When poetic London MC Loyle Carner first appeared a couple years ago he was hailed for his fresh take on UK hip hop. Compared to the street-centric machismo of much grime music, he offered a welcome insight into a more sensitive 21st century masculinity that was a hit with both arts media sorts and the public.
There is increasing urgency, commitment and assuredness about the way Laura Mvula performs her music. The context for her performance here was Love Supreme's day at the Roundhouse. As the event's main headliner and the stand-out performer, she really delivered the goods on Saturday night.
There's a remarkable lightness to the way Norah Jones has glid through her career.
It's kind of vertiginous to realise that the revivalism of acid jazz was way closer to its 1960s and '70s source material than we are to it now. But the patterns that were laid down by the DJ sessions of Gilles Peterson and people like him back in the 1980s abide. Jazz fusion, spiritual jazz, hard bop, obscure soundtracks, Blue Note records: all have continued to demonstrate their immediacy on dancefloors.
Martinů: The Complete Music for Violin and Orchestra Bohuslav Matoušek (violin), Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Christopher Hogwood (Hyperion)
There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album, followed up by Heaven and Earth, which similarly explored esoteric conceptions and abstruse riffs.
In a way, he was a second Bernstein.
The tapes from which Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions is sourced were found in a suitcase Eric Dolphy had given to musical polymath Hale Smith and his wife Juanita before setting off on a European tour in 1964. What was handed over by the prodigious multi-instrumentalist for safekeeping has never before been fully explored by an archive release. Dolphy did not return from that tour.
Joshua Redman's Still Dreaming Quartet is a project surrounded by an abundance of facts, context and backstories. Jazz folk really like that stuff. If fans can’t get enough of all the interconnections and the minutiae, the truth is that a concert stands or falls by what actually happens in the moment, whether it actually works or doesn't.
