Jazz in Elsewhere

Aurora Hentunen: Little Further (digital outlets)

11 Nov 2024 | 1 min read

Now this is interesting: Aurora Hentunen is a Finnish pianist/composer/vocalist who steers her own quintet and is among the brighter lights of European jazz. As far as we can tell she is now based in Amsterdam and tours regularly. Of Little Further, she tells us in an email, “the album's music reflects the state of being during the last few years, forced collective stagnation and... > Read more

Pressured Speech

Revulva: Revulva (digital outlets)

21 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Even more so than “pop” or “rock” -- and vastly more than “reggae” -- the word jazz is immune to easy definition. It contains multitudes. The form known as jazz has been around more than a century and is constantly changing shape, drawing more threads into its complex weave and is as comfortable at adopting world music as it is assimilating aspects... > Read more

Bush Bash

Nubya Garcia, Odyssey (Concord/digital outlets)

14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

It seems a very long time since this exceptional British saxophonist's 2020 debut album Source, which was in our best of the year releases. Her music has undergone numerous remixes (one by Mark de Clive-Lowe) and she's done guest spots (Nala Sinephro, Ezra Collective among them), but this ambitious album is a step in a different but equally rewarding direction. On the Source she reached... > Read more

Set It Free (ft Richie)

Taka Nawashiro: Lifescape (digital outlets)

4 Oct 2024 | <1 min read

Now mostly based in New York where this album was recorded, guitarist Nawashiro from Saitama, Japan won the John Coltrane Award when he graduated from The School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 2020. He has a smooth, swinging and inventive style although the namechecking of Pat Metheny in his PR doesn't quite stack up. There is a beautiful fluidity to his playing across these eight... > Read more

6 to 11

Ezra Collective: Dance, No One's Watching (digital outlets)

30 Sep 2024 | <1 min read

Britain's jazz-cum-world music ensemble Ezra Collective have gone from strength to strength in the past three years, their 2022 album Where I'm Meant To Be won the Mercury Prize which I believe the first time a jazz group has picked up that award. Guests on that album included Sampa the Great and Emile Sande. On this double album – after a short dubby intro which could have... > Read more

Shaking Body

INTRODUCING HERBIE HANCOCK'S BAND (2024): He headhunts the best

26 Sep 2024 | 3 min read

Among the many problems some people have with jazz is there seems to be no concept of “a band”. Players shift around constantly and the leader's name on the album cover is the only constant over a career: every album, new players. That's because in this demanding, improvised idiom – where the performer is simultaneously the composer – artists want to be... > Read more

LacLu: self-titled (digital outlets)

1 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

LacLu is guitarist Keith Price (academic/teacher in the jazz faculty at Auckland Uni) and two recent graduates, saxophonist Francesca Parussini and drummer Maximillian Crook, recorded here in the Kenneth Myers Centre in Auckland, the former IYA radio building on Shortland Street. The four spare, considered and spacious pieces hint at their nature through the titles of Price's originals the... > Read more

Friends and Whanau

MIKE NOCK, INTERVIEWED (2024): The art of having serious fun

31 Aug 2024 | 1 min read

For a man who has spent his life in the earnest art of jazz, Mike Nock laughs a lot, enjoying his deep well of anecdotes, appreciating a joke at his own expense and – when it's suggested a hallmark of his diverse career is that there's no obvious hallmark – laughs until he's breathless. It's no surprise Norman Meehan's 2010 biography of 83-year old Nock was titled Serious Fun.... > Read more

WHERE THE SPIRIT MEETS THE SAX (2024): You got a problem with Muriel?

30 Aug 2024 | 3 min read

Saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Muriel Grossman is a problem at this point in the 21st century when the culture of complaint is peaking, grievances real or imagined are given oxygen and the merest suggestion of a slight is taken as a declaration of war. Pity poor Muriel then, all she wants to make is spiritual jazz, as on her 2023 album Devotion. And right there some... > Read more

Tomasz Stańko Quartet: September Night (ECM/digital outlets)

25 Aug 2024 | <1 min read

The late Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko (d. 2018, age 76) had long been a fixture at Elsewhere for his elegant albums on the ECM label (with a regular quartet, which has an estimable career outside of that) and it was a pleasure to interview him in 2009. His album Lontano has been a special favourite but every album we've heard has had something to recommend it, whether it... > Read more

Song for Sarah

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Nathan Haines: Notes (digital outlets)

19 Aug 2024 | 2 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this double album which comes with an extensive insert sheet of credits. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . It has perhaps been mentioned here previously, but I first encountered Nathan Haines and his younger brother Joel at some time in the mid Eighties when... > Read more

Storm

HERBIE HANCOCK INTERVIEWED (2024): The master and his past

19 Aug 2024 | 1 min read

The musician sits on his patio in the southern California sun, his broad smile revealing an engaging personal warmth and the triumph of American dentistry. This is 84 year-old musical catalyst Herbie Hancock at his ease, among the last of his jazz generation but also in the vanguard of synthesiser-driven jazz-rock and hip-hop influenced electrofunk. On this day – ahead of US and... > Read more

Louis Armstrong: Louis in London; Live at the BBC (Verve/digital outlets)

27 Jul 2024 | 1 min read

For a man considered a genius of jazz, who radiated humour and goodwill, and recorded one of the most enduring songs of the Sixties (Wonderful World which topped charts after the Beatles' Lady Madonna), the great Louis Armstrong has been a figure who divides assessment. To some he became a mugging populist Uncle Tom with a grin who squandered his gifts on lesser material; others read him as... > Read more

Mack the Knife

Holm-Svendsen, Sommer, Praśniewski: Totem (April Records/digital outlets)

10 Jun 2024 | <1 min read | 1

Now the names might not be familiar but this is smooth, cool and interesting jazz which peels off from the likes of Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins as this trio of Christian Holm-Svendsen (saxophones, clarinet), Daniel Sommer (drums) and Mariusz Praśniewski (bass) uncouple themselves from chordal instruments and allow the melodic and rhythmic exploration to flow freely. With sometimes as... > Read more

Duo

Ben Gailer, Auckland Jazz Orchestra: Monolith (digital outlets),

26 May 2024 | <1 min read

The Auckland Jazz Orchestra has proven to be a fine, professional vehicle for young composers and performers as well as sound interpreters of music like that of the late Phil Broadhurst. Here Auckland composer, arranger and pianist Ben Gailer gets to hear his sometimes lush but refined work given polish and punch alongside an increasingly overwrought performance of a tumultuous jazz-rock... > Read more

Kamasi Washington: Fearless Movement (digital outlets)

19 May 2024 | 1 min read

Because the commanding Kamasi Washington has appeared at Elsewhere previously – in an interview and album reviews – we will just note that, as with Wynton Marsalis, Duke Ellington, Ornette Coleman and many others, calling this saxophonist/composer a jazz musician, it's limiting. Growing up in Los Angeles he gravitated to jazz in his early teens but, as a kid of his generation,... > Read more

Interstellar Peace (The Last Stance)

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Alice Coltrane: A Monastic Trio (Impulse)

9 May 2024 | 1 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this album released for the first time in decades on record. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . An excellent and intelligent reissue in the Verve by Request series, these late-Sixties recordings by the much underrated pianist/harpist widow of jazz sax... > Read more

Gospel Trane

Alex Pipes: Square One (digital outlets)

1 May 2024 | 1 min read

With his playing and production expertise, not to mention his international experience, saxophonist/flautist Nathan Haines has been lending his cachet to a number of local jazz artists these past few years. And he appears on the track Blue Fluff on this exciting debut album by Auckland guitarist Alex Pipes who – having studied at the University of Auckland – can also call on... > Read more

552

Callum Allardice: Cinematic Light Orchestra (digital outlets)

26 Apr 2024 | 1 min read

Wellington guitarist/composer Callum Allardice has appeared a few times at Elsewhere but never with an album under his own name. But his time really has come with this ambitious album. Among other accolades, Allardice has won three APRA composition awards (2016, 2017, 2019), one of his bands The Jac was a jazz album of the year finalist in 2014 and won it in 2020 with their third... > Read more

Unknown Peril

Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse/digital outlets)

20 Apr 2024 | 1 min read | 2

It doesn't seem that long ago that “jazz flute” was considered a joke. Thank you, Ron Burgundy. But there is a great tradition of jazz flute through daring players like Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Don Cherry to the quiet considerations of Paul Horn playing inside the Taj Mahal, Alice Coltrane's Indo-spiritualism and Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation. Saxophonist Shabaka... > Read more