jazz
Peter Culshaw
For an art form that has been quite often written off over the last half century, Jazz seems in extraordinarily rude health. Today sees the opening of the biggest ever EFG London Jazz Festival featuring scores of venues and hundreds of groups throughout the capital.Back in the Sixties, the likes of Philip Larkin in All What Jazz? were saying the form died off when it left New Orleans. “Jazz is dead now, as dead as madrigal singing. We can only treasure the records. And I do,” he said mournfully in an interview in 1982. A run of articles in the last year or two with with titles like “Is Read more ...
peter.quinn
Maria Schneider is one of the luminaries of contemporary jazz. The composer, arranger and bandleader, together with her 18-piece orchestra, first came to prominence in 1994 with the release of their debut recording, Evanescence. Blazing the crowdfunding trail as ArtistShare’s first release, Concert in the Garden (2004) made history as the first recording to win a Grammy with online-only sales, while "Cerulean Skies" from Sky Blue (2007) picked up another Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. Featuring the soprano Dawn Upshaw, Schneider's song Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He’s an American jazz giant; she’s a Scottish doyenne of the classical violin. Anyone familiar with one more than the other – and that’s more or less everyone – would do a double take to see their names on the same bill. But this week at Barbican Hall, a new concerto by Wynton Marsalis will be premiered by Nicola Benedetti and the London Symphony Orchestra.What they have in common is a tireless commitment to promoting music education. Jazz at Lincoln Center of which Marsalis is both founder and artistic director has an educational programme, and he is also director of the Juilliard’s jazz Read more ...
mark.kidel
While many of his contemporaries make the most of their grizzled old men’s voices, Georgie Fame sounds as young and fresh as he did when he first burst on the London scene in the 1960s. This is supposedly his last album, and it sounds, in many ways, as if it had been made 50 years ago.Accompanied by a group of top-drawer British jazzmen, including Guy Barker (trumpet), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Alec Dankworth (bass) and Anthony Kerr (vibes) – along with his sons Tristan on guitar and James on drums – the veteran delivers a very tasteful range of characteristically bluesy hard bop, blue beat- Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Asif Kapadia’s Amy packs a punch. It is a wrenching, clear-eyed portait of a supremely talented, charismatic young woman being whittled away by voracious, relentless 21st century celebrity, exacerbated by her own demons. At the UK box office it’s become the second most successful documentary feature film of all time (after Farenheit 9/11). Part of its power is, of course, the raw, soulful singing of its central protagonist. Now a soundtrack arrives, a collage of Winehouse favourites, demos and live takes interspersed with the instrumental music of Brazilian film composer Antônio Pinto.Where Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Return to Larkinland was the second of AN Wilson’s intimate portraits of poets, following his similar excursion to “Betjemanland” last year. His very particular form of exploration of the biographical genre results in a selectively detailed portrait seen through the eyes of an admitted admirer, a sense of character created through a pronounced feel for Larkin’s times, caught in redolent black and white archive, as well as in the attention he pays to the places and spaces of the poet’s life.Wilson knew Larkin well, but wasn’t reluctant to confront the darker issues that have been associated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Georgie Fame: The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966Last month, theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly tackled a collection of albums by Faces which, despite great remastered sound and noteworthy bonus tracks, was a thoughtless, cheapo package ill-befitting a band of such popularity and status. This splendid new Georgie Fame box set is exactly the sort of thing the Faces release could and should have been.The meat of The Whole World’s Shaking – The Complete Recordings 1963–1966 is Fame’s four albums from the period: Rhythm and Blues at the Flamingo, Fame at Last, Sweet Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Fashions in art and music come and go in less time than it takes to read a Buzzfeed list. So there was something uncannily satisfying about star pianist Alan Broadbent’s admission that he’s been working on last night’s collection of entirely new songs for the past 50 years. He and Georgia Mancio showed last night at the Watermill – a popular, ambitious club whose extensive programme belies its suburban location at the social club of insurance firm Aviva – how with the highest standards of skill and craft it’s possible to create something completely new within a respected musical tradition. Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Mule Musiq family of labels, from Tokyo, is one of the great secret goldmines of the dance music world. The house, disco, techno and ambient music they put out from top worldwide producers can very often be tasteful to the point of innocuousness on the surface but, perhaps in keeping with the Japanese sense of wabi-sabi, when given your time and attention it almost invariably reveals hidden beauty that make their releases ones you can come back to over the years.This album, however, seems the diametric opposite of their usual approach. It is, more or less, a jazz fusion record, but one Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Loose Tubes go hand in hand with Ronnie Scott’s. This was the setting for their fabled residencies back in the Eighties, the scene of their farewell gig in 1990 and of their comeback last year (both of which feature on new live album Arriving). The venue’s location gets a name check on 2010 release Dancing on Frith Street (featuring more live material from that 1990 gig) and it got another mention on Thursday night, with Tubes trombonist and irreverent MC Ashley Slater declaring it the band’s "spiritual home".I saw them play the 1600-seat Hall One at Gateshead International Jazz Festival back Read more ...
Martin Longley
The Chicago Jazz Festival is a freebie extravaganza, held over the Labor Day holiday weekend, its massive crowds welcomed by the looming chromium jelly bean that is sculptor Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate. Onward into Millennium Park, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, there are a pair of long tents for the afternoon sets, with alternating bands ensuring constant musical motion.The evening performances take place on the impressive Jay Pritzker Pavilion stage, designed by Frank Gehry. Completed in 2004, it’s been the jazz festival’s home for the last three years of its 36-year history. It’s as if Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Courtney Pine’s Caribbean-flavoured album House of Legends was released three years ago, and it says a lot that he’s still touring it. This riotously melodic collection of ska, soca and calypso, embellished with some scorching solo work, has certainly proved popular, as the latest sell-out run at Ronnie’s testifies. Pine cheerfully apologised for a lack of CD’s to sell at the gig: they’ve all been sold.However, a critic more prone to stroke his chin than shake his (or her) booty (chin-stroking being generally a male pastime) would probably suggest that this reflects a certain lack of urgency Read more ...