Dalston’s Cafe OTO hides in plain sight, tucked away from the main drag, the venue’s name invisible to the outside observer until their nose is almost pressed up against the chalkboard by the door. Intimate and somehow inscrutable – quite an achievement for a premises – it hosts a jaw-dropping variety of free jazz and…
Category: jazz
No limit: Barb Jungr and her Trio, ‘Hallelujah on Desolation Row’
While Barb Jungr has interpreted a range of songs by both Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen throughout her career, this marvellous new release is only her second album to bring them together as ‘twindred spirits’ of sorts. The first, ‘Hard Rain’, is an essential, blistering listen, focusing on the politics in the poetry. However, this…
Jazz circuit: Tom Cawley, Vortex, London
The jazz pianist Tom Cawley is responsible for one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever been to in my life. I’m thinking back to what feels like pre-history, when Croydon – my patch – not only had a music venue tucked discreetly inside its town hall, but hosted an annual jazz festival. If my reckoning…
Pretty good together: Barb Jungr and her Trio, ‘My Marquee’
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, one of her heroes and creative touchstones, Barb Jungr contains multitudes. Anyone familiar with her work will know what a versatile talent she is. She personifies what cabaret at its absolute finest can be. She’s a consummate jazz vocalist – commanding, beguiling and arresting whether working within that genre or careering…
Beat poetry: Rick Simpson, ‘Twice Shaded’
After a few listens, this album feels like a heroically original achievement: without doubt, a jazz record, but unpredictable in ways one wouldn’t have predicted. Warm yet inscrutable; modest in approach but confident and fizzing with ideas: it’s improvised music that feels as though it’s always existed. How can something so spontaneous feel so permanent?…
Jollymath: Bill Bailey at the Royal Opera House
There is a huge range of skills at play here. And the way he weaves them all together into something resembling a whole is bewilderingly deft. But that said – you could probably describe Bill Bailey as having the one, key superpower: an ability to make a large group of strangers blissfully, almost deliriously happy…
Manc union: Prom 20, Manchester Collective with Mahan Esfahani
Back to the ‘dome from home’ for another evening, and for what turned out to be one of the most thrilling Proms I’ve ever attended, for a whole host of reasons. Mainly, I think it was the sheer energy sustained throughout – the performers set out to electrify the audience, and succeeded. Rewind to what…
Yes, surprises: Rick Simpson, ‘Everything All of the Time: Kid A Revisited’
This album is an extraordinary achievement – certainly no ordinary ‘covers project’. Rick Simpson and his ensemble wilfully tackle head-on perhaps the original writers’ most elusive set of tracks and, fittingly, bring the same sense of adventure to the material as Radiohead might recognise from recording much of their music first time around. It’s impossible…
Body and soul: Anakronos, ‘The Red Book of Ossory’
This brilliant suite of songs practises its own apparent witchcraft, seducing you more or less straightaway with its beauty – which doesn’t fade after repeated listens. But as the debut album from Anakronos grows more familiar, it reveals and revels in layer after layer of sinister chills and thought-provoking arrangements and effects. Anakronos are a…
Sax and Jazz. Jean Toussaint Still Has Youth Appeal
Sunday night in Camden. The temperature has plummeted and there are few people about on the high street. Outside the Jazz Cafe however there is a queue forming. I rush to join it and edge my way forwards between the metal barriers to get my wrist stamped. A young man runs alongside us peddling…
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