jazz
Russ Coffey
You may know Harry Shearer better as Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. His wife, Judith Owen, is as well known for her recent stage show with Ruby Wax, Losing It, as her own albums. But though they may have limited street recognisability, in the three cities they call home they are legendary for their hospitality. theartsdesk sampled some of this warmth in their London residence where, over tea, we discussed, amongst other things, dwarf choreography, mental illness and hanging out with Metallica.The night before Owen was giving a promotional concert for her new album, Some Kind of Comfort, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, the Duke of York’s Picture House, the oldest consistently operating purpose-built cinema in the country. It’s a beautiful venue, just over a century old, and almost too comfortable. It’s been jazzed up a few times over the decades and, tonight, bathed in red light, wears its history with lazy insouciance, merging it with the current interior design’s burlesque Art Deco spin. My seat is at the back of the balcony, plush and comfortable, with a little shelf where I place my salted popcorn and horrible pear cider (the latter, a mistake). Mostly the Duke of York’s is still a cinema but they Read more ...
peter.quinn
Spoiler alert: this CD contains grooves that will bring out your inner air guitarist. From the album's lead-off song, “Tenderly”, whose sumptuous voicings lesser artists can only fantasise about, to its towering sign-off, “Fingerlero”, George Benson's 24-carat gift for free-flowing improv remains a thing of wonder. “Fingerlero” also features one of the most recognisable and heart-stirring sounds in jazz: Benson scatting in perfect unison with his deftly picked guitar lines. He makes you wait, but it's so worth it.Heard in both combo and solo settings, the 12-track set includes nods to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time.Shorter enjoys quoting his old cohort Miles Davis’s more enigmatic comments like, “Do you ever get fed up of making music that sounds like music?” What Shorter and his band do is at any rate not like anyone else’s music – they use a huge palette of colours Read more ...
peter.quinn
This Edition Records debut from pianist Andrew McCormack and saxophonist Jason Yarde is a powerful marriage of brilliant musicianship and composition of the first rank. While this is only their second release in the duo format, a follow-up to the 2009 album My Duo, their attention to the smallest detail of phrasing and dynamic has been steadily honed since the days of playing together in seminal groups J-Life and Tomorrow's Warriors, dating back to the 1990s.The new album ranges from the rolling, Jarrettesque vamp of album opener "D-Town" to the duo's elaborate unpacking of "Embraceable You Read more ...
peter.quinn
Take the sounds of New Orleans brass, Prince-style funk, hip-hop beats and power chord axe-riffing. Stir them all together, add in an assortment of high-profile guests, and you produce the genre-defying greatness that is For True.At an age when most kids are developing a taste for solid food, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews was lugging his horn around the Tremé district of New Orleans, where he was born and raised. This follow-up to last year's Grammy-nominated Backatown from the horn player and his wonderfully monikered Orleans Avenue band – Michael “Bass” Ballard (on, er, bass), Pete “Freaky Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Harmonies, psychedelia and soul were meant to go together. Chicago’s’ Rotary Connection realised this and pumped out what were later recognised as classics like "Memory Band" and "I am The Black Gold of The Sun". On their debut album, Brooklyn’s The Stepkids step up, taking the sound apart and restitching it patchwork-quilt style. They are, to their inspirations, what Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings are to their funk and soul roots.The Stepkids coalesced in 2009 after singer/guitarist Jeff Gitelman and drummer Tim Walsh began building a studio in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They’re completed by Read more ...
bruce.dessau
This was always going to garner heaps of publicity. Tony Bennett is not just a legend, but a legend who has outlived his rivals. With Sinatra long gone Bennett, 85, is the capo di tutti capi of living crooners. It will also attract attention because it is the sequel to his excellent 2006 team effort, Duets: American Classics. Most of all, Duets II, featuring new versions of old Bennett hits, will notch up column feet because it features the final official recording of Amy Winehouse, who accompanied Anthony Dominick Benedetto on “Body and Soul” at Abbey Road in March.With 17 tracks there Read more ...
philip radcliffe
This is not exactly Edward II the musical. There’s no singing, but music plays a leading role. It is the food of love of the sort that dared not speak its name – and there is excess of it for my taste. The idiom is jazz of the edgy sort fashionable in Paris in the 1950s, reflecting pretty boy Piers Gaveston’s exile there, where he has been banished by Edward I for getting too close to his wayward son.Director Toby Frow chooses to move Marlowe’s play nearly 650 years on to the 1950s, notable amongst other things for the newsworthiness of homosexual causes célèbres, as the timeline diagram in Read more ...
peter.quinn
While the physical and mechanical elements of its production are common to all, the sound of a person's voice is as individual as a fingerprint. Launching her Brazilian-themed solo album Lágrimas de um pássaro (Tears of a Bird) in the intimate surroundings of Soho's Pizza Express Jazz Club, Heidi Vogel's extraordinarily rich and complex vocal timbre proved capable of completely seducing the senses.You sensed from the very opening bars of Tom Jobim's “Modinha” that the material, musicians and audience were in perfect harmony. A singer who is as naturally sympathetic to the Brazilian idiom as Read more ...
peter.quinn
Rooted in the New Orleans brass band tradition, but updating it for the 21st century with elements of funk, R&B, hip hop, reggae and half-sung, half-rapped lyrics, this disc will blow clean out of the water any preconceptions you might have of what a brass band sounds like.Through a combination of utterly seductive grooves, powerful soloing and über-catchy melodies, the eight-piece Soul Rebels Brass Band possess an unbridled energy that enables Unlock Your Mind to achieve dramatic lift-off from the get-go. Featured in the Season One finale of the acclaimed HBO TV series Treme, the band's Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s the new(ish) big jazz venue, and it’s in, of all places, the wilds of Canary Wharf. It's curious, and encouraging, that anyone has the nerve to open a large new jazz venue anywhere, and in the midst of economic gloom, but they have. The venue for music is the size of Ronnie Scott’s but it is more than a mere music venue – it’s a good-quality restaurant with a cigar bar, a terrace (handy for smokers) and a huge whisky bar - an “amber wall of liquid gold” as they charmingly put it, from £5 to £2,500 for a Macallan 1937 double shot.The vibe is determinedly masculinist – stuffed deer heads Read more ...