Features

Guy Barker - Dark End of the Street

Trumpeter Guy Barker has just released his most ambitious album to date, a 2-CD set, inspired by Mozart. Titled The Amadeus Project it grew out of two separate commissions, one instrumental, the other with an actor narrating. Mozart’s most mysterious opera, die Zauberflöte, has in the process become ‘dZf’, with a Chandler-esque noir and the cool of the night about it. Stuart Nicholson tells the story behind the album and as the trumpeter prepares to turn 50 later in December, looks back on over...

Steve Reid - Surreal Rhythm And Blues

The gulf between the world of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and the house band of James Brown at the Apollo to working recently with local musicians in Senegal is as big historically as it is musically yet musical chameleon Steve Reid sits as happily these days at his kit whether it’s a loft jazz, R&B, pop or world music situation as he did back in the day. With the loose feel of Reid’s latest record Daxaar echoing in his ears Kevin Le Gendre talks to Reid about the journey he has made through...

EST - The Sound of Surprise

Out of the blue, with little fanfare and no advance warning, the Esbjörn Svensson Trio has just released a double CD Live In Hamburg recorded a year ago during the tour for the group’s last studio recording, Tuesday Wonderland. While live albums only occasionally work in their own right as a fair or satisfying representation of the full picture of what a musician has to offer, the Hamburg album makes an immediate impact by the group and displays a remarkable level of virtuosity given that little...

Jan Garbarek - A Sense Of Belonging

Jan Garbarek’s English tour this month, culminating in a London Jazz Festival appearance at the Royal Festival Hall on 18 November, will feature, for the first time in this country his new group with drummer Manu Katché and bassist Yuri Daniel. Yet, despite the changes in personnel, Garbarek’s unique vision as a composer and performer has remained constant since the early breakthroughs in his career. Undoubtedly the key saxophonist in European jazz and a role model for Scandinavian musicians...

Miles Davis - Beyond The Corner

It was music like you had never heard before. A dense, churning rhythm that was like an ice-breaker tearing through a glacial sheet. It was a bubbling, molten mix of wah-wah trumpet, droning sitar, multi-layered keyboards, screaming guitar, scurrying soprano sax, dark bass clarinet and the incessant beat of tabla drums. Was it rock? Was it jazz? Was it funk? Was it music from another time and place? It was all these and more: it was the new sound of Miles Davis.

Stacey Kent - Ringing The Changes

Singer Stacey Kent makes her major label debut this month with a new album that marks a change from her traditional reliance on the Great American Songbook and features a songwriting collaboration with Booker prize winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Peter Quinn talks to Stacey.

Robert Wyatt - Human Nature

Robert Wyatt has a unique perspective on jazz. As a lover of the music and a frequent collaborator with some of today’s most interesting performers, Wyatt also represents a quintessentially English tradition of radical dissent both in his songs and in his politics. Formerly a rock drummer with Soft Machine, a band which has remained uniquely influential on subsequent generations of jazz and rock fans alike, he now pursues a distinctive second life as a singer and songwriter, rarely performing...

Cleo Laine and John Dankworth - Double Top

Dame Cleo Laine and Sir John Dankworth both turned 80 recently, a milestone for the couple who for many years have personified British jazz internationally, receiving acclaim and honours frequently along the way. Still active on the scene they look back on a remarkable career with Stuart Nicholson, to the days when bebop was a new music heard at first hand by Dankworth in New York and to the days when he shared a stage with Charlie Parker and toured with Duke Ellington.

Tord Gustavsen - In A Silent Way

A remarkably understated Norwegian piano trio has produced a set of albums that have become some of the best selling jazz records in Europe in the last few years. Led by pianist Tord Gustavsen the trio is set for a UK tour and an appearance at the London Jazz Festival in November following the release of Being There earlier this year. Stuart Nicholson digs deep to discover their influences, their affinity to “cool school” jazz, and how their Norwegian roots informs thieir music.

Polar Bear - Kicking The Senses

Polar Bear has been in the vanguard of the new wave of UK jazz groups to emerge over the past five years. Led by drummer Seb Rochford, the band appeals to both jazz and rock audiences but became known to a still wider audience when its second album Held On The Tips Of Fingers was Mercury nominated. Switching labels, from Babel Records to V2, for its latest album, as yet untitled, Andy Robson catches up with the band members on the eve of the album’s launch.

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