jazz
Nick Hasted
Neil Young put Toast to one side in 2001, dismayed at its blue emotional terrain. Depicting his marriage to Pegi Young hanging by a thread, it was recorded with Crazy Horse in San Francisco’s Toast studio, where Coltrane once worked, but rats now crept in from the alley. “Toast was so sad that I… couldn’t handle it,” Young said recently, its sound “murky and dark”.Dumped with his many “lost” albums, Toast now joins Homegrown (taped 1975, released 2020) and Hitchhiker (1976, 2017) in a restored discography. Convening Booker T and The MG’s and Horse guitarist “Poncho” Sampedro in a different Read more ...
Katie Colombus
By day three of any festival things are usually winding down. But there was a sense that Love Supreme have saved the best for last this year with a strong offering of funk and soul, R&B and experimental jazz.Crowds of Londoners hitching a tractor ride to Glynde rubbed shoulders with campers and glampers – there’s a definite demographic here of people whose kids have flown the nest and they’re living life to the fullest.Georgia Cecile (pictured left) in peach satin with fur cuffs kicked off the party on the South Downs stage with a touch of old school jazz glamour and a nod to the Great Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The case is quite simple. We think that the policy which is being pursued by the western powers is one which is almost bound to end in the extermination of the human race. Some of us think that might be rather a pity.”This extract from a 1958 interview with Bertrand Russell opens Ban The Bomb - Music Of The Aldermaston Anti-Nuclear Marches, a two-CD set collecting music and interview snippets associated with the early days of CND and the related anti-nuclear protest. Next up in the tracklist is Ewan MacColl & Peggy Seeger’s “March With us Today” which exhorts listeners to come to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Summer has arrived outside and sunny sounds are blasting from the speakers at theartsdesk on Vinyl. But not just sunny sounds, to be truthful, also sounds that cover most of the human emotional range, all from plastic discs in varying colours. Check in below for over 8000 words on music, from Afro-electro to Cornish rock to tango to genres beyond naming. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHShelf Lives Yes, Offence (Sorry Mom)Juddering, sweary, punkin’, sneering electro-rock is the game of London-based duo Shelf Lives, fronted by single-monikered Canadian frontwoman Sabrina and Brit producer-guitarist Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In 1990, teenage prodigy Ron Trent released a single on Armando’s Warehouse imprint. Recorded on cheap equipment it was, nevertheless, a staggering piece of music. Urgent, insistent and unrelenting its piercing strings, metallic cymbals and juddering, robotic bass created a spiralling sense of joy that has remained undiminished for more than 30 years.While the low-level lighting and smooth-as-silk production on Trent’s latest outing, under his WARM moniker, has more in common with the lush and expansive deep house he pioneered alongside Chez Damier on the Prescription label, there is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1966, the combo fronted by French sax player Barney Wilen issued an album of musical interpretations of each sign of the zodiac. In the US in 1969, Mort Garson released 12 albums, each dedicated to a single sign. Two years earlier Garson was behind the one-sign-per-track Cosmic Sounds album, credited to The Zodiac. Back in 1945, bop pianist Mary Lou Williams made an album – over six 10-inch discs – titled Signs Of The Zodiac.Taking inspiration from the signs of the zodiac wasn’t unusual. But Wilen’s album approached what could have been cheesy from a perspective acknowledging that this was Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh Cherry output, the esoteric jazzual spirit that’s imbued her last couple of albums. The Versions is a crafted, mellow, late night affair containing material different enough from the originals to be interesting, even if it cannot top their cheeky hip hop-pop potency.Take the version of 1989 cut “Heart” by Los Angeles violinist-singer Sudan Archives, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Superless are playing live for the first time. Instead of being bottom of a bill, this quartet have a prime spot at Bergen’s Nattjazz festival. Given the eminence of who’s in the band, it makes sense. Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (bass), Eirik Hegdal (woodwind) and Øyvind Skarbø (drums) are Norwegian and American guitarist Jeff Parker is based in Los Angeles.All four have enviable track records. Amongst the signposts are Håker Flaten’s membership of The Thing, Hegdal’s involvement with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Skarbø’s endless credits and Parker being in Tortoise. Whatever it is Superless are Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“I suppose you’re going to ask all the usual questions...?” When Keith Jarrett was interviewed by Alyn Shipton for the very first time, the pianist, who could often be tetchy in such situations, clearly had low expectations. Deftly, Shipton asked him what it had been like to play the baroque organ in the abbey at Ottobeuren for the recording of Hymns/Spheres for ECM in 1976. “His eyes lit up,” Shipton remembers. “[He told] me how he had been ‘immediately lost in its world of sound’... and we were away...”This anecdote – which is not in the book On Jazz - A Personal Journey itself, but in an Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Touched by Rodin in a Paris Museum” is a 14-minute consideration of exactly what its title says: the impact of encountering Auguste Rodin’s work in person. The composition features piano only. There are nods to Debussy and Ravel. The playing is measured and minimal yet still full-bodied. At odd points, there are seconds of complete silence.Taped in 1970, this recording was meant to feature on an album which was never issued. It would have been the third by Patty Waters, following-up her ESP-Disk LPs Sings (1965) and College Tour (1966). After these, Waters seemed to have vanished. Actually, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The latest edition of Peter Culshaw’s occasional global radio shows focuses totally on Ukraine, looking at music, art, culture and resistance.Culshaw has reported over the years on the Odessa Film and Jazz festivals for theartsdesk, and written for the Odessa Review, Songlines and the Guardian on Ukrainian music and film. He argues that Ukraine was becoming too attractive, democratic, hip and culturally and technologically innovative – and that such a flowering had to be stamped out by Russia before it spread. We also discuss whether World War 3 has actually started.His co-pilot for the whole Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Among the plentiful bonus items in this Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Round Midnight, the last one is a surprise. It shows Dexter Gordon in his prime, back in 1969.He’s doing the thing for which, purely as a jazz musician, he’s best known. We see his blistering inventiveness as a bebop improviser. He is playing his own tune “Fried Bananas” with barrelling energy at a club in Copenhagen. In other words, it's nothing whatsoever like the slow, atmospheric playing of Dale Turner, the character played by Dexter Gordon, that we hear throughout Bertrand Tavernier’s moody film.By the time Tavernier Read more ...