jazz
Anonymous
There’s something of a Polish theme to the London Jazz Festival 2009, part of the “Polska! year” celebration of that nation’s art and culture. Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko is by some margin the strand’s biggest name. The man who once explained the mournful, meditative tone of his (and his country’s) music in terms of the “melancholy light” he’d known since birth took to the stage in appropriately sombre attire: suit, shirt and hat alike in any colour as long as it was black.Much of the playing was similarly noirish, in keeping with both the moody shadows of Stańko’s current publicity shots and the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
I have seen Roberto Fonseca play before – in Havana backing Omara Portuondo and in London with the incomparable Ibrahim Ferrer - so although I was well aware of his ferocious talent I had no idea of how he would fare as a solo star. And I have seen plenty of jazz before, including Latin-style jazz – but only in venues the size of pub function rooms, generally full of nicotine-stained old men, so I had some trepidation about how it would come over in a venue as clean and swanky as the Royal Festival Hall.
But before Fonseca's “jazz Cubano” came the young, cosmopolitan and – let's be frank Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The exploratory outer edges of jazz have been rich and fecund in recent years. Among other things, bands such as MoHa and The Thing have pushed jazz into avant-garde noise and heavy rock, wild-haired drummer Seb Rochford has come up with project after project that fascinates far outside the jazz community and even Radiohead have been accused of dabbling. It's in this area that Bellows reside, musical territory that doesn't yet fall under strict genre categorization but touches on post-rock, electronica, cinematic orchestration and, of course, jazz.The Brighton four-piece, signed to Cake Read more ...
robert.sandall
When Miles Davis led his band into a deconsecrated church in New York in August 1959 to record the album that became Kind of Blue, drummer James Cobb recalled that “it was just another date for us. ” How wrong he was. A little over 50 years later, Cobb - the sole survivor of the original sessions – brought his So What band to London on Thursday to celebrate what many now regard as the most important and popular jazz record ever made.Thursday's concert at London’s Tower Festival marked another event in an anniversary that has been greeted with the sort of delirious fanfare normally Read more ...