jazz
Mark Kidel
There is a jovial intensity about the Jeremy Ledbetter Trio. As they launch vivaciously into the second set of their visit to a packed Ronnie Scott's, they clearly enjoy playing together, as the many smiles and expressions of delight they exchange on stage make blatantly clear. There is a relentlessness, though, as if they’d allowed themselves to be a little too possessed by their virtuosity and high volume.
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As Ledbetter (pictured left) makes clear in his opening intro, almost a harangue rather than something tentative, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“She said her life was like a motorway… dull, grey, and long.” The lyrics of “Like a Motorway,” from Saint Etienne’s February 1994 album Tiger Bay see the titular highway negatively, signifying a life defined by a prolonged drabness.Saint Etienne released their final album, International, last September. By that point, Bob Stanley, one third of the band, was already bedded-in as an author. He has also been behind a series of concept compilations. Rather than being devoted to a genre or style – maybe acid folk or Belgian popcorn – they aim to bring to mind a situation, a setting, particular Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHJohn R Miller The Great Unknowing (Rounder)
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John R Miller’s youth was spent in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, an area where he imbibed Americana-folk fiddle music and began his career. The fiddles are mostly long gone but the feel of them is retained on The Great Unknowing, his fifth album. Miller combines raw country songwriting with a rough-edged bar-blues guitar twang. His voice is world-weary and his songwriting literate but catchy, dosed up on the blackly humorous cynicism found in the best country music Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This album is such a remarkable document, and on so many levels. Perhaps its main "story" is that it could well be the very last studio recording by Jack DeJohnette (1942-2025), having been made during sessions on two successive days at a studio near the great drummer’s home just outside Woodstock in upstate New York, at a time when he was already avoiding travel, and, as it was to turn out, not quite a year before he died.DeJohnette was indisputably one of jazz’s greats and the sheer wonder of his musicianship shines through on this wonderful record. As Ethan Iverson has written, among jazz Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key track gives the album its title. “Where the Fades Meet” opens with swelling strings, which are swiftly underpinned by groovy, shuffling, percussion. The lyrics are carried by a chorale singing of a “fading signal”, “stillness” and “shadows.” It seems to about what lies in the gaps between the perceivable. The melody has a vaguely eastern Mediterranean lilt. Overall, it leans into evoking an exotica-inclined Rotary Connection – the late-Sixties/early Seventies outfit that was a core influence on acid jazz.“Where the Fades Meet” is the sixth track on the seventh album – there has also Read more ...
Ibrahim Maalouf
There is a story hidden inside my trumpet.Not the kind of story people usually associate with innovation today. No laboratory. No startup. No investors. No software. No algorithm.Just a poor Lebanese peasant’s son, born in 1941 in the mountains above Beirut, listening to village brass bands trying – and failing – to play Arabic music.My father, Nassim Maalouf, grew up surrounded by European-style fanfares that had settled permanently across Lebanon during the colonial partition of the Middle East. Brass instruments arrived with soldiers, ceremonies, churches, and military traditions, before Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHEd O’Brien Blue Morpho (Transgressive)
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The last thing theartsdesk on Vinyl thought it needed was a solo album from Radiohead’s guitarist but Blue Morpho, Ed O’Brien’s second album, spikes expectations. The opening “Incantations” is fab, a low-rolling, bongo-tastic thing hazed in mysticism, like a particularly stoned offcut from Plant & Page’s No Quarter project. The album was, apparently, a healing exercise for O’Brien, who was having brain doldrums. It feels that way, lightness touched with sadness, like that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“John Coltrane, he’s a major influence on this record. The instrumental on the A-side is an abstraction of the jazz musician named John Coltrane. That’s C-o-l-t-r-a-n-e.”The Byrds’ David Crosby was spelling it out on 28 March 1966 at a New York press conference called to promote – and explain – his band’s new single “Eight Miles High,” issued nine days earlier. His fellow Byrd Roger McGuinn told journalists that Allen Ginsberg had played them Coltrane: that he “wanted that to come out in our music.” A tape was made of what Ginsberg was urging them to assimilate.
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Sebastian Scotney
Whereas the more venerable European jazz festivals, founded from the 1960s onwards, are typically faced with challenges of mid- or later life, Montrachet Jazz is a newcomer and is different. 2026 was just its second edition, but its early steps are bold and impressive. Not only is a very clever artistic vision already in place, but it is also one which authentically complements and enhances the unique magic of its setting.Location is everything, and truly there is no place like Puligny-Montrachet. For lovers of dry white wine, this is, literally, hallowed ground. The village is within Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I was excited by what I had heard of this quartet – guitarist Julian Lage, keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wollesen – on their album Scenes from Above, which came out in January; I thought it was Lage’s strongest album in eight years.Their concert in front of a full-ish and highly appreciative Royal Festival Hall audience on Friday night absolutely fulfilled the best expectations. But perhaps above all I am excited by where this band can go over the next few years. Lage has had seven Grammy nominations until now, but never won one. Maybe that is about to be Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1Simo Cell & Abdullah Diawy Dying is the Internet EP (Dekmantel) + Simo Cell FL Louis (TEMƎT)
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Where house music has drifted to conservatism, becoming predictable and dull, some electronic producers are still creating dancefloor-adjacent music that rips. One of the very best is French machine-freak Simo Cell. His wonked-out bangers defy definition. He’s been Vinyl of the Month before, with his Yes. DJ EP, back in 2021. These two new releases are also essential. The first, via Amsterdam’s Dekmantel organization, is Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The Puppini Sisters brought their signature blend of close harmony singing to Islington’s Union Chapel on Friday, the opening night of a three-week UK tour marking their 20th birthday and the release of their seventh studio album, titled – naturally enough – The Birthday Party. There was nothing Pinteresque about the evening, just unalloyed joy onstage and off. “The Andrews Sisters on acid”, “The Spice Girls of jazz” and “Swing Punks” – this effervescent trio, whose fans include King Charles and Michael Bublé, are all those and more. With their retro-glamour aesthetic (reflected by a few Read more ...