A scrupulously-sequenced Late Night Prom of music entirely by living composers brought Manchester Collective’s third album NEON to a wide audience in a concert that thoughtfully negotiated tensions between scale and intimacy. Manchester Collective was formed in 2016 by Adam [...]
Every year the BBC Proms is accused of watering itself down, a criticism predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding: that the Proms is a classical music festival at the exclusion of all else. The series would be better described as ‘art [...]
Each year since 2012 the Jazz North development agency’s Northern Line programme has selected five northern artists to support their development and live performance, with some now well-established alumni including Zoe Gilby, John Pope and Archipelago, and J Frisco and [...]
John Pope is a revered ‘open hearted bass player’, band leader, omnipresent champion of the Northern jazz scene and all-round good egg. Inspired by the joyous revery of Charles Mingus’s 1970 live album In Antibes, the second album of new [...]
The brainchild of composer and saxophonist Dee Byrne, Outlines is a strong set of fascinating original compositions realised by something of a supergroup of fine creative players. The impressive and technically accomplished intricacy of Dee Byrne’s soloing on alto saxophone [...]
“As you can tell from all the fake jazz music you heard earlier, I was really floundering during Covid. I had to dig deep.” Father John Misty is no stranger to “deep”: take the deep affect of 2015’s I Love [...]
Returning Weather is Irish composer-singer Christine Tobin’s nine-part meditation on the nature of home and homecoming. This fine evocative song cycle charts a personal journey as well as a continuing refinement of the Irish singer-songwriter’s craft as a writer of [...]
Any Dutch music festival is just one pumpkin away from a brain-melting musical aneurysm. At Rewire The Hague last year it was The Bug’s late set demolishing buildings with unbelievable bass; at the Complexity metal festival earlier this week it [...]
Run Logan Run, the longstanding duo of Andrew Hayes and Matt Brown, can certainly play. To do a drum n’ sax duo you really need to be able to – and so in theory they don’t need to add other [...]
Thēsaurōs is a cathedral of sound with the architectural mastery of Wren, the mystical suggestiveness of Hawksmoor, and the mathematical intangibility of Escher. This daunting 82-minute 7-track piano trio album is the second in a projected trilogy from the monster [...]
