The biography of a man generally recognised both by aficionados and fellow musicians as the UK’s greatest ever jazz drummer, Phil Seamen, ‘Percussion Genius’ is, first and foremost, a labour of love. This is both its strength and weakness. Peter [...]
The late Peter Niklas Wilson was a sober, insightful commentator who wrote superb musical biographies of Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. His superb short biography of the prophet of the New Thing has now appeared in an excellent [...]
There seems to be increased interest in the music of Albert Ayler. Ayler was undoubtedly, alongside John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders, one the pioneers of the free jazz movement in the US in the 1960s, but has not [...]
Mark Murphy… Jon Hendricks… Donald Fagen… For those of us not far from author Peter Jones in both years and taste, it’s a perfectly logical sequence. The title of Jones’ first foray into musical biography was This Is Hip: The [...]
The Introduction to this biography of Rolling Stone drummer Charlie Watts sums up its subject in a single sentence: “He was a global celebrity who hated attention and once said he preferred the company of dogs to humans; the car [...]
Around the turn of the millennium, pianist Judy Carmichael had the idea for a radio show that would cast new light on the arts by asking practitioners – musicians, but also actors, animators, architects, and writers – about jazz as [...]
“I’m an artist because I’m drawn to what doesn’t exist. I find this world boring. There’s always something missing.” The late Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko (1942-2018) offers a clue here to more than his artistic life. A restlessly creative player, [...]
John W. Bubbles was one of the great song-and-dance entertainers, the tap dancer who inspired Fred Astaire. He was a contemporary of Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, and his vaudeville partnership Buck and Bubbles was popular for more than thirty [...]
Alyn Shipton has lived the jazz life. No, not that one, the one that involves 3am gigs in bare-bulb speakeasies, cognac for breakfast, pawning your horn and OD-ing aged 34. BBC Radio 3 wouldn’t take kindly to any of that. [...]
Many have fallen in love with Bill Frisell’s music in the last 40 years. Its beguiling blend of every possible American style – folksy melody, the subtlest jazz, rock distortion or gnarly avant-garde noise-making as the fancy takes him – [...]
