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Monday at the Cockpit | thebluemoment.com
Empirical's Shaney Forbes at the Cockpit (photo: Steven Cropper) I was pretty horrified over the new year to see, in the guides to the arts in Britain in 2025 produced by the Guardian and The Times, no mention at all of anything that might be happening in the world of jazz. Both papers have a…
Three in one | thebluemoment.com
It felt like a great privilege to be at Cafe Oto last night to hear the Schlippenbach Trio -- Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano), Evan Parker (tenor saxophone) and Paul Lytton (drums) -- make a rare appearance in London in front of a capacity crowd. This is a group that has existed since 1972, with one…
Bird lives, dies, flies | thebluemoment.com
Coming up to the 70th anniversary of his death (on March 12, 1955), Charlie Parker can still stop you in your tracks. His sound may be as familiar as the head on a postage stamp, his style imitated with greater or lesser success by thousands of saxophone players, but that unquenchable inventiveness retains all its…
Barre Phillips 1934-2024 | thebluemoment.com
Barre Phillips, who died in Las Cruces, New Mexico on December 28, aged 90, was a poet of the double bass, a member of a generation of players who, building on the achievements of Jimmy Blanton, Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus and Paul Chambers, lifted the instrument to new levels of flexibility and expression. One of…
Remaining Intakt | thebluemoment.com
Independent record labels are one of jazz's indispensible support systems, fuelled by the brave willingness of the enthusiasts who run them to buck the odds. My own early tastes were largely shaped in the 1960s by the work of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff at Blue Note, Bob Weinstock at Prestige, Dick Bock at Pacific…
Outer and inner space | thebluemoment.com
On the 243 bus ride to yesterday's matinee show at Cafe Oto, I finished Samantha Harvey's short novel Orbital, the winner of this year's Booker Prize. Starting as a description of the lives of six astronauts aboard a space station, it finishes as a meditation on the world -- the planet, the universe -- and…
Almost like a scientist | thebluemoment.com
"Almost like a scientist." That's what someone says near the beginning of Ingredients for Disaster, Julian Phillips's new 67-minute documentary about the music of the Swiss composer, pianist and bandleader Nik Bärtsch. Almost like a scientist. Well, yes. When Bärtsch talked after a screening in London this week, words like "architectonics" and "topography" entered the…
‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’état’ | thebluemoment.com
Sixty years ago Archie Shepp wrote a provocative column for Down Beat magazine in which, if memory serves, he compared his tenor saxophone to a machine gun in the hands of a Vietcong fighter. In the early '60s it seemed that jazz's New Thing, or whatever you wanted to call it, possessed a powerful political…
Back to Berlin | thebluemoment.com
"A lot of people have died recently," Otomo Yoshihide remarked to his Berlin audience on Sunday night, halfway through a set by his 16-piece Special Big Band. "This is for them." The band's marimba player, Aikawa Hitomi, began to trace out some quiet, limpid phrases, with a sound like pebbles dropping in a pond. One…
Other sounds 5: Feat. Arve Henriksen | thebluemoment.com
A fugitive sound, soft, glancing, indirect: the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen has a signature I love, in pretty much whatever context it appears. It could be in his group Supersilent, or with Jan Bang, Christian Wallumrød, Dhafer Youssef, Terje Rypdal, Iain Ballamy or Trygve Seim, or on his own albums, particularly Places of Worship (Rune…
The lost genius of Albert Stinson | thebluemoment.com
This is a piece about the bassist Albert Stinson (1944-1969). It's something I've been meaning to write for a long time. The great drummer Jim Keltner was kind enough to talk to me about his boyhood friend, as was another drummer from Los Angeles, Doug Sides, who toured and recorded with him in John Handy's…
Other sounds 4: ‘Za Górami’ | thebluemoment.com
Ladino is a language spoken by Sephardic Jews, with its origins in medieval Spanish, Hebrew and Aramaic. In her wonderful book Ornament of the World, subtitled "How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain", María Rosa Menocal describes it and its equally Romance language-based Muslim equivalent, Aljamiado, as not just…
Other sounds 2: Vazesh | thebluemoment.com
The Persian tar is a cousin of the lute, the saz and the oud, a long-necked instrument with three double courses of strings -- sort of like half a 12-string guitar, another relative -- and an unusual double bowl made of mulberry wood with a membrane of stretched lambskin. Perhaps you already knew that, but…
Other sounds 1: Rachel Musson | thebluemoment.com
Olie Brice's new quartet made a very promising debut at Café Oto last night, and one the reasons was Rachel Musson, whose tenor saxophone traced and explored the contours of the bassist's characteristically intriguing themes (and Don Cherry's perky "Awake Nu") with alert and graceful lyricism. The piano of Alexander Hawkins and the drums of…
Giovanni Guidi in Fitzrovia | thebluemoment.com
As Giovanni Guidi sat at a grand piano in the Rosenfeld Gallery in London last night, amid a carefully spaced hang of abstract works by the Spanish painter Enrique Brinkmann, the Italian and his audience could be seen through the plate-glass window forming the gallery's frontage. The occasional stroller along the narrow street in Fitzrovia…
Autumn books 3: Brad Mehldau | thebluemoment.com
The first time I saw the pianist Brad Mehldau in person, playing with a pick-up rhythm section at the Pizza Express in the early 1990s, I was astonished by the intellectual and technical power of his playing, and by its emotional impact. The version of "Moon River" he played that night lives with me still.…
The vision of Scott LaFaro | thebluemoment.com
Invited to talk about the bassist Scott LaFaro, Ornette Coleman came up with a typically gnomic insight. "Scotty could change the sound of a note just by playing another note," Coleman told LaFaro's biographer in 2007. "He's the only one I've ever heard who could do that with a bass." There's a chance to consider…
The timekeeper of Damascus | thebluemoment.com
Intrigued by the title of Pat Thomas's new album of solo piano music, The Solar Model of Ibn al-Shatir, I did a bit of online research into its source of inspiration. Born in Damascus in 1304, Ibn al-Shatir studied astronomy in Cairo and Alexandra before returning home to become the official timekeeper of the city's…
‘The Black Chord’ | thebluemoment.com
David Corio is a fine British photographer whose book The Black Chord, with text by the writer Vivien Goldman, first appeared in the UK 25 years ago. A new edition, published by Hat & Beard, a Los Angeles-based imprint, presents his images of black musicians via a much more elegant design. Corio was born in…
On Kit Downes | thebluemoment.com
One night a few weeks ago I was at the Vortex, listening to a hour of free improvisation performed in the downstairs bar by the pianist Kit Downes with the saxophonist Tom Challenger, his familiar colleague, the drummer Andrew Lisle, and two names new to me; the guitarist Tara Cunningham and the bassist Caius Williams.…
And on drums, Jimi Hendrix… | thebluemoment.com
Stevie Wonder can play the drums (listen to "Creepin'"). So can Paul McCartney, after a fashion ("Maybe I'm Amazed"). But I didn't know that Jimi Hendrix knew how to use a pair of sticks, too. The proof is in American Drummers 1959-88, Val Wilmer's new book of 36 photographs of drummers she has observed on…
‘In the Brewing Luminous’ | thebluemoment.com
Champagne, sorbet and cocaine. Who would have guessed, while falling under the spell of Cecil Taylor's music at the beginning of the 1960s, that these formed the basis of the great pianist's diet? From listening to Jazz Advance, "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail", the "Pots"/"Bulbs"/"Mixed" session and the sublimely sombre trio reading of "This Nearly…
On visiting a friend | thebluemoment.com
The front of the home of Robert Wyatt and Alfie Benge, a pretty Georgian house on a quiet street close to the centre of the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, was bathed in sunshine as I pressed the bell one day last week. The door was opened by Dee, Robert's daughter in law, who took…
A stroll in the park | thebluemoment.com
Although Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers are both longtime members of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, they had never recorded together before going into the studio to make Central Park's Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths and Gardens. Both are originally from the South -- Wadada from Mississippi, Amina from Arkansas…
Croeso y Cafe Oto | thebluemoment.com
Cafe Oto, 8/6/24. From left: Melvin Gibbs, Eadyth Crawford, Mark O'Connor, Tomos Williams, Mared Williams and Nguyen Le A welcome in Welsh from the trumpeter, composer and bandleader Tomos Williams prefaced the performance in Dalston of the third part of his Cwmwl Tystion series: Empathy, to follow the live recordings of Witness (released in 2021)…
Artistry in algorithm | thebluemoment.com
This morning's newspaper headlines included one suggesting that artificial intelligence will play a significant role in the UK's coming general election. My first response was that, given the mess humans have made of selecting the last four prime ministers, maybe the machines should be given a chance. Music, though -- well, that's something else. Who,…
The sound of style | thebluemoment.com
John Simons, who turns 85 this Friday, remembers being 17 years old in 1956 and going to see Stan Kenton at the Albert Hall. He remembers the tall, imposing figure of the bandleader, and the thrilling sound of the music, one piece in particular: "'Concerto to End All Concertos'!" He also remembers that one of…
Passion / Compassion | thebluemoment.com
Back in the early 1970s, Santana were my favourite live band. I saw the original line-up -- more or less as heard at Woodstock -- at the Albert Hall in 1970 and twice the following year, at Hammersmith Odeon and the Olympia in Paris. They were thrilling, and surrounded by a sense of excitement; before…
Bill Frisell in Bristol, Brussels, Orvieto… | thebluemoment.com
At the end of Bill Frisell's concert in Bristol last night, my son (who had bought the tickets as a belated birthday present) asked me which of all the times I'd seen him live was my favourite. That took some thinking, but eventually I told him that it was probably a solo concert at Cadogan…
The sound of London | thebluemoment.com
It's been exciting to watch the blossoming of a new young UK jazz scene in recent years, and now it's possible to welcome a historical survey of its emergence. André Marmot's Unapologetic Expression, published this month, is an insider's explanation of why and how it happened, by whom and to whom. This is history almost…
Matana Roberts at the Roundhouse | thebluemoment.com
Matana Roberts did a lot of talking at the Roundhouse last night. A lot more talking than playing, in fact. Alone on the stage, opening the show for Lonnie Holley with an hour-long set, she restricted her soprano saxophone to the occasional short phrase, often prefaced with the words "This is an improvisation." She has…
Sounds for summer | thebluemoment.com
Tall enough to be unmissable in any environment, and with a truly remarkable fashion sense, Shabaka Hutchings had presence from day one of his career. To me, as an observer, that was the concert at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2009 at which he was one of several UK guests with Charlie Haden's Liberation…
The Necks at Cafe Oto | thebluemoment.com
"We've never really been an emotional band," Lloyd Swanton observed drily after the first set on the last of the Necks' four nights at Cafe Oto in London this week, "but it seems to be creeping in." I'd been trying to tell him, somewhat incoherently, how moved I'd been by what they'd just played, and…
Ishiguro, long ago | thebluemoment.com
A typical day in the A&R department at Island Records' London headquarters in November 1975. Four or five people coming in to play their demo tapes to me or my assistant, Howard Thompson, in the semi-basement office in a beautiful stucco house in St Peter's Square, W6. A lunchtime meeting with Phil Collins, a familiar…
New sounds in the Round | thebluemoment.com
Mejedi Owusu (left) with his quintet at Jazz in the Round There's been a bit of a kerfuffle at London's music conservatoires in recent days over an email from a teacher claiming that white students in the jazz departments are disadvantaged by the preferences given to fellow students who are black. The teacher in question…
The artwork of British jazz | thebluemoment.com
Who could have imagined, as the music and those who made it were fighting for their existence, the three-figure sums that British jazz albums from the '60s and '70s would be fetching in a new century? To some, Richard Morton Jack's Labyrinth: British Jazz on Record 1960-75, a large-format book containing threequarter-size reproductions of the…
Songs for a mother | thebluemoment.com
When the painter Penny Morrows was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer in March 2023, her son, the London-based composer and guitarist Billy Morrows, began writing pieces for her. Some of them were recorded and played to her before her death five months later, aged 72. In the aftermath Billy carried on writing and recording,…
‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100 | thebluemoment.com
The first public performance of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" was given 100 years ago this week, on 12 February 1924, at the Aeolian Hall on West 43rd Street in New York City, by Paul Whiteman and his Concert Orchestra, with Gershwin himself at the piano. Whiteman had commissioned the piece from its composer specially…
At Peggy’s Skylight | thebluemoment.com
Some jazz clubs are intimidating to the first-time visitor, and maybe that's how they're supposed to be. Not all of them, though. I'd been meaning to visit Peggy's Skylight in Nottingham for ages, and on Saturday afternoon I walked in there for the first time and felt right at home. A Saturday afternoon might seem…
Son of a drum | thebluemoment.com
Vinnie Sperrazza grew up in Utica, New York as the son and great-grandson of drummers. He's played the drums all his life, while thinking about drums and drumming and drummers. We'll get to his own playing in a minute, but what first alerted me to his existence were his Substack posts, which appear under the…