Jazz in Elsewhere
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Scofield/Swallow/Stewart: Swallow Tales (ECM/digital outlets)
11 Jul 2020 | 1 min read
Anyone who has even a modest collection of ECM jazz albums will have encountered bassist Steve Swallow, most often on albums with his longtime partner Carla Bley but also with vibes player Gary Burton, and with guitarist John Scofield with whom he has an almost intuitive understanding born of four decades of playing and recording together. This album of Swallow's compositions is a salute to... > Read more
GRG67: Happy Place (Rattle)
1 Jul 2020 | 1 min read
This Auckland jazz group with what looks like a personalised plate for a name, impressed mightily with its debut album The Thing two years ago. And at that time we noted the credentials of the players, notably saxophonist Roger Manins who here again writes most of the pieces. The same quartet appears here – Manins, guitarist Michael Howell, drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Mostyn Cole... > Read more
MayWayDay
Rava/Herbert/Guidi: For Mario, Live: (Accidental Records/digital outlets)
28 Jun 2020 | <1 min read
With elements of minimalism, tone poems, avant-garde inclinations, yearning European trumpet and soundtracks for disconcerting films, this trio of trumpeter Enrico Rava, pianist Giovanni Guidi (both ECM artists) and UK electronic composer Matthew Herbert here invent an aural landscape scape of manipulated sounds and samples, noise and delicacy, drama and reflection. The Mario of the... > Read more
Jerkagram and Martin Escalante: Parkour (577 Records/digital outlets)
26 Jun 2020 | <1 min read
First let us tell you – warn you perhaps – who has influenced the Jerkagram noise duo of Californian twins Derek and Brent who “play” guitars, drums, loops and so on: Captain Beefheart, Boredoms and Keiji Haino. You might, after listening, add the squeal of tyres, fingernails down a blackboard, broken electric equipment . . . This noisecore-cum-experimental sound... > Read more
Connie Han: Iron Starlet (Mack Avenue/Southbound)
21 Jun 2020 | 1 min read
Sometimes you just have to put aside preconceptions about how an artist looks – Alice Cooper, Tiny Tim, Frank Zappa from days of yore – and just head straight to the music. So it is with glamorous if not stunning jazz pianist Connie Han from LA who comes with all the disadvantages of being sultry, sexualised and seductive on this album cover (as she was on its... > Read more
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RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Lonnie Liston Smith and the Cosmic Echoes; Expansions (Ace/Border)
1 Jun 2020 | 1 min read
In the mid Seventies while some African-American artists were getting tight with the brothers and sisters on the angry street or getting back to Africa (sometimes via what we now call Afro-Futurism), some were heading for the cosmos propelled by jazz-funk and using the dancefloor as their launch-pad. This third album in '75 by the great keyboard player LLSmith with his Cosmic Echoes band... > Read more
Paul Flaherty: Borrowed From Children (577 Records/Southbound/digital outlets)
28 May 2020 | 1 min read
Now in his Seventies, alto/tenor player Paul Flaherty has been part of the NYC/free jazz scene for almost 50 years and continues the improvising project of his early influences such as the young Pharoah Sanders, Peter Brotzmann and Ornette Coleman. And for much of that time Flaherty has worked with – as he does here – drummer Randall Colbourne (32 years) and... > Read more
Oded Tzur: Here Be Dragons (ECM/digital outlets)
25 May 2020 | <1 min read
When recently invited to choose 10 formative jazz albums I had two which bridged Indian classical music and jazz, both being improvised musics. I noted that this area between two cultures and genres was often very rewarding. Here Israeli tenor player Oded Tzur – who has studied with bansuri/flute master Hariprasad Chaurasia – brings his sensibility for raga structure and... > Read more
10 INFLUENTIAL JAZZ ALBUMS IN MY COLLECTION: The shape of me to come
22 May 2020 | 6 min read
During the Covid-19 lockdown, Facebook was awash with people being asked to choose their favourite albums, books and so on. And I too was there at the invitation of Rodney Hewson, a music man from way back, who asked me to pick 10 albums that were influential on my thinking about jazz. An impossible task in many ways, but one that did get me considering. It would have been easy to... > Read more
Trrma: Earth's Relief (577 Records/Southbound/digital outlets)
18 May 2020 | <1 min read
This Italian duo of Giovanni Todisco (drums/percussion and Giuseppe Candiano (synths) comes courtesy of 577 Records out of Brooklyn which Elsewhere readers have encountered previously through albums by Daniel Carter and Treesearch. Although the promotional blurb says their inspirations are Sun Ra and classical composer Xenakis with some of Flying Lotus' sensibilities... > Read more
Carter/Wilner/Toure/Ughi: New York United (577 Records/Southbound)
17 May 2020 | 2 min read
They say when you get a dealer you can trust, someone who is reliable and knows what you need, then stick with them. So it is for me with Troy at Southbound Records in Auckland who, late last year, guided me to the excellent Radical Invisibility album featuring the prolific, septuagenarian New York saxophonist/flautist/trumpeter Daniel Carter. It has rarely... > Read more
Al Di Meola: Across the Universe (EarMusic/Digital outlets)
9 May 2020 | 1 min read
Guitarist Al Di Meola is not the first and certainly won't be the last jazz musician to pay tribute to the Beatles, the band he credits with getting him into playing music: “That was a major catalyst for me to want to learn music, so their impact was pretty strong”. And actually it isn't the first time he's been down this route. In 2013 at Abbey Road he recorded All... > Read more
You're Mother Should Know
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RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Mal Waldron; Free At Last (ECM 2xLP/CD/digital)
18 Apr 2020 | 1 min read
Some time in late '88 I was in Paris and by pure chance saw a small ad in some street press saying the Mal Waldron Trio was playing that night in a club. What club and where I can't recall but I made my way there despite being almost entirely ignorant of who pianist Waldron was. But I knew who he had been. Decades previous he'd played with Coltrane, Mingus and Eric Dolphy. And... > Read more
Bley, Swallow, Sheppard: Life Goes On (ECM, digital outlets)
13 Apr 2020 | 1 min read | 1
Now in her Eighties, the great composer/pianist/organist Carla Bley remains productive as a recording artist and here completes a trilogy of albums with her longtime trio of bassist/partner Steve Swallow and British saxophonist Andy Sheppard (who is now in his mid Sixties for those of you who remember hm as the hot young player out of London alongside Courtney Pine). The first in the... > Read more
Copycat 1: After You
Aaron Diehl: The Vagabond (Mack Avenue)
30 Mar 2020 | 1 min read
In a classic trio setting with bassist Paul Sikivie and drummer Gregory Hutchinson, the classically-trained and award-winning jazz pianist Aaron Diehl – still only in his early Thirties – here delivers an elegant, inventive third studio album. It touches obliquely on his broad range of influences, from Art Tatum and the more mainstream but often overlooked style of Oscar... > Read more
Avishai Cohen: Big Vicious (ECM)
28 Mar 2020 | 1 min read
Not to be confused with the Israeli bassist/singer of the same name, this Avishai Cohen – also originally from Israel, then in the US – is a highly regarded trumpeter whose style has some of the spare precision of early Sixties Miles Davis but is also contemporary in that his band Big Vicious edges towards widescreen rock courtesy of guitarist Uzi Ramirez, guitarist/bassist Jonathan... > Read more
Hidden Chamber
Shabaka and the Ancestors: We Are Sent Here By History (Impulse!/digital outlets)
21 Mar 2020 | 1 min read
Shabaka Hutchings – of The Comet is Coming, Sons of Kemet and other evolving UK jazz/funk ensembles alongside this one – has advanced a strand of retro-Afrofuturism which links to Sun Ra, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Don Cherry and others. And given those references it is fitting that the group – back after their Wisdom of the Elders in 2016 –... > Read more
Steve Barry/Judy Bailey: Elements (Rattle)
16 Mar 2020 | 1 min read
Expat New Zealand pianist Barry studied under the exceptional Australia Bailey when he attended Sydney's Conservatorium of Music (where Mike Nock also taught) on a jazz course and almost immediately discovered they had a mutual understanding when it came to live improvisation. Barry called it “telepathy” and this session recorded live in August 2018 confirms that. The album... > Read more
Tane-Rore
PAT METHENY INTERVIEWED (2020): The confounding career of Pat Metheny
10 Mar 2020 | 6 min read
For more than 45 years, over as many albums and 20 Grammy awards, 65-year old Pat Metheny established himself as the pre-eminent guitarist of his generation. That he's not a household name isn't just down to his chosen idiom – he's nominally a jazz musician – but because he hasn't made it easy for an audience. In his catalogue are sublime and commercially successful albums --... > Read more
Treesearch: Know More Knowledge (577 Records/digital outlets)
2 Mar 2020 | 1 min read
The duo Treesearch from the US – on the same label 577 Records as the great saxophonist/trumpeter Daniel Carter – are violinist Keir GoGwilt and acoustic bassist Kyle Motl. They freely improvise and create something very attractive between quite disciplined free jazz, quasi-ethic sounds, bouncing invention and contemporary art music. There is mostly a poise and... > Read more