jazz
Thomas Rees
“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Cassandra Wilson to a half empty Royal Festival Hall, after a sulky rendition of “Don’t Explain”, the opening track from her Billie Holiday tribute album, Coming Forth By Day. It was an hour and fifteen minutes since the singer was due on stage and half an hour since the directors of concert promoter Serious had arrived in her stead – amidst boos and irate whistles – to tell us she was refusing to leave her hotel room. A good chunk of the 2,500-strong audience had gone for their trains, demanding refunds on the way out and venting their frustration on Twitter, and Read more ...
David Nice
Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which platform rearrangements took longer than two of the pieces in the first half?Worse, the end sank the whole. Milhaud’s La création du monde, the penultimate offering, might have sent us out smiling. Instead the world premiere of Simon Bainbridge’s Counterpoints, for the indisputable jazz king of the double bass Eddie Gomez, was a throwback to the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Eloquent, transfixing, profoundly moving. Last night, in the beautiful setting of the Cadogan Hall, the Maria Schneider Orchestra gave one of those landmark performances that people will remember for years to come. We heard seven of the eight tracks from the composer, arranger and bandleader's stunning latest release, The Thompson Fields, which celebrates its composer's love of her childhood home in Windom, southwest Minnesota.The scene-setting opener, "A Potter's Song", featured the free-flowing accordion playing of Ron Oswanski (also a fine pianist and Hammond B3 player), with just the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Having released a self-titled debut album last year, soul singer Jarrod Lawson has been on a European touring offensive for much of this one. Very charming it has been, too, landing Lawson Soul Artist of the Year title at the 2015 Jazz FM Awards, and a string of stellar album reviews. Saturday’s London Jazz Festival appearance – there’s a lot of jazz in Lawson’s harmonic keyboard adventures – was the final night of a month-long European tour. On the evidence of the Shepherd’s Bush crowd, he already has loyal fans who know his music, and their number is increasing rapidly.There’s a sharper, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Featuring the usual, divertingly eclectic mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul, last night’s Jazz Voice announced the opening of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival with a programme that satisfied both aficionado and newbie alike. Arranged, scored and conducted by the unceasingly inventive Guy Barker, the epoch-spanning celebration of jazz-related anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2015 was hosted by the mellifluously voiced BBC Radio 3 presenter, Sara Mohr Pietsch.Joe Stilgoe was supported by a top-notch big band when he launched his outstanding album Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For an art form that has been quite often written off over the last half century, Jazz seems in extraordinarily rude health. Today sees the opening of the biggest ever EFG London Jazz Festival featuring scores of venues and hundreds of groups throughout the capital.Back in the Sixties, the likes of Philip Larkin in All What Jazz? were saying the form died off when it left New Orleans. “Jazz is dead now, as dead as madrigal singing. We can only treasure the records. And I do,” he said mournfully in an interview in 1982. A run of articles in the last year or two with with titles like “Is Read more ...
peter.quinn
Maria Schneider is one of the luminaries of contemporary jazz. The composer, arranger and bandleader, together with her 18-piece orchestra, first came to prominence in 1994 with the release of their debut recording, Evanescence. Blazing the crowdfunding trail as ArtistShare’s first release, Concert in the Garden (2004) made history as the first recording to win a Grammy with online-only sales, while "Cerulean Skies" from Sky Blue (2007) picked up another Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. Featuring the soprano Dawn Upshaw, Schneider's song Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He’s an American jazz giant; she’s a Scottish doyenne of the classical violin. Anyone familiar with one more than the other – and that’s more or less everyone – would do a double take to see their names on the same bill. But this week at Barbican Hall, a new concerto by Wynton Marsalis will be premiered by Nicola Benedetti and the London Symphony Orchestra.What they have in common is a tireless commitment to promoting music education. Jazz at Lincoln Center of which Marsalis is both founder and artistic director has an educational programme, and he is also director of the Juilliard’s jazz Read more ...
mark.kidel
While many of his contemporaries make the most of their grizzled old men’s voices, Georgie Fame sounds as young and fresh as he did when he first burst on the London scene in the 1960s. This is supposedly his last album, and it sounds, in many ways, as if it had been made 50 years ago.Accompanied by a group of top-drawer British jazzmen, including Guy Barker (trumpet), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Alec Dankworth (bass) and Anthony Kerr (vibes) – along with his sons Tristan on guitar and James on drums – the veteran delivers a very tasteful range of characteristically bluesy hard bop, blue beat- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Asif Kapadia’s Amy packs a punch. It is a wrenching, clear-eyed portait of a supremely talented, charismatic young woman being whittled away by voracious, relentless 21st century celebrity, exacerbated by her own demons. At the UK box office it’s become the second most successful documentary feature film of all time (after Farenheit 9/11). Part of its power is, of course, the raw, soulful singing of its central protagonist. Now a soundtrack arrives, a collage of Winehouse favourites, demos and live takes interspersed with the instrumental music of Brazilian film composer Antônio Pinto.Where Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Return to Larkinland was the second of AN Wilson’s intimate portraits of poets, following his similar excursion to “Betjemanland” last year. His very particular form of exploration of the biographical genre results in a selectively detailed portrait seen through the eyes of an admitted admirer, a sense of character created through a pronounced feel for Larkin’s times, caught in redolent black and white archive, as well as in the attention he pays to the places and spaces of the poet’s life.Wilson knew Larkin well, but wasn’t reluctant to confront the darker issues that have been associated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Georgie Fame: The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966Last month, theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly tackled a collection of albums by Faces which, despite great remastered sound and noteworthy bonus tracks, was a thoughtless, cheapo package ill-befitting a band of such popularity and status. This splendid new Georgie Fame box set is exactly the sort of thing the Faces release could and should have been.The meat of The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966 is Fame’s four albums from the period: Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo, Fame at Last, Sweet Read more ...