The 2025 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, now in its 55th year, has evolved over the last 20 years from its original format of celebrating the music culture of New Orleans and Louisiana to what now feels more like a major rock festival, with a number of specialist genres –jazz, blues, cajun, zydeco and gospel – on the side.
Its ambition and scale – 650 acts on 14 stages over eight days – lends itself towards being thought of...
Gato Barbieri: Standards 2 (Red Records RRCD 1233482)
By the time this album was recorded in Rome in the spring of 1968 the Argentinian Barbieri had...
Kjetil Husebø: Piano Transformed - Interspace (Optical Substance Productions OSP010)
My reviews of Kjetil Husebø’s recent ambient jazz projects have spoken of the Norwegian pianist-composer’s...
Jenna Cave Sextet: Grief, Hope, Love (ABC Jazz ABC J0033D)
Australian jazz composer Jenna Cave identifies the concept of “grief literacy”, which might be defined...
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Pete McGuiness Jazz Orchestra, Theo Travis, Bugge Wesseltoft, Becca Wilkins and Savina Yannatou // Editor's pick: The Action 4s
Sharel Cassity: Gratitude (Sunnyside Records)
As a youngster in Oklahoma, Sharel Cassity’s heart and soul got captured by bassist Christian McBride’s debut studio album Gettin’...
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Joshua Redman, Scandinavian Art Ensemble (w. Tomasz Stańko) and Martin Speake & Will Butterworth // Editor's pick: Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet
Ben Webster: Soulville (WaxTime 772350-LP)
The swing-era trinity of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster really wrote the book on the tenor saxophone until...
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Georgia Mancio & Alan Broadbent, Harvey Mason, Bennie Maupin, Pat Metheny and Hedvig Mollestad || Editor's pick: Mehldau, Turner, Bernstein
Jeb Patton Quartet: Whisper Not (Fresh Sound Records FSRCD 5134)
It’s absolutely clear where this quartet’s heart lies from one look at the material and...
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Goran Kajfeš, Matthew Kilner, Lagon Nwar, Germana La Sorsa, Ingrid Laubrock and Joe Lovano // Editor's pick: Lagon Nwar
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Phil Haynes, Arve Henriksen, Freddie Hubbard, Jon Irabagon and Naïssam Jalal // Editor's pick: Rita Hargrave and Wayne Wallace
Thirty years ago Derek Ansell reviewed the tenorist in a well-planned and expressive straightahead session with Tom Harrell, Willy Pickens, Cecil McBee and Elvin Jones
Fifty years ago Mike Shera thought Garbarek and Stenson's collection of pieces based on simple phrases or modes should be heard by those interested in that sort of thing
Thirty years ago Mark Gilbert welcomed another example of the substitution of a loose sixties-style rock shuffle for the triplet groove most often associated with piano-trio jazz
Sixty years ago Mark Gardner acclaimed the Swiss pianist's adaptation of the baroque to jazz, reckoning the era's hipsters would have flipped their wigs in approval
The 2025 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, now in its 55th year, has evolved over the last 20 years from its original format of celebrating the music culture of New Orleans and Louisiana to what now feels more like a major rock festival, with a number of specialist genres –jazz, blues, cajun, zydeco and gospel – on the side.
Its ambition and scale –...
Gato Barbieri: Standards 2 (Red Records RRCD 1233482)
By the time this album was recorded in Rome in the spring of 1968 the Argentinian Barbieri had already made something of a case for the idea of jazz as an international language, not least through his contributions to Don Cherry's Blue Note album Complete Communion. At that point in time it was clear that he was an...
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Pete McGuiness Jazz Orchestra, Theo Travis, Bugge Wesseltoft, Becca Wilkins and Savina Yannatou // Editor's pick: The Action 4s
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Joshua Redman, Scandinavian Art Ensemble (w. Tomasz Stańko) and Martin Speake & Will Butterworth // Editor's pick: Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet
Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2025, including Georgia Mancio & Alan Broadbent, Harvey Mason, Bennie Maupin, Pat Metheny and Hedvig Mollestad || Editor's pick: Mehldau, Turner, Bernstein
Just as Nigel Jarrett laments the dilution - even hijacking - of the word "jazz" by festivals featuring pop and increasingly resting on "inclusion" as a justification, Swanage in Dorset lays claim to hosting "'the largest and purest jazz...
For a third year Wandsworth - London Borough of Culture 2025 - presents Battersea Park in Concert over the summer bank-holiday weekend, this year 23-25 August. As in 2024, the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra will again feature, but this...
James Baldwin (1924-1987) is considered by many to be one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Born into poverty in Harlem, New York, he became an activist and broke new ground with his exploration of racial...
In Brassroots Democracy, author Benjamin Barson presents a "music history from below", embracing the Haitian revolution, post-civil war reconstruction and early jazz. The term "brassroots democracy" is a synthesis of grassroots activism and New Orleans' historic brass-band tradition, and...
I first met Gale Madden at a record shop in Bellingham, Washington in the late 80s. As we stood digging a CD of vintage Roy Eldridge, Gale (1) regaled...
“I don’t rate myself,” asserts saxophonist Art Themen. “I’m just a jobbing musician who’s been very, very lucky.” It’s an astounding statement, for Themen,...
In 2024, having spluttered speechlessly at the non-jazz headline acts of major jazz festivals for several years, I came across Montreux and its 58th manifestation. Its promoters boasted it would “span all genres”. All genres of what? With a...
Roy Ayers was a virtuoso jazz vibraphone player and multi-instrumentalist, but he was also able, in the 1970s, to bring jazz substance into R&B, funk and soul and later to inspire the style known as neo-soul. Everyone Loves The...
Thirty years ago Mark Gilbert welcomed another example of the substitution of a loose sixties-style rock shuffle for the triplet groove most often associated with piano-trio jazz
Thirty years ago Derek Ansell reviewed the tenorist in a well-planned and expressive straightahead session with Tom Harrell, Willy Pickens, Cecil McBee and Elvin Jones
Thirty years ago Michael Tucker felt this unplugged set from Corea almost compensated for the 'high-tech, riff-heavy fusion which he has occasionally seen fit to indulge'
