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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…
Semper Max | thebluemoment.com
Max Roach, a vital link in the chain of jazz drummers that stretches from Baby Dodds to Tyshawn Sorey, was born in North Carolina a hundred years ago today, on January 10, 1924. After moving with his family to New York at the age of four, he played the bugle and the drums in gospel…
Dalston rhapsodies | thebluemoment.com
There seemed to be an unusually high percentage of people in a sold-out Vortex last night wearing the sort of minimalist beanie hat long associated with Django Bates, who was there to give a rare solo piano recital. Bates talked about his brothers being present, and a son, so maybe it's clan thing and they…
Sounds from silence | thebluemoment.com
Gerald Clayton, Charles Lloyd and Marvin Sewell at the Barbican 17/11/23 Charles Lloyd's set with his Ocean Trio at the Barbican on Friday felt like a voyage into the core of jazz. Together they created music full of warmth, humanity, experience and spontaneity, ranging from the gently probing lyricism of Lloyd's tenor saxophone, flute and…
Val Wilmer: ‘Blue Moments, Black Sounds’ | thebluemoment.com
Val Wilmer is one of the most remarkable people I know, and you'll know that too if you've seen her photographs. Whether it's Muddy Waters playing cards with Brownie McGhee backstage at the Fairfield Halls in 1964, Archie Shepp sitting beneath a Jimi Hendrix poster in his New York apartment, or a joyful couple whose…
Sylvie Courvoisier x 2 | thebluemoment.com
Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson at Café Oto 30 October 2023 One way and another, Sylvie Courvoiser's new album, Chimaera, contains the most sheerly beautiful music I've heard this year. Inspired by the paintings and drawings of Odilon Redon (1840-1916), these pieces recall the words of the French artist about his own work: "They place…
Our Island Story | thebluemoment.com
To those who found Chris Blackwell's 2022 autobiography, The Islander, long on charm but, shall we say, short on detail, The Island Book of Records Vol 1 1959-68 will be the answer to their prayers. Here is the story of the UK's most charismatic independent label during its formative years, in which the foundations were…
Nina & Monk, etc | thebluemoment.com
If you happen to be in Paris this week, you might wander along to the little bookshop and gallery of Robert Delpire, tucked away on a street beside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, to see a small show of photographs taken by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswater. Nica, as she was known, took snapshots of many…
Carla Bley 1936-2023 | thebluemoment.com
Carla Bley during one of the recording sessions for 'Escalator Over the Hill' It seems so true to Carla Bley's nature, such a characteristically mordant mixture of the sad and the funny, that her last album should have been called Life Goes On. Carla, who was one of jazz's greatest composers and arrangers, died this…
Terry Riley in Japan | thebluemoment.com
In the early weeks of 2020, at the outset of a world tour, Terry Riley was in Japan when the Covid-19 epidemic began. The tour was cancelled. He was 85 years old, and his wife -- the mother of their three children -- had died five years earlier. In his words: "As I had no…
The great-grandmother’s tale | thebluemoment.com
The series of audio collages that Matana Roberts calls Coin Coin, now reaching its fifth chapter (of a projected 12) with the release of In the Garden, may one day come to be seen as a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of Black American life: an extended narrative portrayal of the struggles, the pain, the joy,…
Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands | thebluemoment.com
From left: Mike Westbrook, Kate Westbrook, Karen Street, Pete Whyman, Chris Biscoe, Marcus Vergette (out of shot: Coach York) You might have noticed, Mike Westbrook said as the second of today's two lunchtime sets at the Pizza Express drew to a close, that a lot of this music we've been playing has something to do…
Fire of London | thebluemoment.com
The flight of Mike Osborne's alto saxophone was like that of the swift: its entire existence was spent on the wing, soaring high or swooping in shallow dives, twisting back on itself before arcing again towards the heavens, as if desperate to avoid contact with the ground. Something remarkable was happening in London in the…
Miles à l’Olympia | thebluemoment.com
Miles Davis arrived in Paris on the morning of November 30, 1957 for a tour booked by a local promoter, Marcel Romano. He was met at the airport by the singer and actress Juliette Gréco, whose lover he had become during his first visit to France, in 1949, and by the young film director Louis…
Re-Focus | thebluemoment.com
No single organisation has exerted a more profound or beneficial influence on jazz in Britain than Tomorrow's Warriors, founded as an outgrowth of the Jazz Warriors big band 30 years ago by Janine Irons and her husband, the bassist Gary Crosby, with the ambition of giving young people from diverse and usually unprivileged backgrounds a…
Defying gravity | thebluemoment.com
It's easy to imagine the director Dorsay Alavi going all the way through an alphabetical list of Wayne Shorter's compositions while looking for a suitable title for her three-part documentary on the life and work of the great saxophonist and composer, and knowing when she reached "Zero Gravity" that she'd got it. As such bio-docs…
Tension and release | thebluemoment.com
While writing about Nik Bärtsch recently, I mentioned his practice of giving all his compositions the same title -- each is called "Modul", with a distinguishing number attached. In that way he establishes no preconceptions in the listener's mind. In that respect Darcy James Argue, the Canadian-born, New York-based composer, could hardly be more different.…
A man of wealth and taste | thebluemoment.com
It's rather charming when someone who spent most of his life signing autographs for fans turns out to have been a collector of famous signatures himself. In Charlie Watts's case, they're a bit different from the one he signed for me on a paper napkin in 1964. They're the signatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha…
Ronin at Ronnie’s | thebluemoment.com
Nik Bärtsch's Ronin at Ronnie Scott's (photo: Robert Crowley) Somewhere between an "oh!" and an "ow!", the abrupt vocal command with which Nik Bärtsch cues his musicians for a shift in musical pattern is the polite zen-funk equivalent of James Brown's exhortation to take it to the bridge. The reaction is immediate, the players switching…
Summer books 1: Henry Threadgill | thebluemoment.com
As a primer on how to grow up amid communities of creative musicians while asserting and developing your own individuality, Henry Threadgill's Easily Slip into Another World is exemplary. It also happens to belong, in my view, in the very highest rank of autobiographies by jazz musicians. One of the great contemporary composers and bandleaders,…
Climate change | thebluemoment.com
On an unseasonably cold, rainy late-July evening in East London, the trio known as Decoy -- Alexander Hawkins on Hammond organ, John Edwards on double bass and Steve Noble on drums -- and their regular guest, the indefatigable 83-year-old American saxophonist Joe McPhee, provided all the warmth the audience at Cafe Oto could need, and…
Coltrane & Dolphy on the record | thebluemoment.com
When Uncut magazine invited me to review the newly discovered tapes of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy at the Village Gate in the summer of 1961, which are released today on vinyl and CD, I went and dug out the 12 April, 1962 of issue of Down Beat. Its striking cover announced that the two…
A Ducal setting | thebluemoment.com
Groups of figures -- men in dinner jackets, women in floaty dresses -- moving across terraced lawns on a warm midsummer afternoon, carrying picnic baskets and champagne in coolers. An auditorium built into an 18th century Greek Revival mansion sitting above a river in the lovely Hampshire countryside. It's not hard to imagine that Duke…
The bending of headlights | thebluemoment.com
"We have a new very quiet album out," Rickie Lee Jones said as she greeted a packed Jazz Café in London last night. I bought Pieces of Treasure, the album in question, a few weeks ago, played it three times, and filed it next to the rest of the evidence of her long and remarkable…
Peter Brötzmann 1941-2023 | thebluemoment.com
I'm listening to Catching Ghosts, a beautiful recording of Peter Brötzmann's set at the 2022 Berlin jazz festival, in whch he was joined by the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the American drummer Hamid Drake. Brötzmann died last week in Wuppertal, his hometown, aged 82; the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, from which…
Old and New Dreams | thebluemoment.com
I may have said this before, but jazz tributes and reunions don't do much for me. I'd rather hear the music moving on, using its past as the basis for further development. There are exceptions, including the welcome rediscoveries and reinterpretations of Herbie Nichols' compositions by various musicians, Ryan Truesdell's meticulous reconstruction of Gil Evans's…
Astrud (& Gil) | thebluemoment.com
By the time Astrud Gilberto got to sing with Gil Evans, the great arranger had slowed his pace of working. Eventually he would take as long to compose eight bars as some writers took to complete a symphony, but in 1965 he was still able to write 11 arrangements to order for the singer who…
The moment of Joy | thebluemoment.com
After a great deal of activity on the British jazz scene of the early 1970s, things were starting to go quiet by the time a quintet called Joy came along. The generation centred on Mike Westbrook, Graham Collier, Keith Tippett, Howard Riley, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Blue Notes had flared brightly before settling…
Empiricism | thebluemoment.com
I can still hear the roar that greeted the end of the performance by Empirical at the 2017 JazzFest Berlin, the reaction of an audience of around 1,000 people who instinctively recognised and responded to the skill, seriousness of purpose and inherent gift for drama emanating from a group of four British musicians of whom…
Trio x 3 | thebluemoment.com
Ahmad Jamal may have left us recently, but the jazz piano trio -- the format to which he gave so much -- refuses to die. Although the spurt of intense activity that gave birth to such inventive genre-benders as E.S.T., the Necks, the Bad Plus, the trios of Vijay Iyer and Brad Mehldau, Plaistow, Phronesis…
Starless and bible black | thebluemoment.com
Dylan Thomas by Alfred Janes, 1953, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin © estate of Alfred Janes To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea.…