fri 11/07/2025

jazz

Ian Shaw, Pizza Express Jazz Club

Many jazz singers are known for an instantly recognisable tone. Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong are known the moment they open their mouth, for a particular quality of delivery. Jazz singer and comedian Ian Shaw, who launched his 14th album at...

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Reissue CDs Weekly: The Wilde Flowers

Though Soft Machine were the first band to suggest Canterbury could be musically noteworthy, the appearance of Caravan’s debut album in late 1968, Kevin Ayers' post-Soft Machine solo outing two years later, and the subsequent arrivals of Gong,...

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Albums of 2015: The Maria Schneider Orchestra - The Thompson Fields

My Album of the Year is The Thompson Fields, a stunningly beautiful collection of eight new pieces by the acclaimed composer, arranger and bandleader, Maria Schneider. It's one of those incredibly rare albums in which every element –...

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We Made It: The Electric Recording Company

Always desperately seeking the next profit-boosting lifeline, the record industry is getting all worked up about the "vinyl revival". While sales of CDs and downloads have been falling, those shiny black circles, once believed defunct, have been...

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Brad Mehldau, Wigmore Hall

Contemporary jazz is a world full of magpies – artists who flit between genres and build glittering nests of disparate musical influences. Rock up to a so-called jazz night today and the repertoire can come from anywhere, you’re as likely to hear...

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CD: MALIJA - The Day I Had Everything

With a moto perpetuo of looping accompanying figures in piano and bass underpinning a memorably angular melody in the sax, the opening track of The Day I Had Everything, ”Squared”, announces both a cliché-free collection and a work of trenchant...

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Keith Jarrett, Royal Festival Hall

How, exactly, are you supposed to review a Keith Jarrett concert – solo, completely improvised, just one man and his Steinway, audience on all sides, ushers walking up and down the aisles bearing signs forbidding any record of the evening's music?“...

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Cassandra Wilson/Lionel Loueke, Royal Festival Hall

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Cassandra Wilson to a half empty Royal Festival Hall, after a sulky rendition of “Don’t Explain”, the opening track from her Billie Holiday tribute album, Coming Forth By Day. It was an hour and fifteen minutes since the...

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Gomez, Osborne, Britten Sinfonia, Järvi, Milton Court

Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which...

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Maria Schneider Orchestra, Cadogan Hall

Eloquent, transfixing, profoundly moving. Last night, in the beautiful setting of the Cadogan Hall, the Maria Schneider Orchestra gave one of those landmark performances that people will remember for years to come. We heard seven of the eight tracks...

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Jarrod Lawson, O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire

Having released a self-titled debut album last year, soul singer Jarrod Lawson has been on a European touring offensive for much of this one. Very charming it has been, too, landing Lawson Soul Artist of the Year title at the 2015 Jazz FM Awards,...

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Jazz Voice, Barbican

Featuring the usual, divertingly eclectic mix of singers from the worlds of jazz, pop and soul, last night’s Jazz Voice announced the opening of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival with a programme that satisfied both aficionado and newbie alike....

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