Madeleine Peyroux recorded her latest country/folk/jazz/blues album in a church in Great Milton, Oxfordshire or in the middle of nowhere. Her partners are Jon Herrington on guitar and Barak Mori on bass. And the repertoire is a potpourri of different styles and genres we’ve become familliar with: Songs by Tom Waits (“Tango Till They’re Sore”),…
So this time around, after so many different projects with guest singers and what have you, the Experiment is back to its core design: all four artists have written tracks for the new album and all of them take over vocal duties, too. Robert Glasper, bassist Derrick Hodge (also with a new album out), drummer…
Prince, Barry Manilow, Cyndi Lauper, Kraftwerk, and Peter Gabriel all on one album – a cover album by piano trio extraordinaire The Bad Plus. It is anyone’s guess if the title of the album refers to the difficult process of finding suitable cover songs for an album like this or to the fact that it can indeed…
The multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Derrick Hodge has released his second album on Blue Note called, well, “The Second”. This time around though, he has played all the instruments himself (almost all). The Marcus Miller-like bass lines on the opening title track pave the way for this ultra-relaxed, somehow experimental, always entertaining set which is…
The guys from Real Side Records just released their fifth edition of “Soul On The Real Side”, a collection of twenty soulful cuts ranging from 1970 to 2015. As usual, there are real hard-to-find tracks on the album as well as contemporary tunes from Lisa Stansfield (1993) and R Kelly (2015). Several of the songs…
In 1962, Toots Thielemans wrote “Bluesette” which has become a standard now. He worked on many film scores, has recorded dozens of albums, has played with Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker and George Shearing in the early 50s and received countless awards. I first heard him on the 1981 Quincy Jones LP “The Dude” on “Velas”,…
Singer Erin Bode first came to my attention through a couple of brilliant albums on the equally brilliant, now defunct, MaxJazz label: “Don’t Take Your Time” (2004) and “Over And Over” (2006). The former featured the hard-to-categorize jazz/pop/folk singer on more than a dozen tracks, ranging from fascinating originals (like the title track) to pieces…
One of the newer contemporary jazz festivals in Berlin in recent years is called Serious Series. Contemporary jazz as in modern, avantgarde, and experimental. This year’s line-up features musicians from Germany, the UK, Sweden, and Finland. The festival starts with a duo concert of two of Germany’s most promising, interesting, and imaginative performers: Christopher Dell on…
I remember a concert at Cologne’s Subway club back in 1990 with an elegantly dressed Bobby Hutcherson who seemed to echo his taste in clothes with what he was playing. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to dwell in a lot more concerts by this master musician. I first came across his music on…
Little Jacob Collier spent a lot of time in the music room of his family’s home and after years of spending thousands of hours there and filling the room with an abundance of sounds, he has now ended up on Quincy Jones‘ label. I saw him back in January during the annual APAP convention and…