jazz
Joe Muggs
In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem for self-driving cars back then, and generative AI now, is that the last 0.1% is something special. Intractable.It’s worth holding on to that as more and more playlists are flooded by uncannily realistic impersonations of country, disco and what have you. We are about to get glutted by a technology that seems all encompassing, but there remans an Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Something of a jazz supergroup this one: with drum virtuoso, the ubiquitous Seb Rochford, Jim Bar of Get the Blessing, Adrian Utley – formerly of Portishead, a prolific collaborator and producer, but with a heart rooted in jazz, and sax and flute-player Larry Stabbins, among other credits a co-founder of Working Week, recently returned from 10 years’ sailing around the world.Playing mostly improvised music, and deftly navigating a space between fierceness and sensitivity, the four musicians (and friends) have created a dialogue of singular voices that converse and battle with Read more ...
Liz Thomson
You can take the woman out of the Left Bank, but you can’t take the Left Bank out of the woman. Madeleine Peyroux would be perfectly at home in a boîte in the Latin Quarter, or perhaps Montparnasse. Alas, we were in the sadly unromantic surrounds of London’s Barbican, where the lighting crew had done a good job of creating a smoky vibe before curtain-up.If the smell of Gauloises and Lillet were of necessity left to the imagination, Peyroux and her four-piece band provided a 90-minute transport of delight to the near-capacity audience that was, surprisingly, notably older than the singer Read more ...
Tim Cumming
With a title track that sounds like the theme tune of the best TV series of your life – only it doesn’t exist yet – and some star guest jazz players joining the core trio of Dave Stapleton, Deri Roberts, and Elliot Bennett, Slowly Rolling Camera mark their 10th year with a luxuriously immersive sixth studio release on Edition Records.Silver Shadow evokes an analogue film world of reels and projections, a monochrome noir with great lighting, referenced on the vinyl album’s sleeve. Its eight compact tracks, only one breaking the five-minute mark, are described as film montages, ones Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Voice and piano. The combination can have a simplicity, a conversational freedom, a rightness about it, as it does here. “My Ideal” (Dot Time), with its eleven songs from the early days of jazz up to the 1950s, is already being placed alongside classic duo albums by Ella Fitzgerald with Ellis Larkins, or the great pairing of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, and it is indeed a very fine and uplifting album.The sixth track of the album, its centrepiece, “Ain’t That Love”, shows off the intimate vibe of the duo particularly well. Vocalist Catherine Russell and pianist Sean Mason clearly know the Ray Read more ...
John Carvill
It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.In this fine, clear-eyed biography, Paul Alexander documents Holiday’s propensity for feeding the media inaccuracies and tall tales, her enthusiastic embrace of “the adage that said the truth should never stand in the way of a good story.” But the media gave as good as they got, downplaying her artistic achievements and fixating on her problems with substance abuse and exploitative, violently toxic male partners.Many of the myths imposed upon her during her lifetime persist, particularly those that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As Dust we Rise ends with “Quilt,” a percussion-driven lamentation bringing to mind the New Orleans stylings of Dr. John. The album begins with “Hem,” where stabbing piano and strings interweave with a pulsing, wordless chorale. After a while, a muted trumpet and pattering wood blocks fill it out.In between, odd suggestions of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil" (“Here Comes the Flood”), a spectral, twinkling ballad (“The Sea”), a sharp, skip-along, clockwork-toy of a track (“Ammonite,” one of the album's most electronica-inclined cuts) which could fit snugly into the soundtrack of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Madeleine Peyroux made her name with her second album, 2004’s Careless Love. It consists almost completely of cover versions, delivered in a quiet, jazz-bluesey shuffle redolent of singers from the 1930s. She’s never flown as high again but has maintained a decent career, mostly mining similar sonic territory. Her new album, and first in six years, does not wander far from the path, but is all originals, written with regular collaborator Jon Herington. Despite being spiked with songs that have something to say, it’s a deliciously lazy summer listen.Contrary to a common perception, Peyroux is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Amazed by what she heard, she tuned in to pop radio for the first time. Her head was further turned by The Beatles and The Mamas & the Papas. A copy of “God Only Knows’s” parent album Pet Sounds was bought.Newly thrilled by a pop she saw as more innovative than a jazz scene she thought too full of Ornette Coleman imitators, she wrote a song titled “Think of Rain.” In tune with the burgeoning harmony pop style, its baroque leanings and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHAriel Sharratt & Matthias Kom Never Work (BB*Island) + Ella Ronen The Girl With No Skin (BB*Island)Two offbeat albums from the uncategorisable Hamburg label BB*Island. They are home to the literary indie outfit The Burning Hell. The central figures of that band are Canadian singers Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt (assuming the latter is Canadian as Google wouldn't tell me). Together, their second album is a concept affair loaded with brilliant, poignant freak-folk responses to contemporary capitalism, the gig economy and similar. These include the inspiring title track “ Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Always looking dapper and always sounding cool, Barry Adamson is a man who nevertheless seems to be perpetually of another time. Giving off the vibes of a one-man Rat Pack with a dash of the legendary Lee Hazelwood, his music certainly doesn’t have much in common with mainstream tastes.The former Magazine bassist and Bad Seed’s new album is a stylish and charismatic collection that draws on gospel, classic soul, blues and jazz through a widescreen cinematic lens that may be mature, but certainly isn’t square. Louche but sharp, Cut to Black is by turns atmospheric and soulful but wholly witty Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great jazz pianists, was called Songs from Home, released on the New York indie jazz label Palmetto Records towards the end of 2020. Silent, Listening, released this month on ECM could not be more different in it moods and in its aims.Songs from Home was recorded at the time of the pandemic at Hersch’s home in Pennsylvania. The pianist sought solace from a “loss of identity” (and loss of work) by recalling the songs which had been around during his youth. As a “child of the 60s” he remembers, “when the craft of Read more ...