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Under the same sky | thebluemoment.com
In the 55 years since the discreet arrival of the first ECM album, Mal Waldron's Free At Last, Manfred Eicher's label has released somewhere north of a thousand albums. Contrary to a cynical early view, they don't all sound the same. They are, however, distinguished by the presence of set of qualities -- musical, aesthetic…
The last of the Blue Notes | thebluemoment.com
Louis Moholo-Moholo died on Thursday at his home in Cape Town, aged 85. He was the last survivor of the Blue Notes, the group -- also including the trumpeter Mongezi Feza, the alto saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, the pianist Chris McGregor and the bassist Johnny Dyani -- who arrived in Europe in 1964, fleeing South Africa's…
A point of stillness | thebluemoment.com
There is a balm in Gilead, according to an African American spiritual whose lines were borrowed from the Old Testament Book of Jeremiah, and there is a profound sense of healing in Solace of the Mind, the new solo album by the pianist and organist Amina Claudine Myers. Born 83 years ago in Blackwell, Arkansas,…
Meet the house band | thebluemoment.com
Before the evening show on the first of their two days at Cafe Oto on Saturday, the Necks were announced to the audience as "the house band". We laughed, and so did they. But it seemed to fit. The Australian improvising trio have played in many London venues, but the little space on Ashwin Street…
Everybody Loves a Train | thebluemoment.com
About twenty years ago, my friend Charlie Gillett was compiling a series of themed CDs for a Polygram label called Debutante, under the aegis of the former Island A&R head Nick Stewart. Charlie asked me if I'd like to put one together, and if so, what the theme might be. "Trains," I said, after about…
The music of Gatsby | thebluemoment.com
The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn. Coinciding with the first publication of The Great Gatsby a hundred years ago (April 10, 1925), a new musical version of F. Scott Fizgerald's masterpiece…
All this beauty | thebluemoment.com
So much wrong in the world, and yet so much wonderful new music. How to explain the existence, amid the trauma and violence and chaos agents and the encroachment of threat, of all this beauty? Here are five new albums I wouldn't want to be without: Billy Hart's Just (ECM), Yazz Ahmed's A Paradise in…
Silencing the Voice of America | thebluemoment.com
Time for jazz... Willis Conover speaking... This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour... When, as a schoolboy in the late 1950s, I started to discover the music I love and write about, that process took some work. The music wasn't easy to find, which of course added to the sense of its value. One…
The world and Don Cherry | thebluemoment.com
Wherever, whenever and by whomsoever the idea of "world music" was invented, it had no finer exponent, explorer and exemplar than Don Cherry. In a few months' time it will be 30 years since Cherry died in Malaga of liver cancer, aged 58, leaving a world in which he was, to quote Steve Lake's happy…
Brutalised | thebluemoment.com
Maybe you saw Daniel Blumberg's acceptance speech for the best soundtrack award during the Academy Awards ceremony at the weekend. Honoured for his work on The Brutalist, he finishes off with a mention of Cafe Oto, which is less of a surprise when you've noticed, among the musical credits, the names of such Oto-adjacent improvisers…
Data mining with Maria Schneider | thebluemoment.com
"It's kind of nightmarish, what's happening," Maria Schneider said during her performance with the Oslo Jazz Ensemble at the Barbican last night. She was introducing the title piece from her most recent Grammy-winning double-album. And since 2019, when she wrote and recorded Data Lords, the nightmares have got a whole lot darker. Half of the…
Roberta Flack in London | thebluemoment.com
Roberta Flack, who has died aged 88, made her London debut on July 27, 1972, at an early-evening showcase presented by Atlantic Records before an invited audience of industry and media types at Ronnie Scott's Club. She'd already released three albums but it was when Clint Eastwood chose to feature a track from the first…
Keyboard studies | thebluemoment.com
Perhaps it was last month's 50th anniversary of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert that got me thinking about solo jazz piano. As it happens, I'd been listening recently to the incomparable Art Tatum, particularly to the unaccompanied pieces from Jewels in the Treasure Box, recorded in 1953 at the Blue Note in Chicago and released last…
Dave Tomlin 1934-2024 | thebluemoment.com
I never met Dave Tomlin, or heard him play live, but the news of his death at the age of 90 rang a bell that echoed back to London in the late 1960s. A Tibetan prayer bell, probably: among other distinctions, Tomlin was the founder of the wonderfully named Giant Sun Trolley, a group who…
Tour de force | thebluemoment.com
As we queued in the Dalston drizzle outside Cafe Oto for last night's sold-out show by the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, I don't suppose many of us realised quite the extent to which we were about to enter a better world. Outside: the return of territorial conquest as a mode of historical change, the revived persecution…
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)…