jazz
Matthew Wright
Zara McFarlane’s rise to jazz eminence has taken the scenic route, especially in these days of the super-educated jazz prodigy. From a Jamaican home where reggae was always in the air, via a love of musical theatre, and a degree in pop performance, McFarlane studied jazz and improvisation at the Guildhall. With the support of Gilles Peterson, who signed her to his Brownswood label, she released a debut album, Until Tomorrow, in 2011. This was warmly reviewed, and received a MOBO nomination, but her second album, If You Knew Her, which came out earlier this year, is a further breakthrough. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Seb Rochford’s five-piece Polar Bear is now ten years old, and the band's post-jazz amalgam of lugubrious saxophone phrases and scratchy riffs, scarified electronic soundscapes, and mesmeric, crackling drum and bass rhythms has matured. The giddy thrills of nearly winning the Mercury Prize (with Held on the Tips of Fingers in 2005) are long past, and they seem content with the trappings of the alternative scene, releasing limited edition vinyl and selling inscrutable T-shirts. That stability of identity has, perhaps, contributed to a subtler, slower-burning sound that lets the details breathe Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Julian Siegel’s urbane, generically layered voice has, as both reeds player and composer, forged a unique and revered position in the jazz world. He leads a quartet of pioneering drive and technique, featuring pianist Liam Noble, bass player Oli Hayhurst and drummer Gene Calderazzo. Their 2011 album Urban Theme Park was widely praised for its improvising ambition, diverse sound worlds and smouldering virtuosity.He has a distinguished presence in jazz-rock in the form of the band Partisans, co-founded nearly 20 years ago with the guitarist Phil Robson, and also leads a trio with Joey Baron and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Trumpeter and composer Rory Simmons is one of the most innovative and diversely talented musicians on the contemporary jazz scene, genre-hopping with startling agility across its many cutting edges. Fringe Magnetic, Simmons’ acclaimed 11-piece band, has been blending the compositional rigour of classical music with the freer playing style of jazz for nearly five years now. He’s a core member of the LOOP Collective, and has collaborated across Europe with jazz stars including Barak Schmool, John Etheridge and Byron Wallen. Meanwhile, he’s also in demand as a sideman and session musician with Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Revelling in the acoustic precision of the recently opened Milton Court concert hall last night, Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen showed once more why his quartet’s combination of tersely lyrical melodies and syncopated rhythms is so appealing. For his new album, some of which was played here, his typically European, restrained sound was, to a greater extent than previously, augmented by some distinctly funky passages, which were drawn out with immense skill and sensitivity from what had gone before. Several pieces shared both an extraordinary variety of style, and a seamlessly smooth Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Barbican brought two of the great originals of contemporary music together last night. Ralph Towner and Egberto Gismonti are temperamentally very different, but complement one another wonderfully, in an inspired piece of programming. Both are stylistically polyglot, straddling contemporary classical technique as well as jazz and, in Gismonti’s case especially, a range of folk idioms. Like two paths taking different routes up a mountain, they have both reached peaks of remarkable musical achievement, but taken different routes, and offered different views along the way. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Bach, Duke Ellington and free jazz improvisation met at Cafe OTO last night, and joyously warped some minds. Composer Alexander Hawkins’ BBC Radio 3 commission, the nonet piece "One Tree Found", was part of last year’s Baroque Spring season. It takes the three-part structures of Bach’s trio sonatas for organ, adds echoes of Duke Ellington’s (known, Hawkins notes, as "The Hot Bach" at the height of his fame) numerous three-way orchestrations, and completes the creation with improvisations both contemporary and baroque in style.Last night’s was only its second London performance, but thanks to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Finland’s Jaakko Eino Kalevi, who played his debut British show last November, heads up theartsdesk’s latest regular round-up of what’s come down from the north. A spellbinding display of individualistic pop, the London outing coincided with the arrival of his first non-Finnish release, the Dreamzone EP.Deadpan and stood at his ancient synth, he was accompanied by a drummer and sax player. The rhythms rarely deviated from the beat of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”. The hollow sax evoked Chris Rea or the white-bread soul-pop of Hall & Oates. The whole enfolded like dub. Kalevi barely Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The pared-down beauty and integrity of this remarkable new album is all the more exciting given the quantity of stylistic clutter typically associated with its two principal genres, jazz and soul. Showing excellent taste and artistic self-confidence, McFarlane has stripped away warbling vocal ornaments, stale generic phrasing and redundant backing tracks, trusting the assured, true-grained timbre of her voice to carry the emotional weight of her potent and original writing.A handful of these songs are surely destined to endure in the repertoire. They balance McFarlane’s exposed voice and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dory Langdon: My Heart is a HunterAs a singer-songwriter, Dory Previn’s reputation rests on the extraordinary quartet of albums she made for United Artists in the opening years of the Seventies. This, her debut album, was issued in 1958. Commenting on his reaction to hearing “The Lady With The Braid” from 1971’s Mythical Kings & Iguanas for the first time, Jarvis Cocker said “I remember very vividly first hearing this record. I had moved to London. I was living in this squat and I was trying to put a curtain rail up. I was listening to the radio and it’s one of those moments where Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The musical concept behind this constellation of international stars at Ronnie Scott’s last night was simple. Take a sextet of some of the world’s finest improvising jazz musicians, give them either a funky groove, gentle swing or a bass-fired post-bop beat, and ample space to improvise. Sit back and enjoy the sonic fireworks.Russian alto saxist Zhenya Strigalev is only half a dozen years out of music college, but has already played extensively in three cities, moving to London from St. Petersburg to study, then on again to New York in 2010, where he recruited most of Smiling Organizm. He’s Read more ...