jazz
Matthew Wright
John McLaughlin made history at the Royal Festival Hall 25 years ago when he recorded a superb album featuring Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu. Last night’s performance with his fusion quartet 4th Dimension was not epochal in quite that way. The repertoire and style was largely familiar, much of it released on the band’s album earlier this year, the pieces in many cases reworked from earlier McLaughlin material. But it was remarkable for the excellence and of the ensemble playing. The sensitivity and sheer quality of interaction within the band embodied the interest in loving spirituality Read more ...
peter.quinn
It's day five of the EFG London Jazz Festival, and Snarky Puppy's show at the Roundhouse has sold out weeks in advance. And, as the crowd sings the gorgeous main theme of “Thing of Gold” in perfect unison, one of the reasons for the band's huge success becomes apparent. Yes, there's brilliant musicianship, spirited improv, blazing energy and the kind of impressively vast textures that only a band this size can achieve. But there's something else, which trumps all of these things. There's melody. And the kind of melody that tends to stick in your auditory cortex for days on end.“Kite”, Read more ...
peter.quinn
Is it just me, or do Guy Barker's orchestral charts for Jazz Voice get more refined, more nuanced, more richly detailed every year? Effectively becoming earworm central last night, the Barbican resounded with tintinnabulating glockenspiels, delicately plucked harp strings, punchy horn charts and luxuriant strings, as Barker sprinkled his arranging magic over the customary epoch-spanning celebration of anniversaries, birthdays and milestones stretching back from 2014.Grounded by the fabulous rhythm section of pianist Dave Newton, bassist Chris Hill, drummer Ralph Salmins and the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Michael League is the Grammy Award-winning bassist, composer, producer and bandleader with NYC-based jazz-funk-fusion band Snarky Puppy. Formed in Denton, Texas, in 2004, Snarky Puppy is comprised of a collective of over 30 musicians. In addition to touring and recording, the band is committed to music education, holding over 100 clinics, workshops, and masterclasses in the US, Canada, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.Snarky Puppy released their debut album, The Only Constant, in 2006. Following the band's fifth album, Tell Your Friends (2010), League launched his own Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation.The music itself is also unmistakably Icelandic. As with fellow Icelanders múm, electronica has been assimilated bringing a glitchiness which knocks the lush, ebbing and flowing arrangements off balance. Yet the totality is folky and warmly intimate.Innra, the third album from Rökkurró, is a lovely thing – a musical postcard from a world where Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Annie Lennox is a far more fascinating artist than she’s often given credit for. Perhaps because she has been around for decades (she’s now 59) and hasn’t self-destructed like her friend Amy Winehouse or gone into exile for ages like Kate Bush, or Patti Smith, she has less of a fierce mystique and feels more a familiar part of the landscape.Her first band The Tourists, with Dave Stewart, was not especially distinguished. Their big hit “I Only Want to Be with You”, a Dusty Springfield cover, was distinctly unadventurous in the world of 1979 post-punk. "You wouldn’t have put money on Annie Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Michael Schønwandt (Challenge Classics)The halting, juddering opening of Mahler 9 is nicely characterised in this live reading. Low harp notes ring out like bells, the stuttering rhythm on cellos and horn sharply pointed. Michael Schønwandt conducted this performance at short notice owing to a colleague's illness, and there's an unusual flexibility and spontaneity on display. The build up to the first climax, three minutes in, is well handled. Schønwandt lets us hear all – the orchestral playing fiery and radiant, the tempi Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A first live experience of the French-Cameroonian singer Sandra Nkaké leaves many questions unanswered. Once the immediate bewilderment has passed, the most pressing question for a British audience should be: why is this extraordinary performer not block-booking the festival circuit? In a single set, accompanied by flautist and controller of the electronics, Jî Drû, Nkaké gave a stunningly complete display, as voice, accompaniment, movement and stage presence combined to project her mesmerising, leonine charisma. For Georgia Mancio’s ReVoice Festival, it was an inspired booking.There’s a Read more ...
peter.quinn
Since self-releasing his debut album Heard It All Before in 1999, Jamie Cullum has gone on to become the UK's biggest selling jazz artist of all time. Since April 2010, he has also presented a weekly jazz show on BBC Radio 2, for which he won a Sony Gold award this year.Following the pop stylings of Momentum, Cullum's seventh studio album, Interlude, sees him return to the jazz repertoire. Available in both standard and deluxe versions, the latter includes a DVD of Cullum's performance at Jazz à Vienne plus an exclusive photo booklet containing tour and studio pictures, for which Cullum Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Wildern” means “poaching” in German. That’s as in pheasant, rather than egg. On this album, German jazz singer Tobias Christl goes poaching (foraging might be more accurate) for iconic rock songs, which he adapts for his jazz quintet. Retaining on some level the basic emotional character of the song, he otherwise manipulates freely, to the point where in a couple of cases it’s not obvious which song he started with. We end up with familiar melodies made radically unfamiliar, with saxophone improvisation, eruptions of krautrock, distorted vocals and stretched rhythm turning familiar songs Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“Were we leaving Rio, or were we in New York?” Stacey Kent sings in “The Changing Lights”, the title song of her latest album, before moving on seamlessly to “Les Invalides, or Trafalgar Square”. The prosperous, wistful ennui that some of her recorded songs exude, propelled by her impeccable enunciation and glistening tone, is cosmopolitan with a slightly laminated, departure-lounge sameness. It can feel a little bit like a global franchise in polite enervation. The lyrics, by her regular collaborator, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, are in fact leagues away in subtlety from the rhythmical Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Acclaimed British jazz singer Georgia Mancio celebrates five years of ReVoice!, her festival of jazz song, with an expanded event – now twice its original length – beginning next week. Mancio’s programming combines some of the most charismatic and original performers worldwide to create ten concerts (some with several performances) that display the art of jazz singing at its cosmopolitan best.In some quarters, vocal jazz can still be too closely associated with restaurant crooners to be widely recognised as a serious musical form. While all of these performers are highly entertaining, and Read more ...