Kay chose the duo after hearing Shetland-born saxophonist Norman Willmore’s debut album, Alive and Well at the Muckle Roe Hall.

“I loved Norman’s approach to improvising and the way his group worked with the Shetland tradition and other folk influences on that album,” says Kay.

Willmore, a graduate of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama’s jazz course, has since joined forces with drummer-percussionist Corrie Dick, who, like Kay, is a former Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year and a former member of the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra.

Norman&Corrie launched their debut album, Twa Double Doubles, to an enthusiastic reception at EFG London Jazz Festival in November and have since won more admirers at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.

“I’ve been listening to their album a lot,” says Kay. “I love the way they interact spontaneously and create music that’s daring but also very melodic, again with that Shetland influence. I’m looking forward so much to hearing them live.”

Kay’s own group features an especially familiar rhythm section as pianist Peter Johnstone, bassist Calum Gourlay and drummer Alyn Cosker all play with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, as does Kay. They arrive at the Queen’s Hall fresh from the SNJO’s latest project, “Nu-Age Sounds: Planet World”, a suite for which Kay composed one of the movements.

“We’ve played in the Queen’s Hall often with the SNJO and it’s a fantastic venue but this is the first time we’ll have played there as a quartet,” says Kay. “It’ll feel quite different having just the four of us onstage instead of being part of a sixteen-piece ensemble. We’ll have so much room to work in!”

The post Helena Kay Quartet – ‘Golden Sands Revisited’ + Norman&Corrie first appeared on UK Jazz News.

He was the piper who caused a sensation at Glasgow Jazz Festival. But then, Martyn Bennett’s musicality drew attention wherever he played, whether that be busking on Sauchiehall Street, performing on Millennium Night on Edinburgh Castle esplanade, or at Cambridge Folk Festival.

Bennett had a natural aptitude for music, a talent that was guided by expert tuition. Yet the music that is his legacy was compiled largely on a computer. The last of his five albums, Grit, was the triumph of a man who had smashed his instruments in a fit of frustration at no longer being able to play to his own exacting standards. He became “the singer”, painstakingly bringing together sounds and songs sampled from the tradition he grew up in, and fusing them with the dance beats he had fallen in love with while a student.

His life was short. He died aged thirty-three in January 2005, and the last years of his life were marked by extensive chemotherapy, radiotherapy, a bone marrow transplant and a splenectomy. Yet he persevered with music, revising, editing, adding to and perfecting his final work (although he never felt he’d achieved perfection).

Gary West is a piper himself: he presented the specialist piping programme, Pipeline, for BBC Radio Scotland for two decades, and is well placed to tell Bennett’s story. He knew Bennett, and in writing this very readable account, he must have had to hold material in reserve because everyone who met Martyn Bennett has a story.

Bennett was born in Newfoundland, but at age five came to live in the Highlands, in Kingussie, with his mother Margaret after her marriage to Welsh geologist Ian Knight ended. Perhaps because Margaret Bennett is such a valued presence in Scotland as a folklorist and singer, Bennett’s father has often seemed to be a shadowy figure until now. West has ensured that he is very much part of his son’s story and shows that the music gene came from both sides of the family.

Attending folk festivals with his mother, the young Martyn was exposed to the singers and characters who fed into his own grasp of the tradition, and when he gravitated to the pipes – via the practice chanter that he apparently mastered in record time – he became quite the junior phenomenon.

Bennett won a place at Broughton High School’s specialist music unit in Edinburgh by auditioning on the pipes. This led to classical training in violin, piano and composition. He might have become an international soloist on violin – he ‘depped’ with the exacting Edinburgh Quartet on several occasions – but classical music wasn’t in his blood. The pipes, traditional songs and club beats were.

And so began an adventure that involved a classic television commercial for Drambuie, with Bennett playing an extraordinary fluent reel on the smallpipes as Robert Hardy’s butler delivers a specially flown in bottle of the liqueur – then drops it. It also included some heroically chaotic international touring, a frenetic session in Paris during the 1998 World Cup that saw Sean Connery and Ewan McGregor cavorting onstage, and a duo with drummer Tom Bancroft that showcased Bennett’s improvisational capabilities. There is also the appreciation that Peter Gabriel and his record label, Real World, showed for Bennett’s work, and the praise from Hamish Henderson, the father of Scotland’s folk revival, that gives the book its title.

Gary West marshals all this – and more – with considerable skill, alongside informed assessments of Bennett’s recordings. There is much about Bennett’s later years that is tragic, but Bennett himself was quite the mischievous sprite, full of humour, and what shines through above all is his determination to present the music he heard in his imagination to the very best standards.

These days, the music Bennett created through his combination of alchemy, musical brilliance and computer technology is largely presented by the Grit Orchestra, an eighty-strong ensemble of traditional, classical and jazz musicians. They fill large auditoriums, including Glasgow’s 13,000 capacity Hydro, with music whose details are still revealing themselves, possibly even to violinist Greg Lawson, the man who has orchestrated and conducts this ambitious celebration of Bennett’s work. Lawson actually predicted that he would orchestrate Bennett’s blend of tradition and electronica, and told this to Bennett himself. He delights in sharing Bennett’s poker-faced response: “Are ye, now?”

The post ‘Brave New Music – The Martyn Bennett Story’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Oblivion Express offered the keyboardist now known as the Godfather of Acid Jazz a new direction that was partly suggested by his old bandmate, guitarist John McLaughlin’s “Devotion” album. And if, as Auger has often said, this direction was in danger of leading him into oblivion after pop hits including his classic take on Rick Danko and Bob Dylan’s “This Wheel’s on Fire” with Julie Driscoll, he clearly wasn’t inclined to pursue it gently.

This is the embryonic Oblivion Express with three quarters of the personnel that Auger fans might consider the “first” line-up in place. Jim Mullen is on guitar and Barry Dean on bass guitar alongside Auger and on drums is Keith Bailey, who would soon be replaced by Robbie McIntosh. Bailey maybe doesn’t have quite the directional presence that McIntosh brought to the band, but he does a fine job in a group that combines raw energy and frank, bluesy excitement with tight ensemble arrangements.

For long-time Auger observers this is a fascinating glimpse into how Oblivion Express developed. Four of the nine tunes are holdovers from the final Trinity album, “Befour”. Gabriel Fauré’s “Pavane” is a wild ride indeed, with Mullen taking the melody before tearing into a solo that’s surely more urgent than the piece’s composer could ever have anticipated. “Maiden Voyage” similarly brings more outboard motor than sail power to the Herbie Hancock standard and Sly Stone’s “I Wanna Take You Higher” grooves with startling locomotion. If Eddie Harris’ pulsating “Listen Here” ends a mite abruptly, no matter, as it has already served its purpose as an encore that allows Auger to turn his Hammond organ keyboard into a conga drum as the excitement builds.

Of the five numbers that would appear on the first Oblivion Express album, John McLaughlin’s “Dragon Song” is a particular highlight, its insistent menace inspiring Mullen and Auger to improvise with fire, while “Oblivion Express” – a sort of band manifesto-cum-theme tune – shows that for all the urgency and drive they generated, they also had pacing, light and shade, and compositional shape.

Ahead lay the arrival of the precocious McIntosh, who would meet a cruel, premature and accidental end, and another Scot, Alex Ligertwood, who sang Oblivion Express into a more soul ‘n’ groove-based milieu. This, though, is the blueprint – flammable, fervent, intense, and exhilarating.

The post Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express – ‘Super Pop Montreux ’70’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Nu-Age Sounds – Planet World follows the conspicuous success of the inaugural Nu-Age Sounds tour of 2024, with Mercury Prize shortlisted acts corto.alto and pianist Fergus McCreadie joining singer kitti, saxophonists Helena Kay and Matt Carmichael, trombonist Anoushka Nanguy, bassist Ewan Hastie, and grooving powerhouse KARMA in creating new music with a science fiction narrative.

“Planet World depicts our solar system’s awe-inspiring majesty but there’s a nightmarish ecological downfall at the heart of the story,” says SNJO founder and musical director, saxophonist Tommy Smith. “The inhabitants of all the planets are sheltering on Earth, the lone survivor of a catastrophic event, and we have to save the entire solar system’s citizens and life forces. It calls for imaginative music and our composers are once again up to the challenge.”

With live video projections, Planet World is set to be a sound and light spectacle.

“All the artists in our line-up are award-winners,” says Smith, who has played a major role in creating Scotland’s currently thriving, internationally admired young jazz scene through the jazz course he established at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. “Planet World allows them to be super-creative as composers and to trigger their own creativity and that of the orchestra’s players in the heat of a live performance. It’s going to be quite an experience for everyone – the composers, the musicians and especially the audience.”

Nu-Age Sounds – Planet World opens at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on Friday 31 January, visits Dundee Rep Theatre on Saturday 1 February and ends with a performance at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in the city’s wonderfully atmospheric Old Fruitmarket venue on Sunday 2 February.

The post ‘Nu-Age Sounds – Planet World’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Allan, a 28-year-old fourth year student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, performed his own fast-tempo composition Hush and a smart arrangement of the standard Tea for Two,in an accomplished and assured set with the house trio of pianist Paul Harrison, bassist Roz MacDonald and drummer Max Popp to impress the judges.

Pianist Fergus McCreadie, who chaired the judging panel alongside jazz singer Niki King and singer-harpist-composer Corrina Hewat, praised all three finalists for their strong engagement with the jazz tradition. He added that, having made the judges’ decision very difficult, they were all winners in their own way.

Allan’s fellow finalists, singer Sam Hancock (20) from St Andrews and bassist Laurie Moore (22), from Glasgow both gave impressive performances. Hancock showed maturity, ambition and scatting chops in his delivery of On the Street Where You Live and the Broadway ballad Guess Who I Saw Today, and Moore brought command of his instrument and a big, firm tone to three selections including bassist Oscar Pettiford’s challenging Laverne Walk.

Speaking to presenter Seonaid Aitken afterwards, Timmy Allan said he was pleased to win such a prestigious title and looked forward to adding it to his C.V. As well as a bespoke trophy, he wins a recording session and appearance on Radio Scotland’s ‘The Afternoon Show’; the winner’s performance at next year’s BBC Young Scottish Jazz Musician event; and a concert appearance organised by the Glasgow Jazz Festival or an equivalent prize.

The post Timmy Allan wins BBC Radio Scotland Young Jazz Musician 2024 first appeared on UK Jazz News.

In partnership with Care UK, the SNJO will present a relaxed afternoon edition of this celebration of Duke Ellington’s music which will be specially tailored for older audiences and their families and will take place at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on Sunday 1^st December.

“We believe that music has the unique ability to evoke memories, lift spirits, and foster connections, and we recognise how important these experiences are for older people and their families,” says SNJO founder-director, saxophonist Tommy Smith.

Using the Queen’s Hall’s cabaret setting and keeping the auditorium well-lit, says Smith, will provide a welcoming and inclusive environment to ensure everyone can enjoy the music in a comfortable and supportive setting where people can move around or take breaks when required.
 
The concert will last between 45 minutes and an hour and will feature many of Duke Ellington’s most familiar compositions. Wheelchair spaces and welcoming front-of-house staff will be on hand and the doors will open forty-five minutes before the scheduled start time of 3pm to let everyone settle in.

Elsewhere on the tour, ‘Remembering Duke’ will involve a thirty-four-strong cast and will feature an opening set by the seventeen-strong Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra. The SNJO will then play its internationally acclaimed Ellington interpretations with their special guest, singer Lucy-Anne Daniels adding gospel music-inspired selections of the great composer’s songs.

“Duke Ellington has been an inspiration to musicians and composers across the musical spectrum for almost 100 years,” says Smith. “The breadth of his writing encompasses songs that were the pop music of the day and hugely descriptive suites that compare with works in the classical canon in terms of ambition. It’s wonderful to witness young players from the TikTok era finding their way into playing jazz through Ellington as generations before have done.”

The SNJO’s expertise as Ellington interpreters has developed over its twenty-eight-year history and was recognised internationally through its 2012 recording, In the Spirit of Duke, which captured the orchestra in top form live on tour.

“To be praised in the US for performing Duke Ellington’s music was special recognition,” says Smith. “Quite a few of the musicians who took part in that tour are no longer with us but the players who have come in have picked up the baton, knowing they must measure up to high standards. At the same time, Ellington is now in the orchestra’s DNA and his music is an essential part of what we do.”

For Remembering Duke, the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra will reinvigorate Ellington classics and rarities, adding to the SNJO’s command of highlights from throughout the master’s repertoire.

The tour opens in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s New Auditorium on Friday 29^th November before moving on to the Laidlaw Music Centre in St Andrews on Saturday 30^th November and reaching its coda in the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on the evening of Sunday 1^st December.

“We’re looking forward to playing this great music, which has so much depth and character, and to giving the audience an experience that will be authentic in every way in terms of staging, attire and equipment as well as the music,” says Smith.

The post SNJO – ‘Remembering Duke’ Tour first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The delight comes in hearing Tina giving the prolific Guntrip’s sometimes quirky but always easy on the ear melodies an added character of their own through both her voice and her words. When they met, in 2006, Tina had already added lyrics to music by Joe Zawinul and alto saxophonist Bobby Watson and she was about to have her collaboration with pianist Ray Bryant, which was recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary studio in Englewood Cliffs four years earlier, released.

As with these triumphs, Tina takes Guntrip’s tunes into her imagination and gives them compelling stories. The title track is a celebration of Paris in the days when American jazz musicians found a second home in the French capital. Titicaca salutes and almost tries to protect what would become the world’s most at risk lake in 2023, and on the suitably waltzing Daisy Dance she communes with nature enthusiastically and poetically.

All the vocal qualities Tina’s admirers recognise are here – the tonal variety, the senses of conspiracy and fun and the scatting improvisations that remind us that this was a musician who could – and did – add her clarinet playing to the Humphrey Lyttelton Band.

The band here is splendid, with carefully crafted arrangements and generous soloing space leading to superbly fluent and creative contributions particularly from Gary Barnacle (alto and tenor saxophone), Nik Carter (soprano and baritone) and Jack Birchwood, whose muted trumpet playing on Daisy Dance is beautifully judged.

Ray Guntrip himself adds both piano and Fender Rhodes solos, the latter following Carter’s baritone on Oogie in F, whose lyrics are a typical piece of May mischief that ends the album by calling to mind the Andrews Sisters, courtesy of backing vocals from Emily Hunter.

The post Ray Guntrip and Tina May – ‘Mood in Blue’ first appeared on UK Jazz News.

The SNJO features in two concerts, joining forces with Highland folk group Breabach at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Thursday 23 January and staging its ambitious sci-fi adventure Nu-Age Sounds: Planet World at the Old Fruitmarket on the closing night of the festival.

corto.alto, who have been nominated in the Mercury Music Prize, the Scottish Album of the Year Award and the Parliamentary Jazz Awards, play at the iconic Barrowland Ballroom on Saturday 18th January before joining the SNJO’s Planet World cast.

Georgia Cécile plays the Old Fruitmarket on 21st January followed by fellow singers kitti (Drygate Brewery 22nd), Mary Coughlan (Mackintosh Church 30th) and Lady Blackbird (Pavilion Theatre 2nd Feb). Folk-jazz adventurers Norman&Corrie (aka saxophonist Norman Willmore and drummer-percussionist Corrie Dick) bring their experimental melding of two traditions to the Drygate Brewery on 24th January.

“We’re really pleased to be presenting Planet World as part of this great festival,” says SNJO founder-director, saxophonist Tommy Smith. “Eight of Scotland’s internationally acclaimed young jazz stars – corto.alto, trombonist Anoushka Nanguy, saxophonists Helena Kay and Matt Carmichael, pianist Fergus McCreadie, singer kitti, bassist Ewan Hastie and KARMA have been commissioned to write new music for this second Nu-Age Sounds project. After the success of the 2024 project, to be back at the Old Fruitmarket, a unique setting with an amazing atmosphere, is really exciting.”

The post SNJO, corto.alto, Georgia Cécile for Celtic Connections first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Kurt Elling, who is almost as renowned for his adventurous song choices as he is for his sensational vocal talent and the richness of his voice, has opted for a blend of the familiar and not-so-familiar for the tour.

Among the words he’ll be singing are the ones he set to Carla Bley’s Lawns and Jaco Pastorius’s Three Views of a Secret. He’ll also revisit the energising vocalese with attitude that Nina Clark gave to John Scofield’s Jeep on 35, which was released on video by the SNJO during the pandemic.

Joe Jackson’s 1980s hit Steppin’ Out, which Elling recorded on his album The Gate, lends the tour a theme song that for SNJO artistic director Tommy Smith, is entirely appropriate.

“Kurt Elling is a phenomenon,” says Smith. “Since 2012 he has collaborated with us on a series of captivating and diverse programmes. From honouring the legendary Frank Sinatra to crafting the seasonal spiritual experience of Spirit of Light and delving into profound philosophical themes in works such as Apparition Bridge and Syntopicon, Elling’s artistic vision knows no bounds.”

Recognition for Elling’s talents has been plentiful. In the US he has won two Grammy Awards, having been nominated sixteen times, and he topped Downbeat’s Critics Poll on fourteen consecutive occasions from 2000 to 2013, subsequently adding to this success. He has also won three Prix du Jazz Vocal in France, two German Echo Awards, two Dutch Edison Awards and the International Jazz Artist of the Year title at the Jazz FM Awards.

“As well as putting his own stamp on established songs including, in these concerts, Come Fly with Me and You Are Too Beautiful, Elling has written definitive lyrics for tunes by jazz masters including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist-composer Carla Bley and the revolutionary bassist Jaco Pastorius,” says Smith. “We’re looking forward to delivering these with him in vibrant orchestral arrangements.”  

The tour begins in Elgin Town Hall on Thursday 26^th September as part of Findhorn Bay Festival and continues in Perth Concert Hall on Friday 27^th, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday 28^th and Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh on Sunday 29^th.

“This is a really exciting way to open our 2024/25 season,” says Smith. “Working with Kurt Elling is always inspiring and his choice of material for these concerts is sure to stimulate our audiences and musicians alike. Steppin’ Out promises both the reassuringly familiar and, as jazz was once famously described, the sound of surprise.”

LINK: Full details of all four concerts and bookings

The post Kurt Elling with SNJO – Elgin, Perth, Glasgow, Edinburgh, 26-29 September first appeared on UK Jazz News.

Helena Kay will relive a moment from her teens when she joins pianist Zoe Rahman onstage at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh on Thursday 19 September.

The saxophonist and Guildhall School of Music and Drama graduate first met Rahman after a concert with Courtney Pine when she was still at school.

“My mum, who is also a big fan of Zoe’s, made sure we both went to meet Zoe after the gig,” says Kay. “It was so inspiring for me to meet Zoe at that stage in my musical life. The sixteen-year-old me wouldn’t believe that we’re sharing the stage now.”Il

Rahman headlines the first in a series of concerts that Kay has curated at the Queen’s Hall over the next year under the Jazz Thursdays heading. The pianist will play a solo set before Kay joins her in a duo.

“I’ve played in Zoe’s octet, which was a fantastic experience,” says Kay. “So I’m looking forward to working with her again.”

Perth-born Kay, a former Young Scottish Jazz Musician of the Year who has since become a City Music Foundation Artist and winner of the Drake YolanDa Award 2023, has played on the Queen’s Hall stage frequently as a member of the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra.

“The Jazz Thursdays series is a fantastic opportunity to work in a venue that is so rich in jazz history,” Kay says. “When I’ve played there with the SNJO, I’ve always been aware that I’m following in illustrious footsteps. The brilliant composer and pianist Carla Bley and saxophone legend Sonny Rollins are just two of the people I admire who have appeared there. So to play on that same stage with some of my heroes is really special.”

Following the concert with Zoe Rahman, Kay has chosen several other musicians for the series who have been an inspiration, including the saxophonists Laura Macdonald and Tommy Smith and violinist Seonaid Aitken, with whose string ensemble Kay is the featured soloist. The Glasgow-based Ghanaian guitarist Nathan Somevi and folk-jazz duo Norman&Corrie (saxophonist Norman Willmore and drummer-percussionist Corrie Dick) also feature in The Jazz Thursdays programme.

Kay and Rahman took advantage of their schedules allowing them to meet up earlier in the summer and have rehearsed in advance of their debut together at the Queen’s Hall. “Zoe is so brilliant to play duos with,” says Kay. “It’s almost like playing in her octet. She puts so much energy and passion into her playing and her flow of ideas is amazing. It really makes you want to play.”

The post Helena Kay + Zoe Rahman in Edinburgh, 19 Sep. first appeared on UK Jazz News.