jazz
Ismene Brown
Craig Hassall, English National Ballet’s managing director, apologised ironically at theartsdesk’s Dance Question Time in November for putting on popular work at ENB, meaning Strictly Gershwin, a song-and-dance entertainment to follow the music-and-dance entertainment that is The Nutcracker.My colleague Judith Flanders has already reported on her feelings about this production with unimprovable acerbity, and I’m there with her, wondering what the dancers of ENB did to deserve such pale fare as this. On the other hand, shows are not conceived with dancers in mind but with box office, and box Read more ...
peter.quinn
2011 can only be described as a banner year for vocal jazz. Gretchen Parlato is blessed with one of the most mellifluous timbres in jazz, but it's her highly developed rhythmic concept that really marks her out. Like some of the great Brazilian singers, Parlato can make the bar line disappear. It helps that she's got a killing band, and together on The Lost and Found they perform the subtlest metrical shifts in the blink of an eye.Gretchen Parlato performs "How We Love" (excerpt) from The Lost and FoundTwo world-class UK singers, Ian Shaw and Liane Carroll, both released career-best Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Frank Sinatra might have come to dislike being branded as part of the Rat Pack, but the phrase stuck and still sticks. Judging by last night’s Christmas-slanted show, just as he, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr live forever, so will that phrase. Eleven years on from the first Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas show the shine hasn’t gone and the trio – even though they aren’t really there – light up the Wyndham’s Theatre.Strolling on to open the show with “Come Fly With Me”, Stephen Triffitt is Frank Sinatra. He’s been at it for over 10 years and ought to be good, but if you’re a first-timer little Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Scotland’s Bill Wells is hard to pin down. Although ostensibly a jazz pianist, boundaries don’t concern him. He’s played with Aidan Moffat and Isobel Campbell. In 2009 he made the GOK album with Japan’s Tori Kudo (who records as Maher Shalal Hash Baz). Lemondale was made in Japan with a raft of collaborators that include Jim O’Rourke, Kudo and members of Tenniscoats.It’s a lovely album. Coherent, too. Especially considering that it was recorded in one day. Overall, Lemondale is filmic, edging towards Michel Legrand’s jazzier moments and even Francis Lai soundtracks. Equally, it’d be at home Read more ...
david.cheal
Let’s hope that the first posthumously released Amy Winehouse album is also the last; not because it’s in any way bad – actually it’s a pretty decent collection of songs from throughout her career – but because “pretty decent” is about as good as it gets. After this, if there’s anything left, it will surely only be the sound of a barrel being scraped.Assembled by Winehouse producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, it’s a patchwork of alternative versions, some newer stuff, some bits and bobs, plus her famous duet from earlier this year with Tony Bennett. What shines through immediately – and Read more ...
John L Walters
The 10-day London Jazz Festival, now in its 19th year, is a diverse and international festival that embraces the unapologetically commercial Jazz Voice, the outer reaches of (free) free improv and even Abram Wilson’s Jazz for Toddlers. Despite a line-up that’s both starry and distinguished there was no single name that might encapsulate the festival’s rainbow palette. You can get a taste of its breadth from the three giants competing for our attention on the final night: Brazilian pioneer Hermeto Pascoal, guitarist Bill Frisell and free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. I rationed myself to Read more ...
marcus.odair
It’s nine days into the 10-day London Jazz Festival, and highlights so far include the double bill of saxophonists Steve Williamson and Steve Coleman, and the UK’s own Empirical supporting veterans Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn (the former a mellowed African-American firebrand, the latter a German pianist with all the wild intensity of Klaus Kinski in a Beethoven biopic). Contemporary crooner Gregory Porter, who played the "Jazz on 3" launch at Ronnie Scott’s, didn't do much for me, but it seems already to have been written that he is THE FUTURE OF JAZZ and it might just come to pass.The room Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Los Angeles, raised by his mother in Bakersfield, and now living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, Gregory Porter's resonant baritone is one of music's wonders. Porter's Grammy-nominated debut album, Water, has earned him praise from critics and fellow artists alike. Released in the UK in April this year to coincide with his appearance on Later... With Jools Holland, Water leapt to Number One in both the UK's iTunes and Amazon charts.Porter's amazing vocal abilities have seen him described by no less a jazz luminary than Wynton Marsalis as “a fantastic young singer”. Read more ...
peter.quinn
There aren't too many pianists who excite jazz aficionados and hip-hop fans in equal measure. But then no other artist has been inspired equally by hip-hop beats on the one hand and Thelonious Monk on the other. And while it appears increasingly that jazz artists are refusing to be straitjacketed by genre convention, US pianist Robert Glasper is perhaps the prime example of this blurring at the edges.Glasper's previous Blue Note album, Double Booked (2009), celebrated this creative duality by featuring his acoustic trio in the first half and the electric Robert Glasper Experiment in the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Funkier than a James Brown bridge, the mighty Soul Rebels Brass Band swung back into town last night and flattened all before them. Possessing that rare combination of serious chops, impeccable stagecraft and down-home soul, they confirmed their position as one of the most explosive live acts on the scene. From the very opening bars of Stevie Wonder's “Living for the City”, taken from their current Rounder album Unlock Your Mind, the Soul Rebels had the entire QEH off their seats.The continuous set featured the reggae-fied uplift of the title track, the dazzling call-and-response interplay Read more ...
peter.quinn
It would be difficult to imagine a more impressive curtain-raiser to the London Jazz Festival than Jazz Voice, and this year's vintage was the finest yet. One sensed from the very opening bars of Gregory Porter and Ian Shaw's a cappella duet, “Feelin' Good”, that something remarkable was about to unfold, and so it proved. Drawing on major anniversaries, birthdays and milestones that link the decades stretching back from 2011, the annual vocal extravaganza – hosted this year by Victoria Wood – featured a typically adventurous mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul.With spine Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Fusion is a pretty difficult word to deal with. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew might have inspired a raft of jazzers to embrace rock, but an awful lot of the crossover that followed – like prog rock – became the musical equivalent of the love that dare not speak its name. Shoot!, the debut album from Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, might fit that bill, but it’s not that straightforward.A formally educated guitarist, she was the 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival’s Jazz Talent of the Year. Her work with The Trondheim Jazzorkester and her own Trio Thomassen (whose repertoire includes the Read more ...