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1 week ago | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Norwegian Jan Gunnar Hoff’s model of Scandi-fusion sends sparks off the rails for this album, with a quartet whose members constitute what popsters might call a supergroup.
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1 month ago | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Australian jazz composer Jenna Cave identifies the concept of “grief literacy”, which might be defined as the means of giving voice to heartbreak and distress resulting from the death of someone close. In 2022, aged 38, she became a single parent to her three-year-old daughter after her husband committed suicide. In this commissioned suite of six songs, she articulates and processes the traumas of bereavement.
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1 month ago | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
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 line-up that included Alice Cooper, P J Harvey, Kraftwerk, Soft Cell, Duran Duran, Sting and Massive Attack, one was entitled to ask. Not all genres of jazz, then.
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2 months ago | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Most of the records made by Latvian company Jersika, the jazz and improvised-music label founded by Mareks Ameriks in 2017, are made completely analogue and eventually cut directly to lacquer. But even those that go through the digital process are, the company says, carefully mastered to preserve a warmth of sound. The current album bears that out.
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Mar 16, 2025 | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’s third album for Blue Note is a big departure for him. As a concept, it’s played out on a broad canvas that encircles and and engages with black historicity. It might have been just angry.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Jazz has often courted so-called “classical” music, initially perhaps to gain respectability by association but latterly in the hope that something different or revelatory will emerge. An album of 11 Schubert lieder is performed here by a trio whose classical music component is embodied in a composer (Bolcsó) and a harpist (Razvalyaeva). Veronika Harcsa is a jazz singer.
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
asiw.co.uk | Dan Ford |Nigel Jarrett
Before the 1960s – and a while after that in most places – a jazz piano trio consisted of a pianist doing nearly all the work and a bassist and drummer simply underpinning the tempo and rhythm. Now and then, the last two were allotted solo spots, often out of deference to skill sets buried in routine and repetitive accompaniment. Everything changed with the Bill Evans Trio.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
An author bold enough to decide on the most significant individuals and happenings in his zone of interest and write a book about them might be thought vindicated, to his own satisfaction at least, by a decision to update it. That’s to say, it’s a moveable feast.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
There’s an element of reassembly on this album. The MTB trio (pianist Brad Mehldau, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner and guitarist Peter Bernstein) is joined by bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Bill Stewart to replicate, almost, the quintet on the album Consenting Adults, recorded in 1994 by Criss Cross and released six years later. The only change is that Stewart replaces the original drummer, Leon Parker. The music is contemporary, accessible New York at its best.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
jazzjournal.co.uk | Nigel Jarrett
Bassist and composer Ursula Harrison, winner of BBC Young Jazz Musician 2024, didn’t have to cast widely for an influential exemplar: her mum, bassist Paula Gardiner, founder of the jazz course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, was on hand. But whereas her mother might cherish a definition of jazz with sturdy parameters, Ursula goes for more elasticity. “I think the term ‘jazz’ carries a lot of baggage, both positive and negative,” Harrison said.
