Tag Archives: courtneypine
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers/IDJ Dancers: 35 Years On
1986 was a watershed year for the so-called ‘1980s Jazz Revival’. Indeed it was one of the few positives in a fairly duff year for music. Style magazines like The Face were on board and DJs such as Baz Fe Jazz, Patrick Forge, Gilles Peterson and Paul Murphy were spinning Blue Note sides for a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Album Review: Zoe Rahman’s Dreamland
The pianist has a whole orchestra at his or her fingertips – that’s the theory, anyway. And therefore the jazz pianist has the potential to make the unique sound of an orchestra in ‘spontaneous improvisation’ mode. Duke Ellington was famous for approaching the keyboard in this way, and now Zoe Rahman’s sixth solo album Dreamland […]
Album Review: Courtney Pine’s Europa
Gifted saxophonist Courtney Pine‘s career is one of the great success stories in British jazz. Starting out in the early ‘80s as a sideman with reggae double act Clint Eastwood and General Saint and in various Britfunk bands, he became disillusioned with the outlawing of jazz as a respected, popular music in the climate of […]
Sounds Of Surprise 