New Orleans, that most musical city, is back, back, back, everyone told me. The tourist board said that visitor numbers are over eight million again, back to levels before “The Storm” as they refer to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina here. The hippest new TV series Treme is a gritty epic set in the Big Easy, created by David Simon of The Wire fame, and the city’s music has been riding high in the pop charts by the unlikely means of Bertie Wooster (or Hugh Laurie as he is in real life, also, apparently the best-paid actor on American TV as the grumpy medic in House). And there’s an Read more ...

One of the great strengths of Manfred Eicher's ECM label is the way in which it has encouraged and documented many unlikely yet fruitful musical collaborations throughout its thousand-plus discography. First assembled for her season as artist-in-residence at Norway's Molde Jazz Festival in 2008, percussionist Marilyn Mazur's Celestial Circle quartet brings together stylists as individual as pianist John Taylor, bassist Anders Jormin and vocalist Josefine Cronholm (who makes her ECM debut here).Born in New York and raised in Denmark, Mazur, whose well-stuffed CV includes work with Miles Davis Read more ...

Sometimes you hear something new and your perspective on music shifts seismically, making everything you were listening to previously sound safe and predictable by comparison. Inevitably, as one gets older and more musically knowledgeable, such moments are fewer and further between; either the shock of the new isn’t as high-voltage as it used to be, or it just irritates rather than stimulates. And so it was a pleasant surprise when, one morning – heralded by a storm of tape hiss and an enthusiastically bashed tribal drum – a new band called tUnE-yArDs (aka Merrill Garbus) came at me from the Read more ...

It may have taken just three days to record, but this new duo recording from sax player Branford Marsalis and pianist Joey Calderazzo has 13 years of music-making behind it, dating back to when Calderazzo replaced the late, great Kenny Kirkland in the Branford Marsalis Quartet in 1998. We've come to expect a superabundance of imagination from both these players, but in Songs of Mirth and Melancholy Marsalis and Calderazzo seem to tap into even deeper levels of musical empathy and intuition.Having finally decided to take the plunge and record – a decision precipitated by a short, four-tune set Read more ...

Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This Read more ...

The first night of this weekend residency by the renowned bassist, composer and band-leader Charlie Haden celebrated the 25th anniversary of Quartet West and their new Emarcy release, Sophisticated Ladies. A winning mix of tender balladeering and coruscating instrumentals, the quartet's music-making – rather like the finest wines – seems to improve and deepen with age. While all groups are capable of whipping up a barnstorming fortissimo, it's only the great ones that operate as well at the other end of the scale. And the Quartet West pianissimo is nonpareil.Saxophonist Ernie Watts is the Read more ...

It took until the fourth song of their set for Suuns to take off. Lurching into “PVC”, the Montréal quartet gelled. Monolithic drums, pounding, relentless bass guitar and slabs of sheet-metal guitar rolled off the stage. Harnessing the power of heavy metal, they’d achieved escape velocity. More powerful than on album, the unassuming-looking Suuns made a compelling case for their stripped-down, post-Krautrock rock.Before that, the stage belonged to Gyratory System, the vehicle of Andrew Blick. Recent instrumental album New Harmony was a hypnotic marriage of bloopy early acid house and motorik Read more ...

America has been very good to Hugh Laurie. His starring role as Dr Gregory House has shot him to the top of the earnings tree in US television, while comprehensively demolishing existing preconceptions of him as the blissfully idiotic Bertie Wooster, or the half-witted Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third. You might even say that with House, Laurie finally got the chance to play Blackadder.It's a mutual transatlantic love affair, and Laurie's triumph as the manipulative medic has given him a platform from which to record an album of his adored blues and New Orleans music, Let Them Talk. In Read more ...

I've spent the last week feasting on John Martyn via Spotify. He was a gap in my musical education. He turns out, as a large portion of you reading already well know, to be a rich, raw talent. I knew his rep but had a misguided notion he was another blueprint for whiny contemporary singer-songwriters. All that reveals is my own ignorance.There's a fair chunk of miscalculated stodge in his back catalogue but the best of it combines Britain's folk heritage with all manner of jazz, blues, funk and roiled emotion and is something that will require a great deal more investigation on my part. Read more ...

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece – but it could easily have been a bloody mess. The team-up of Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek is the kind of thing that brings genre purists and scene snobs out in hives: Somerset-born, Australian-resident Pritchard having delved into everything from sensuous ambient jazz to bouncing booty bass, hardcore rave to exotica over his two-decade career, while vocalist and co-producer Steve Spacek formed the highly individualist and criminally under-appreciated techno soul band Spacek at the start of the 2000s. Together they have brought Read more ...

Catalan dance is one of Sadler’s Wells’ themes this spring, though I’d love to know how much of what Tap Olé does can really be called Catalan - this is a tap fusion company that owes its germination to Riverdance, Tap Dogs and the efforts in New York recently to revive rhythm tap. Attaching tap class skills to Spanish guitar makes what’s on at the Peacock this week more a tap show in a tourist-trail tapas bar than a theatrical dance production worth a detour.This appears to be the object. Tap Olé launched eight years ago by two efficient tap dancers who’d done the Riverdance/Tap Dogs/ Read more ...

Hugh Laurie knows we're going to be doubtful. He knows that this is a vanity project by the most successful TV actor on the planet, the man who is House. He could have walked into Warner Brothers and said he wanted to do an album of auto-tuned Euro-disco with David Guetta and some middle-management toady would undoubtedly have hit the green light. Thankfully he didn't.Instead he's recorded a set of New Orleans-flavoured classic jazz and blues, music he's loved since his Oxford and Eton youth, assisted by Big Easy figureheads such as Dr John, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint and, er, Tom Jones. Read more ...