Features

Jef Neve - Soul power

Tipped as one of the new rising stars on the European jazz circuit Belgian pianist Jef Neve returns this month with a follow-up to his critically acclaimed trio outing from last year. On the new record, Soul in a Picture, he manages to mould jazz, rock and classical influences into a flexible improvising vehicle along with drummer Teun Verbruggen and bassist Piet Verbist. Stuart Nicholson talks to Neve about his inspirations, his classical and jazz influences, and how he manages to develop his...

Django Bates - The Loneliness Of Being Right

There’s no one quite like Django Bates. Once the enfant terrible of the 1980s jazz scene, the focal point of Loose Tubes, the ramshackle and influential big band that became a launching pad for a host of significant jazz musicians, Django’s solo career as a keyboardist and composer has developed in fits and starts since. He has gained devotion, bafflement and international recognition in equal measure, as his inexorable retreat from the surburbia of his youth towards a global hybrid of...

Saxophone Summit - Into The Light

Joe Lovano and Dave Liebman are joined by Ravi Coltrane in the new line-up of Saxophone Summit. Following the death of Michael Brecker, Ravi stepped into the breach with his tenor-playing colleagues to find a way to remember both Brecker and Ravi’s father John Coltrane on the  breathtaking new album Seraphic Light. Recorded with the intent of reflecting both the integrity and spirituality of both Brecker and Coltrane, dwelling particularly on the late underappreciated period of Trane’s...

Dave Douglas - The Silver Silence

Trumpeter Dave Douglas has taken the film legacy of silent movie star Fatty Arbuckle whose career was ruined when he was accused, then later acquitted, of the rape of an aspiring actress at a party he threw at a San Francisco hotel in 1921, as the inspiration for his new live album Moonshine. The native New Yorker talks to Stuart Nicholson about the search for Fatty, the process of gaining inspiration to write for film and how he’s pushing recording industry boundaries by recording at a club and...

McCoy Tyner - Reaching Fourth

A walking spirit, a talking spirit, to adapt the title of the opening track on new album Quartet, McCoy Tyner, the only surviving member of the great John Coltrane Quartet, a legend in jazz since the 1960s, who has contributed to the art and practice of jazz music in an incalculable way. Blessed with one of the most distinctive, original, widely copied and most rhythmical piano sounds in jazz, a veritable thunderstorm of rhythm, fire and passion, he’s back with a live album and UK concert...

Acoustic Triangle - Grand Designs

A rave in the nave could hardly be further from the idea behind Acoustic Triangle, that most cerebral of chamber jazz trios comprised of bassist Malcolm Creese, pianist Gwilym Simcock and saxophonist Tim Garland. Touring in sacred spaces, often the largest cathedrals and churches in the land, surprising audiences with sound coming from different angles around the historic spaces, has introduced an element often taken for granted in jazz performance: the nature and impact of space and...

Cassandra Wilson - Southern Comfort

There was a dazzling period in the mid-1990s when Cassandra Wilson could do no wrong. Her bluesiness, innate feel and definitive touch with both her own original songs and blues or rock material, made her that rare jazz singer who could achieve critical and popular acclaim with jazz fans but who also was able to reach out to rock audiences.

Jack DeJohnette - Rhythm Symbol

Master drummer Jack DeJohnette is part of a continuum in jazz that stretches back to the 1960s when the Chicagoan was a member of Charles Lloyd’s seminal quartet and when he made his debut as a leader. The line continued the next decade via Miles Davis and the groundbreaking album Bitches Brew, and then into the 80s and on with his own influential group Special Edition. With the foundation of the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, a new chapter in both...

Christine Tobin and Phil Robson - Coming of age

Daring to be different, singer Christine Tobin is set to delve still deeper into the consciousness of her fans and newcomers alike if the arrival of her brand new album Secret Life of a Girl is anything to go by. An emotional and personal stirring, one step beyond her previous album, the dark Romance and Revolution, Tobin on Secret Life inhabits the world of the young characters in the songs, representing different stages of an untold story, an incipient self awareness and maturity. The album is...

Jason Moran - Sphere of influence

Misunderstood in his own lifetime, but in time elevated to the pantheon of composers that make him as relevant today as he was in the heyday of bebop, the totemic presence and music of Thelonious Monk forms the bedrock of a new monumental work by Jason Moran. The pianist, who tours the UK this month, with an Anglo-US band, has taken Monk’s At Town Hall and reimagined it for the jazz of today. Kevin Le Gendre talks to Moran about how he got inside the mind of the one and only Monk.

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