jazz
Matthew Wright
Jazz-funk organ trio Wild Card have been slowly building a reputation for smoking funk tunes and grooves you could lose a pantechnicon in for some years now. Led by French guitarist Clément Régert, with organist Andy Noble and drummer Sophie Alloway, they perform with quite a range of guests, both instrumentalists and singers, which keeps the atmosphere of their repertoire fresh and varied. Their rise to prominence has accelerated recently with the release of their third album, Organic Riot, which has been garnering rave reviews internationally. It was launched last night at Jazz Café POSK, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Vein Trio craves the horn. Though a complete and expressive unit in itself, with Swiss brothers Florian and Michael Arbenz on drums and piano respectively, and Thomas Lähns on bass, they’ve been working with a new saxophonist each season. Last year there was a tour with Greg Osby; now they’ve secured the accompaniment of one of the finest, and most humane-sounding of the post-Coltrane saxophonists, the American Dave Liebman. Turning 70 next year, Liebman grew up with the stars of bebop (and played with Miles Davis for a few years), but was also a founder member of one of the most Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Very often, the greatest impact comes without shouting. Subtlety can have a power lingering longer than the two-minute thrill of a yell. So it is with Bridges, the eighth album by Eivør. In the past, the Faroese singer-songwriter has collaborated with Canada’s Bill Bourne, the Danish Radio Big Band and Ireland’s Donal Lunny, and taken turns into country and jazz. Bridges builds on her last album though, 2012’s Room, as further evidence that she is now more focused than ever.Bridges is an all English-language album. It opens with the elegiac “Remember Me”: the song asks “Will I leave a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your mum told you (or at least, I hope someone did) that it wasn't about being pretty, it was about having personality. True wisdom though this is, you probably also noticed that there are some jobs where it appears to be necessary to conform to a certain model of style or appearance. Playing the princess roles in ballet is one of these, though it's not about prettiness: for practical reasons you have to be shorter and considerably lighter than the men who will partner you. Tall ballerinas do become principals, but, especially in smaller companies, they don't often get to dance the Auroras Read more ...
peter.quinn
Compered by the velvet-toned broadcaster Moira Stuart, the winners of this year's Parliamentary Jazz Awards were announced last night in a packed Terrace Pavillion at the House of Commons.Now in their eleventh year, the Awards are organised by the All Party Parliamentary Jazz Appreciation Group (APPJAG) and, since the sad demise of the BBC Jazz Awards, are now the UK's premier awards for the jazz community. Sponsored by the music licensing company PPL, this year's awards included more artist-focused categories, reflecting the incredible breadth and depth of the UK jazz scene.Special guest Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Emily Saunders has crafted a reputation for cool, sophisticated songs blending Brazilian themes and rhythms with a clean, precise, almost Scandinavian delivery. On this, her second album, she includes electronic sounds and distorted vocals, moulding the typical Latin aesthetic to her own musical identity with great confidence. Saunders composes music and lyrics, and also produces, so has been able to build a soundworld both unified and unique. Her lyrics are much more substantial than is frequently the case in these genres: a slickly rhymed combination of dense, highly coloured imagery Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Jazz and politics go way back. Throughout its history the music has been involved with underground resistance movements in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It was inextricably entwined with civil rights campaigns in the United States and it played a part in the struggle against South African apartheid. In 2012, a host of jazz heavyweights (among them Roy Haynes and Joe Lovano) came out in support of Barack Obama in the run up to the US elections and it was that event that provided the inspiration for last night’s Barbican spectacular, Jazz For Labour: A Concert For Fairness and Diversity, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Jazzerbaijan”, the giddy publicity tag attached to last night’s double bill of Azeri jazz at Ronnie Scott’s, was sounding soberly appropriate by the end of a dazzling display of generic shape-shifting by the young Isfar Sarabski Trio. A packed and exuberant audience thrilled to his sound, which seemed to transcend generic boundaries with a breath-taking lyricism and fluency. The first set, an accomplished, if perhaps more familiar sound from the Amina Figarova Sextet, had a more consistent Western focus, though Azeri music still featured in Figarova’s playing and compositions.Jazz in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Russian saxophonist Zhenya Strigalev, whose band of stars Smiling Organizm has now released its second album, cuts a rather romantic figure in jazz, hopping from continent to continent, his saxophone as calling card. Along the way, he has accumulated an outstanding band of mainly American players, including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Eric Harland, though there’s still a quirky, rootless individualism about much of this album that sounds like a band whose origins cross oceans. Where Strigalev’s compositions really stand out is in the blending of Read more ...
Thomas Rees
You know what really grinds my gears? Bands that only have one. One gear, one level of intensity. For a good hour of last night’s set, diminutive diva Alice Russell, the voice behind countless Quantic hits and that cover of “Seven Nation Army” that no one would shut up about back in 2005, was guilty of just that. She was flatlining at mid-intensity, lost in the no man’s land between tension and release and it was a shame, because everything else about her set, the first of two sold out shows at Camden’s Jazz Café, was hard to fault.For starters, Russell’s voice is the real deal. It’s powerful Read more ...
peter.quinn
Gloriously feel-good, unashamedly retro, uniformly urbane, the Nicola Conte Combo presented a set that was bursting with fantastic melodies last night at Ronnie Scott's. Performing music from last year's Free Souls and his 2011 album Love & Revolution, listening to the Italian DJ, producer and guitarist's music is rather like falling into a jazz wormhole, a wondrous peregrination through the past, from the finger-snapping soul-jazz of Horace Silver (the great "Shades of Joy" surely nods to Silver's classic "Song For My Father") and the all-embracing polystylism of Archie Shepp, to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s celebrated jazz colossus Jan Garbarek hadn’t played the north Norwegian city of Bodø for 15 years. Moreover, he and his group took the stage of the spanking new Stormen concert house as the openers of Bodø Jazz Open, the city’s four-day festival of all that is and isn’t strictly jazz. If there was any pressure, it didn’t show. Resolutely composed during his hour and three-quarters on stage, Garbarek also said nothing. Given his stature, the waves of power intermittently surfacing in the music and the nature of the event, there was only one possible outcome – a standing ovation. And Read more ...