jazz
peter.quinn
There's something about the way in which the musical surfaces of album opener “Urban Control” glitter and sparkle that immediately announces you're listening to a Phronesis recording. By the time Danish bassist Jasper Høiby reaches the end of his first, elegantly constructed, descending phrase, you already sense the impending explosion of motifs and rhythmic energy that it will detonate. And, sure enough, once British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger are brought into play, the trio's characteristically rich counterpoint takes on an unstoppable momentum.Recorded over Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the 1960s and early 70s drummer Jack DeJohnette, now 71, was learning his craft with nearly everyone who was anyone, including Coltrane, Monk, Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis. Last night at the Barbican, he was the presiding spirit (if not, technically, leader) in a new multi-generational “supergroup”, the Spring Quartet, alongside Blue Note’s star saxophonist Joe Lovano (61), and two thirtysomethings, pianist Leo Genovese, and the winner of the 2011 best new artist Grammy Esperanza Spalding. It was like watching spring in slow motion: the new shoots are vigorous, but there’s still plenty of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
John Coltrane’s extravagant, trance-like saxophone-playing is often considered the pinnacle of jazz technique, but for Evan Parker, who celebrated his 70th birthday with a concert at Kings Place last night, it was only the starting point. In an immensely distinguished international career, Parker has taken Coltrane’s hard-scrabbling virtuosity into the realms of abstraction, experimenting with split notes and circular breathing, and leaving behind even the barest bones of traditional key changes and melodic variation to create a brave new world of spontaneously improvised sound.If this sounds Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Art, real art, is a denial of the status quo. A tradition that values the role of the individual.” Speaking in Estonia’s capital for the opening of Tallinn Music Week, the Baltic country’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is referring to what’s just over his shoulder. Freedom is on his mind.Estonia shares a border with Russia, and Tallinn is just 1000km from Ukraine’s capital Kiev. Taken together, Estonia, Latvia and Belarus share an unbroken border with their former Soviet master. On the Black Sea, Ukraine is on the southern seaboard of that border, and on the Baltic, Estonia is on the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
“The most influential band of the last ten years. Period,” said Jez Nelson, of BBC Radio 3’s Jazz On 3, announcing Polar Bear to the XOYO audience last night. It’s difficult to live up to an introduction like that, especially when the band wanted the audience to focus on their new album, which was launched that night. They gave a typically committed and masterful performance of their well-received new album, In Each And Every One, which drummer, bandleader and composer Seb Rochford introduced with his trademark bashful charm. The playlist followed the order of the album quite Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Norwegian saxophonist Marius Neset is not yet 30, and he already has several acclaimed albums with smaller forces to his increasingly neon-lit name. With this release of new and adapted work for 12-piece big band, he sets out to work on a larger (and notoriously complex) canvas. It’s intense, dramatic and finely wrought, with numerous changes of style and direction.Some tracks are adapted from two previous albums, Birds and Golden Xplosion; others are original. The lion theme is everywhere: the Nordic blonde Neset himself, his gleaming sax over one shoulder; the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s strange to think that music recorded 45 years ago in what was once an old Yiddish theatre turned rock 'n' roll palace on the Lower East Side in the summer of 1970 – a few months before Jimi Hendrix’s death, as war raged in Vietnam and riots in the US – still sounds way ahead of our time, let alone the time in which it was made.Robert Glasper recently complained that jazz was stuck in the past, with Miles Davis, 22 years dead, still able to knock him off the number one spot. Fair enough, but Davis was playing the future, not the past, and on the strength of a remarkable third volume in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Zara McFarlane’s rise to jazz eminence has taken the scenic route, especially in these days of the super-educated jazz prodigy. From a Jamaican home where reggae was always in the air, via a love of musical theatre, and a degree in pop performance, McFarlane studied jazz and improvisation at the Guildhall. With the support of Gilles Peterson, who signed her to his Brownswood label, she released a debut album, Until Tomorrow, in 2011. This was warmly reviewed, and received a MOBO nomination, but her second album, If You Knew Her, which came out earlier this year, is a further breakthrough. Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Seb Rochford’s five-piece Polar Bear is now ten years old, and the band's post-jazz amalgam of lugubrious saxophone phrases and scratchy riffs, scarified electronic soundscapes, and mesmeric, crackling drum and bass rhythms has matured. The giddy thrills of nearly winning the Mercury Prize (with Held on the Tips of Fingers in 2005) are long past, and they seem content with the trappings of the alternative scene, releasing limited edition vinyl and selling inscrutable T-shirts. That stability of identity has, perhaps, contributed to a subtler, slower-burning sound that lets the details breathe Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Julian Siegel’s urbane, generically layered voice has, as both reeds player and composer, forged a unique and revered position in the jazz world. He leads a quartet of pioneering drive and technique, featuring pianist Liam Noble, bass player Oli Hayhurst and drummer Gene Calderazzo. Their 2011 album Urban Theme Park was widely praised for its improvising ambition, diverse sound worlds and smouldering virtuosity.He has a distinguished presence in jazz-rock in the form of the band Partisans, co-founded nearly 20 years ago with the guitarist Phil Robson, and also leads a trio with Joey Baron and Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Trumpeter and composer Rory Simmons is one of the most innovative and diversely talented musicians on the contemporary jazz scene, genre-hopping with startling agility across its many cutting edges. Fringe Magnetic, Simmons’ acclaimed 11-piece band, has been blending the compositional rigour of classical music with the freer playing style of jazz for nearly five years now. He’s a core member of the LOOP Collective, and has collaborated across Europe with jazz stars including Barak Schmool, John Etheridge and Byron Wallen. Meanwhile, he’s also in demand as a sideman and session musician with Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Revelling in the acoustic precision of the recently opened Milton Court concert hall last night, Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen showed once more why his quartet’s combination of tersely lyrical melodies and syncopated rhythms is so appealing. For his new album, some of which was played here, his typically European, restrained sound was, to a greater extent than previously, augmented by some distinctly funky passages, which were drawn out with immense skill and sensitivity from what had gone before. Several pieces shared both an extraordinary variety of style, and a seamlessly smooth Read more ...