jazz
peter.quinn
Born just a year apart in the 1950s and having both clocked up almost 40 years' work in their respective scenes, it's surprising that it's taken quite so long for fellow trailblazers Pat Metheny and John Zorn to work together. It's certainly been worth the wait, as this collection is a real barn-burner.Apart from his frequent collaborator, drummer Antonio Sanchez, guitarist Metheny is responsible for every other sound you hear on his contribution to John Zorn's gargantuan Masada songbook project: bass, keyboards, bandonéon, percussion, flugelhorn and much more. All six richly detailed Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Jazzfest has managed to succeed as a mainstream rock festival. The first weekend’s headliners on the main Acura Stage included John Mayer, Billy Joel and Dave Matthews, while this weekend promises Fleetwood Mac, Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. If the aforementioned suggest a festival devoted to AOR chart-topping US rock, then understand that the festival’s organisers allow the superstars to drag in suburban rock fans, thus underwriting the rich regional music flavours that dominate most of the other 11 stages.Admittedly, the Acura Stage did also host local legends Dr John and Allen Toussaint , Read more ...
peter.quinn
Some vocal jazz can be so anodyne that it barely registers on your consciousness, as anyone who's ever heard a jazz wannabe dusting down “My Funny Valentine” will know. A Liane Carroll gig, on the other hand, offers a roller coaster ride of emotions: joy, pain, hope, loss. With the ability to make every song sound like a personal experience, Carroll is one of the few singers who can make your spine tingle for an entire set.Launching her exceptional new album Ballads last night in a newly refurbed Pizza Express Jazz Club, a luxuriant first set featured the singer with exquisite string Read more ...
peter.quinn
The CD booklet note by NASA astrobiologist Daniella Scalice is just the first of many striking features on this third Basho CD by the Mercury Prize-nominated pianist Kit Downes. Joined by his core trio of bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer James Maddren (both fellow alumni of the Royal Academy of Music), plus reeds player James Allsopp and cellist Lucy Railton, Light From Old Stars sees Downes really getting into his compositional stride.With rippling arpeggiations on the piano strings and icy harmonics in the cello, album opener “Wander and Colossus” ushers you into the album's singular sound Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn parps. A group of muttering voices are agitated. Reed instruments parp like angry parrots. Someone grunts and hollers. A trumpet signals a fanfare. Bells tinkle. Sonny Rollins appears to wander in and out. So does Ornette Coleman. The whole is arrhythmic, but bedded by percussion. Melodies come and go in the same piece, but are never repeated.The Read more ...
peter.quinn
OK, so you've given your copies of Rod's It Had To Be You and Robbie's Swing When You're Winning a few listens (released many, many years ago, the latter is still top of the iTunes jazz albums chart in a gazillion countries). You've memorised the words and now you quite fancy giving “Summertime” a bit of a go. A touch of rubato here, a judicious tweak of the melody line there and, hey, you're singing jazz! Er, not quite.As shown in last night's masterclass by the inimitable Kurt Elling, "singing jazz" requires a number of things: the desiderata would include developing your own approach to Read more ...
geoff brown
Any conductor who ends a concert with only one leg on the ground, as if engaged in the Highland fling, is either a little fanciful or has been utterly carried away. In Keith Lockhart’s case last night, it was probably a bit of both. No-one can take charge of Duke Ellington’s big band tone poem Harlem by impersonating a lamp-post, especially at its roaring end, the epitome of jubilation in sound. But the BBC Concert Orchestra’s transatlantic Principal Conductor is also a conscious showman. Sometimes his hands trace such sensuous curves that you feel he’s stroking a Ming vase.All his gifts for Read more ...
peter.quinn
Suddenly, it's raining Duke Ellington homages. Stateside, there's Terri Lyne Carrington's Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue, a brilliant reimagining of Ellington's classic 1963 trio recording with Charles Mingus and Max Roach that recently hit the top spot on the JazzWeek radio chart. Here in the UK, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra's latest release In the Spirit of Duke – recorded on tour during October 2012 – features an all-Duke programme which captures the Ellington Orchestra sound down to the tiniest detail. This evening at the QEH, the Nu Civilisation Orchestra joins the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Del Shannon: The Complete UK Singles and More (1961-1966)The plaintive, urgent drama of Del Shannon’s debut single, 1961’s “Runaway”, will always identify him. But amazing 45s like 1965’s crunching “Break up” and the ferocious garage-punk of “Move it on Over” show that there was more to the Detroit stylist than his calling card. This well-presented collection of his early singles – all heard in pristine fidelity, unlike the raft of budget comps available – reveals that Shannon was constantly evolving but hampered by what surrounded him.Shannon was a singer-songwriter before such a label was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death today at age 82 of trumpeter Kenny Ball makes him the first of the big three chart regulars of Britain’s trad jazz boom to pass away. Both Acker Bilk and Chris Barber are still with us. It’s easily forgotten, but trad actually was bigger than The Beatles. In January 1963, just as the Liverpool quartet were issuing their second single, “Please Please Me”, Ball was on a sell-out bill at north London’s massive Alexandra Palace. Ball beat them to the US charts, hitting number two there in early 1962 with “Midnight in Moscow”.Trad isn’t cool, and probably wasn’t then. But it was massive Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Stephen Poliakoff's slow-burning drama had turned into a propulsive whodunnit by this final episode, hurtling towards a resolution with panache and surprise. The five-part mini-series about a black jazz band in early 1930s high society has had the feel of an exploratory score at times. With syncopated beats and riffs decorating its unfolding narrative, the occasional scene and detail has seemed superfluous. But Poliakoff has had his reasons. By episode five, almost every character had a motive for murdering Jessie (Angel Coulby), the lead singer, or at least assisting in a cover-up.This Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in London in 1978 to a Barbadian father and British-Jamaican mother, Soweto Kinch is one of the most exciting and versatile young musicians to hit the British jazz and hip hop scenes in recent years. Following a degree in modern history at Hertford College, Oxford, Kinch has carved out a music career that has so far led to two Mobo wins for best jazz act (2003 and 2007) and a Mercury Prize nomination for album of the year in 2003. As well as recording and touring, Kinch curates The Flyover Show, an annual music and arts festival in Birmingham which he has recently started to produce Read more ...