Musical genes don’t run much deeper than Garrick’s. With a jazz pianist father and a mother who played classical piano and sang in the London Philharmonic choir, avoiding a musical upbringing and education would have been difficult. “We lived in a very claustrophobic house with a piano on each of its three floors,” recalls Garrick.
Tim Garland in the space of 20 years has carved out a career as a highly distinctive saxophonist and composer with a sense of his own English identity as a player and at the same time establishing his own place within the jazz tradition. As well as founding his own groups, Garland has played extensively with both Bill Bruford and Chick Corea and has been commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra to write a concerto. This month his Lighthouse Trio, with GWILYM SIMCOCK and ASAF SIRKIS ,...
After putting together a new version of the Jazz Warriors last year Courtney Pine changes tack for his new project, an album made in homage to the early saxophone pioneer Sidney Bechet. Pine takes time in the album to also examine what traditions in jazz mean to him and makes the connection beyond Bechet to Joe Harriott in the 1960s. Selwyn Harris talks to Courtney, recently awarded with a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List, about the impact of Bechet’s playing on him and how we can all learn a...
There are a few surprises in store for long term fans of Joshua Redman. A looser, freer feel, a “double trio” and the sense that, as the title Compasssuggests, Redman has found a new direction. Andy Robson catches up with Redman in the wake of Barack Obama’s election victory and a period of change in Redman’s own life with the birth of his son.
“I’ve got a group of German artists to blame for my being a professional musician,” says Wareham. “I was going to go Art school, but they persuaded me that music was more my thing.”
2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the recording of an album frequently cited as the greatest jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue. To mark the anniversary a special anniversary box set has been released and in keeping with the importance of the album in this special feature Stuart Nicholson tells the story of the album, detailing a tale of surprising confusion along the way which affected the titling of two of the songs on the album ‘All Blues’ and ‘Flamenco Sketches’ and curiously involving...
The youngest member of the influential Loose Tubes big band back in the 1980s, saxophonist Julian Arguelles went on to record a series of critically-acclaimed albums before, unaccountably, falling out of the limelight. But that’s set to change with a new multitracked solo album, Inner Voices, about to come out and plenty of hard touring in 2009. Interview: Selwyn Harris
As a new boxed set tracing the work of the pioneering South African jazz group the Blue Notes is released, Duncan Heining charts the genesis of the distinctive group and the charismatic figure of Chris McGregor from early days in apartheid-era South Africa to exile in Europe and the subsequent development of Brotherhood of Breath and other offshoot groups
With the London Jazz Festival 2008 kicking off on Friday 14th November the organisers, Serious, have announced a special Esbjörn Svensson tribute event together with the full jazz club programme and a series of special free concerts and events to run alongside the major concert programme announced in Jazzwise last month.
“Good teachers are so important to your natural development,” says Wilson, as he recalls a memorable moment of musical inspiration. “My first teacher, Lester Wright, was a crazy kind of individual, but he had really creative ways of teaching. I remember he pulled out this boiled egg, set it down and said ‘now this is a whole note – it has four beats’. Then he attached a pencil to it and called that a half note and then coloured the egg and called it a quarter note. That visual representation of...
