Author Archives: Matt P (movingtheriver.com, soundsofsurprise.com)
The Love Supreme Festival 2013
An all-jazz residential UK festival – who’d have predicted it? Spread over an idyllic estate in Glynde, rural East Sussex, Love Supreme’s USP was a wholesale celebration of the music’s huge range, from straightahead to avant-garde, and it certainly delivered on that score. Jazz’s liberation from the club and concert hall also seemed to liberate […]
The Steinway Two-Piano Festival @ Pizza Express, March 2013
To paraphrase Keith Jarrett, the piano perhaps isn’t the most natural instrument for playing jazz, so conquering the beast with 88 teeth remains a huge challenge and this annual festival of duets always throws up an intriguing potpourri of styles. Bath residents Jason Rebello (pictured) and Dave Newton kicked things off with an engaging if […]
Steve Khan on producing Biréli Lagrène’s Inferno and Foreign Affairs
Blue Note’s mid-’80s resurgence was driven by shrewd management of its established stars and also a willingness to expand into various fusions. Some projects of the era have dated well, others not so well, but Biréli Lagrène’s debut Inferno (1987) and follow-up Foreign Affairs (1988) were successes. It’s fair to say that many excellent jazz […]
Wayne Shorter/Martial Solal + Tomorrow’s Warriors @ St Luke’s Church, 27th January 2004
It’s always interesting to hear jazz away from a club or concert hall, and both the unique location and musical content made this a very interesting evening indeed. The always-interesting Tomorrow’s Warriors started off the second night of Wayne Shorter’s Barbican residency with a mixture of the saxophonist’s early compositions for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers […]
Album Review: Scott Henderson’s People Mover
Look up ‘uncompromising’ in the dictionary, and there’s a good chance you’ll see a photo of guitar great Scott Henderson. If he’d wanted to, he could have enjoyed a long, fruitful career as sideman to the stars – Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Jean-Luc Ponty were a pretty decent start – but in the early […]
John McLaughlin & The 4th Dimension @ Barbican, 23rd April 2019
If this was John’s final London gig, what a way to go out. Though the audience’s response was at times reverential and/or strangely undemonstrative, the outpouring of emotion at the conclusion was heartfelt and seemed to come as quite a shock to the performers too. It’s hard to think of another ‘jazz’ band which has […]
Hubert Laws/Smithsonian Masterworks Orchestra @ Milton Court, 6th April 2019
Mention the name of flautist Hubert Laws to jazz fans of a certain bent and it’ll elicit an expression of appreciation and affection – his name is synonymous with the kinds of cool jazz/Latin/funk exemplified by the CTI label, where he made a few fondly remembered albums, as well as making key contributions to Gil […]
Will Downing’s Jazz Odyssey
Will Downing’s string of three fantastic albums from 1990 to 1995 (A Dream Fulfilled, Love’s The Place To Be and Moods) are almost completely forgotten now – a real oversight. Downing came out of the New York mid-’80s session scene, singing on countless jingles and short-lived studio projects, but hit on a formula of sorts […]
Book Review: Pat Metheny (The ECM Years 1975-1984) by Mervyn Cooke
You know the guy: long, bushy hair, beatific grin, jeans, sneakers, long-sleeved T-shirt, usually rhapsodizing intensely via some kind of guitar gizmo. Despite his many stylistic detours, Pat Metheny is a brand all right, and his music inspires a devotion and attendant sales profile that has rarely – if ever – been afforded to ‘jazz’ […]
Album Review: John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring Live In San Francisco
If this is indeed McLaughlin’s final album, as some recent interviews have intimated, it’s a pretty remarkable one to go out on. There are various reasons for this; it’s the first bona fide full-scale return to Mahavishnu Orchestra material since the final incarnation of that band waved goodbye in 1975; it was recorded live on […]
Book Review: Stan Levey: Jazz Heavyweight by Frank R. Hayde
If Martin Scorsese ever gets round to making his jazz movie, he could do a lot worse than a Stan Levey biopic. Levey, who died in 2005, was one of the first great bebop drummers. Completely self-taught and an early master of fast tempos, he played with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Miles Davis, […]
Manfred Eicher awarded Royal Academy of Music Honorary Fellowship
On Monday 12th February, ECM founder and producer Manfred Eicher was presented with a Royal Academy Of Music Honorary Fellowship, an award bestowed on ‘only 100 distinguished individuals who have rendered signal service to the institution or to the music profession in general’, in the words of the RAOM’s website. After the ceremony, Eicher joined […]
Book Review: Forces In Motion (The Music And Thoughts Of Anthony Braxton) by Graham Lock
Is it possible to enjoy a non-fiction book about a musician whose work you’ve never heard? I would probably have said not before I read Graham Lock’s excellent ‘Forces In Motion’ recently. Concerning the music, life and philosophy of Anthony Braxton – possibly the most recorded solo artist in jazz history – the book mainly […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Jason Rebello’s A Clearer View (1990)
This is a fabulous Wayne Shorter-produced album by a London-based piano prodigy who I believe was just 20 when it came out. Rebello’s compositions are certainly influenced by the sax master – anyone who’s spent any time trying to decode the Atlantis album will relish hearing a slightly more accessible version here. But Jason’s touch […]
When Wayne Met Allan
Allan Holdsworth and Wayne Shorter: two of my all-time favourite musicians who, on the face of it, don’t seem to have much in common. But on further inspection, maybe they do – independence, innovation, integrity. Also neither were much given to making guest appearances on other artists’ albums, at least in the second half of […]
Three Views of the Piano @ London Jazz Festival 2017: Monk’s Centenary, Nik Bärtsch and Kate Williams
The sumptuous Cadogan Hall hosted the fitting finale to this year’s London Jazz Festival, a recreation of Thelonious Monk’s famous New York Town Hall concert of 28th February 1959. Charles Tolliver, who had attended the original concert as a teenager, conducted and added occasional trumpet. In a neat touch, the band set up in the […]
Album Review: Courtney Pine’s Black Notes From The Deep
A new Courtney album is always a cause for celebration. Since his big-selling debut, 1986’s Journey To The Urge Within, he’s relentlessly pursued sounds of the Black diaspora (jazz, reggae, calypso, drum’n’bass, ska, hip-hop, soca) and also become a respected educator and broadcaster. And yet the London saxophone legend is still somewhat of a divisive […]
‘Brass Eye’ Meets Mr Bungle: Shatner’s Bassoon
Music videos and jazz: they don’t make for natural bedfellows. A few record companies dipped their toes into the medium in the 1980s with predictably uneven results – Miles’s Tutu videos were ‘interesting’ and worth a look but Chick Corea’s ‘Elektric City’ is probably now an embarrassment to everyone involved, even the brilliant IDJ Dancers. But […]
Rescued From The Vaults: That’s The Way I Feel Now
Most jazz players don’t really seem to ‘get’ the music of Thelonious Monk. Decent cover versions are hard to come by, of course with some notable exceptions (Steve Khan, Kenny Kirkland, Lynne Arriale, Paul Motian and probably a few more). During the centenary of the genius’s birth, it seems as good a time as any to […]
Tony Williams: Creature Of Conscience
It seems as if the second chapter of Tony Williams’ Blue Note solo career (1985–1992) has been rather forgotten. But listening back again after quite a few years, it’s striking how different those six albums sound to most acoustic jazz records being made these days. Though no fan of the whole ‘Young Lions’ neo-traditionalist thing […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Johnny Guitar Watson’s Ain’t That A Bitch
As well as being a blues pioneer, Johnny Guitar Watson was steeped in bebop and swing; one listen to his version of ‘Witchcraft’ or brilliant guitar solo on ‘Telephone Bill’ should prove that. But there was a lot more to Watson, who died in 1996. Frank Zappa said that listening to ‘Three Hours Past Midnight’ […]
Album Review: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side
The trio is of course one of the staples of jazz. But legendary Art Ensemble Of Chicago/AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) co-founder, saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell has come up with an ingenious concept on his new ECM double album: he leads four separate trios, then mixes and matches them. Sometimes he […]
Album Review: The Joe Harriott Story
Jamaica-born alto saxist Joe Harriott was one of the UK scene’s most original, inventive and under-appreciated jazzmen of the late-‘50s and ‘60s. Although he died almost penniless in 1973 at the age of just 44, his work is now being reappraised and he’s being cited as a major influence on today’s younger players. Young UK jazz […]
Rescued From The Vaults: Terje Rypdal’s Waves
Terje Rypdal has enjoyed a very long and varied career with ECM Records. His guitar style is an in-your-face mixture of Hank Marvin-influenced wang-bar melodicism and jagged, dramatic lines that would seem more likely to come from a cello or violin. And whilst probably too much of a mysterious presence to be described as a […]
Geri Allen 1957-2017
Pianist, composer and educator Geri Allen, who has died at the age of 60, had her own sound. Her close-interval chord voicings and sparkling single-note lines couldn’t be anyone else. Influenced by Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Monk, Tommy Flanagan, Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor, she explained her style to writer Howard Mandel in 1993: ‘A […]
Sounds Of Surprise 