
New Orleans icon Dr John (Mac Rebennack) epitomises that city’s diversely blended musical traditions. This release was recorded live in May 2014 at a New Orleans Jazz Festival celebration of his career, which began in the 1950s on the Los Angeles studio scene. The generous double CD (even this double release is only half the original gig) allows enough time to sample the full range of his output. The live event programmed alternating local and guest performers. Inevitably, the recording has favoured the names from elsewhere, though there are still plenty of New Orleans veterans, such as Big Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Until The Hunter is the third solo album by Mazzy Star singer, Hope Sandoval, and the long awaited follow-up to 2009’s Through the Devil Softly. It’s safe to say that the intervening time hasn’t encouraged any great stylistic leaps but to say that it’s been worth the wait, would be an understatement.Mellow Gothic country and folkie blues tunes abound here and if you’re looking for something to get you through the early hours of the morning when things aren’t necessarily at their best, look no further: Until The Hunter is exactly what the doctor ordered. “Into the Trees” opens with a gently Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Berlin's electronic music world has been traditionally been very white. Sometimes, as with the inward-looking minimal techno of the 2000s, it could feel painfully so. Obviously a city can't really help the nature of its demographic, but monoculture is rarely healthy for the development of living club scenes – and it certainly needn't be that way. Techno, the city's life-blood over decades, has always been at heart about the interplay between the European avant-garde and black American music, and back in the Nineties, many of Detroit's techno originators held musical residencies or even lived Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The original 1961 poster for Paris Blues trumpeted it as “a love-spectacular so personally exciting you feel it’s happening to you”. Would it were actually thus. Instead, it’s ponderous and features a cast so obviously “acting” that any verve implied by being filmed in Paris and set in the world of jazz is missing in action. Paris Blues is worth seeing, but don’t expect the pulse to quicken.Ram Bowen (Paul Newman) and Eddie Cook (Sidney Poitier) are American jazzers living in Paris with a residency in a smoky basement. One member of their band is a drug addict and a local Juliette Gréco type Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
While there were 20 years between the 74-year-old David Crosby’s last solo album, 2014’s Croz, and its predecessor It's All Coming Back To Me Now..., Lighthouse arrives with what must be seen as exceptional speed. It’s also, despite being recorded at Jackson Browne’s studio (like Croz) and one co-write with singer-songwriter Mark Cohn, an album more dialled-in to today than Croz due to Snarky Puppy’s leader Michael League being on board as producer and main co-writer. Venerable figures like Mark Knopfler, Wynton Marsalis and Leland Sklar are absent. But there is a lot of Crosby himself. More Read more ...
peter.quinn
The human voice is as individual as a fingerprint: the emotional, melancholic pull of Billie Holiday; the slightly nasal, always ironic quality of Donald Fagen; the overheated melismas of Mariah Carey; and Michael Bolton, the aural equivalent of the Krakatoa eruption. Listening to “Carry On”, the lead single from her sixth solo album Day Breaks, Norah Jones's voice is characterised not only by its great tonal warmth but also by its conversational intimacy.The album is being billed as a return to the sound-world of her much garlanded debut Come Away With Me, which it is – to an extent. In fact Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s fair to say that vocal jazz ranks modestly in British awareness of Danish culture, certainly below the instrumental music and the phenomenon of the moment, the cable-knit-sporting detective Sarah Lund. Which is a shame, because this second event in Pizza Express’ week-long festival illustrated the variety and strength of that country’s scene very effectively. Sinne Eeg is a multiple award-winning performer broadly in the American tradition, while Cathrine Legardh exemplifies a Scandinavian, folkloric style.Eeg performed a tasteful and eclectic selection of favourite standards and Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Madeleine Peyroux made her name channeling Billie Holiday. White stars have never ceased to model themselves on African-American genius – Mick Jagger on Don Covay, Rod Stewart on Sam Cooke and Joe Cocker on Ray Charles. The resemblance is often uncanny, and yet there is always something missing - call it authenticity, roughness or soul. Peyroux has grown away from Lady Day, and found her own voice, but the jazz and blues that characterize most of the covers she sings with great skill and feeling, don’t quite have the edge of the originals.And yet, black vocalists have been as attracted to the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Pianist Morten Schantz has been a prominent and pioneering figure on first the Danish, then international jazz and fusion scene for more than a decade. With saxophonist Marius Neset and drummer Anton Eger, also members of his new trio, he founded ground-breaking quintet JazzKamikaze in 2005, playing an exhilarating fusion of jazz, rock, funk and hip hop. Since then he has composed and performed across the full range of jazz-related fields, with ensembles including Unicorn, playing North African music, and Segment. He has recently formed a new trio, Godspeed, with long-standing Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
As I waited outside the entrance to the Royal Albert Hall, someone leaned over to me and said: “My cocaine is to your left.” I glanced in that direction and realised they’d actually said “Michael Caine is to your left”, and indeed he was, on his way inside to hear a prom devoted to music by his old friend Quincy Jones.It’s hard to know where to begin with Jones’s musical CV. He’s had a towering career in jazz, film music and pop, and any one of these genres could enough provide material from him to fill a series of proms.The Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley and led by Arlia de Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and first wife Frances Taylor, the film was trapped in a pipeline for aeons. While he waited, Cheadle had plenty of time to turn himself into a trumpeter good enough to perform onstage in the film’s coda with Davis collaborators Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.The wait was so long that it easily outstrips Davis’s five-year fallow period in the 1970s when Read more ...