jazz
Helen Hawkins
Sam Taylor-Johnson has fashioned her biopic of Amy Winehouse with great care and affection, but sometimes, as she shows her subject discovering, love isn’t quite enough. The superb jazz-inflected singer from north London, who in 2011 joined the sad club of pop-culture luminaries who died at the age of 27, has already been given the documentary treatment by award-winning film-maker Asif Kapadia. Documentarists can expose their subject both visually and forensically, but a feature film has the tougher challenge of telling some of the same basic story without the mesmerising presence of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Gal Beckerman’s 2023 book The Quiet Before makes a plea that if ideas, revolutionary or otherwise, are to grow, there needs to be a retreat from “our current cacophony”. And if there is one artist who is truly living out that principle in his musical life, it is Shabaka. As he said to the audience at this year’s Winter Jazzfest in NYC: “Change is never easy.”What is clear, though, is how utterly serious and focused he is on the change. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace is almost entirely a meditative and quiet album. His live shows in the past few months have all been in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The name of this group is Mayan Space Station.” In spite of the billing as The William Parker Trio, their bassist – coolly introducing himself as “William Parker, bass” – is firm about the designation under which the three musicians on stage are operating.Mayan Space Station is also the title of a recent album. On the 2021 release, Parker was joined by drummer Gerald Cleaver and guitarist Ava Mendoza. All three are here, on stage in the basement of the Park Hotel in the lakeside village of Voss, to the east of Bergen. Getting here from Norway’s second city, the just-more than an hour train Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dee C Lee was born Diane Sealy in London in 1961. She is best known for her 1985 hit “See the Day”, later covered by Girls Aloud, and for being in two of the Eighties' most notable pop acts, The Style Council and WHAM!. But she was also prolifically involved in multiple other musical projects, and now has a new album appearing, Just Something, her first in over 25 years.Lee’s first break came through talking her way into working with the British soul outfit Central Line, who had a couple of US club hits in 1981. From here, EMI picked her up as a session singer and, alongside Shirlie Holliman Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released yesterday to coincide with International Women’s Day, The Sisterhood will surely prove to be one of the brightest jewels in Sarah Jane Morris’s varicoloured discography.A labour of love which Morris has been contemplating for two decades, the album presents a tribute to “my ten singers, my essential lodestars”, as she puts it, acknowledging and honouring female artists past and present who have inspired her own musical journey. Wonderfully arranged and stylistically diverse, Morris and her co-writer/co-producer Tony Rémy pull off a remarkable feat of crafting 10 songs which tell each Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMito y Comadre Guajirando (ZZK)Mito y Comadre are Guillermo Lares and Shana Comadre, a Bogota-based pair of Venezuelans whose debut album is produced by Christian Castagno (a man who’s more likely to be found helming outings by Iggy Pop, Arcade Fire and others). The duo are deep-dipped in their heritage, embracing an array of traditional instruments that I can’t even locate by name via Google (the quichimba, the macizón, etc). Such ignorance is no hindrance to adoring this music, heavily lathered and danceable funk and lively upbeat spirit, with electronic twiddlings and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Tom “Squarepusher” Jenkinson has covered a lot of ground over three decades, from dank cellar ambience to refined baroque composition, and from chirpy funk to monstrous noise. But his default mode is instantly recognisable: 170+ beats per minute jungle / drum’n’bass-adjacent breakbeats, squelching acid techno synths, high drama rave chords, all with him playing jazz fusion bass guitar over the top like a maniac.And that’s what he does here. OK there are “Arkteon” parts one to three – solo bass pieces which form intro, mid point interlude and outro to the album, that are very much in that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’re here. I’m so happy you’re here. You’re alive. You’re doing so well. Living is so hard. We’re alive. Have you suffered? When we’re alive, we suffer. We suffer to be alive. You must have suffered.Paraphrasing Alabaster DePlume’s on-stage discourse alludes to its disconcerting quality. It takes a while to get used to it. At first, it is perplexing. He looks surprised to see the audience yet speaks directly, initially saying he does not know anything. His intensity suggests he’s seeking to convert his audience to questioning why they – and he and his bassist and drummer – exist. It doesn’t Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
Twenty years ago, the British-Ghanaian saxophonist Tony Kofi recorded the results of a venture as ambitious as it was potentially audacious: an album of transpositions for sax of music by the master of improvisational quirk and idiosyncratic technique on piano: Theolonius Monk.Plays Monk was, duly, an astonishing debut statement of intent, musicality, and reverent but confident understanding of Monk specifically, and of Bebop’s journeys parallel to Monk’s studio and live recordings for Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside and Columbia records.During the interim years - and several awards and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Terrapath is a prog-rock album with a large dash of jazz-rock fusion. When the styles were in their Seventies pomp, an album side could be occupied by one cut. Both sides might feature, at most, four, maybe five tracks. Yet Plantoid’s debut LP fits 10 tracks into its 39 minutes, three of which are under three minutes apiece.This take on early Seventies archetypes, then, doesn’t cleave to a standard template. Nonetheless, songs sport shifts in time signatures, very Jan Akkerman-come-John McLaughlin guitar and jazzy drums. There is also fuzz guitar, a hard rock sensibility and a manic approach Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bull And The Lion was originally released in 1976 by Jo'burg, a South African label which opened-up for business in 1973 with a couple of singles and the first album by black singer Margaret Singana. Her debut LP was titled Lady Africa. The same year, the imprint issued the second single by Rabbitt, a white pop-rock band whose guitarist Trevor Rabin became internationally known when he played with Manfred Mann and then joined Yes.Jo'burg, it seems, was not bound by genre limitations and the strictures of working within Apartheid-era South Africa. After 1973, Singana and Rabbitt remained Read more ...
peter.quinn
A flawless song list comprising Richard Rodney Bennett originals plus some of his favourite standards, stunning arrangements by conductor Scott Dunn, plus the mellifluous vocals of Claire Martin magically aligned in my Album of the Year, I Watch You Sleep, an extraordinarily beautiful tribute to Bennett marking the tenth anniversary of his death.It was one of several outstanding vocal jazz releases this year. Returning Weather, a new song cycle from the Dublin-born vocalist and composer, Christine Tobin, presented a fascinating exploration of cultural reconnection. The album’s striking sound- Read more ...