jazz
peter.quinn
Christine Tobin’s latest CD Sailing to Byzantium brings to life the lyrical magic of W B Yeats’ poems and has been widely acclaimed. Reviewing the album earlier this year, I wrote that "Tobin has created an unqualified masterpiece. Setting poems from across the entire spectrum of Yeats's oeuvre, Tobin perfectly gauges the emotional and spiritual resonances of the texts, aided by performances of incredible subtlety and understatement."In October and November, the BBC award winning jazz vocalist and her group - Phil Robson (guitar), Kate Shortt (cello), Liam Noble (piano) and Dave Whitford ( Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a fallow few years in the long recording life of Van Morrison. The last release was his highest charting release in the US, but that was four years ago. His 34th studio album finds him back on the Blue Note label, where he last recorded What’s Wrong With This Picture in 2003. Can you tell? The albums may come, the labels go, but in the end Van is Van and this set of a dozen songs confirms mostly to the sound Morrison has been turning out since the mysticism first got plush on the likes of Beautiful Vision and Poetic Champions Compose. His own breathy sax, the ambling bass, the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Ivo Neame is not only one of the finest multi-instrumentalists, composers and arrangers of his generation. Given that the Royal Academy of Music graduate also performs with Phronesis, MOBO award winners Kairos 4tet, Fringe Magnetic and Marius Neset's Golden Xplosion, as well as lead his own regular quintet, his time-management skills are clearly nonpareil too.Neame's 2007 debut Swirls & Eddies, scored for the humble piano trio, was followed in 2009 by his quartet album Caught in the Light of Day. With Yatra, Neame really steps things up a gear, luxuriating in the possibilities offered by Read more ...
peter.quinn
Enthusiasts of the tenor sax will find it impossible not to be swayed by this terrific follow-up to Trish Clowes' impressive 2010 debut, Tangent. Apart from her highly distinctive melodic fingerprint, it's the composer's terrific ear for textural detail that really draws you into this 10-track collection: the ever-so-subtle cello harmonics that underpin the intro to album opener “Atlas”, the constant ticking of “On/Off”, the ghostly violin figurations enfolding the bass solo in “Animator”.The album's sole song is typically individual and about as far from the Great American Songbook as you Read more ...
theartsdesk
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, StreetcoreLisa-Marie FerlaAs well as marking the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death, 2012 would also have been the year the legendary Clash frontman turned 60. The reissue of these two albums, recorded with his last band the Mescaleros, is therefore doubly timely.The band's three albums built on the very best of the globe-trotting, more experimental themes that had begun to sneak into The Clash's work before they disbanded in 1985, but did so in a way that kept them vital and accessible to those of us raised on three-chord punk Read more ...
peter.quinn
Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd Bird comprises three classics from the Parker canon – the title track, “Donna Lee” and “Now's the Time” – plus six compositions from Bates.The trio's amazing rhythm section, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun, are both alumni of Copenhagen's Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the leader's erstwhile stamping ground. The sudden shifts of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ride: Going Blank AgainKieron TylerWhen Oxfordshire’s Ride arrived in the shops via Creation Records, they were the sonic little brothers to label-mates My Bloody Valentine. But their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, ploughed its own path, leaving the competition behind. Twenty years on, this smart, book-bound reissue adds most of the tracks from contemporary EPs and teams the album with a DVD of a March 1992 Brixton Academy live show.In the liner notes, guitarist – and future Oasis bassist, and current Beady Eye member - Andy Bell admits Ride were initially an “an amalgamation of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Towards the end of a ridiculously easy and enjoyable hour spent in their company, Flap!’s singer and ukulele player Jess Guille described “Rock in Space” as “jazz-folk-disco” – and, you know, it kind of was. A bawdy, slap-happy five-piece from Melbourne, their root note is pre-war American jazz, but to that foundation they add ska, gypsy music, blues, folk and flickers of more contemporary styles, mixing them all together with deceptive ease. And although their defining aim is to get the audience to laugh, dance (and drink), they can really play, too.Guille alternated lead vocals with Eamon Read more ...
peter.quinn
This debut album from Leeds-based Roller Trio epitomises the can-do, DIY approach of the younger generation of jazz musicians. With their achievements recognised by a prestigious Peter Whittingham Jazz Award last year, the band - James Mainwairing (tenor sax/fx), Luke Wynter (guitar/fx) and Luke Reddin-Williams (drums) - sent a tape of their first concert to the London-based F-IRE label who subsequently invited the band to release an album on its "F-IRE presents" imprint.With influences ranging from Tim Berne to Queens of the Stone Age to J Dilla, as well as artists much closer to home such Read more ...
peter.quinn
The UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis's Swing Symphony (Symphony No 3) last night was extraordinary on several counts. We heard, first and foremost, a real dialogue between jazz band and orchestra. Not one of those fist-bitingly cornball jazz arrangements where the jazz players get to stretch out and the orchestral players sit back and contribute the sustained, saccharine harmonies. This was a genuine coming together where all hands contributed equally to the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic detail of the work. And talking of melody, the one that Marsalis penned for the orchestral bass section – Read more ...