Jazz Articles about Jack McCarthy

About Jack McCarthy

Album Review

Leader di questo progetto è la pianista e compositrice britannica Claire Cope, che ha debuttato cinque anni fa con l'album Small World. Il suo organico ha acquisito un respiro orchestrale passando da sette a undici componenti (con nuovi ottoni e ance) e sostituendo alcuni membri originari. La conferma più significativa è quella della vocalist Brigitte Beraha, che contribuisce a mantenere l'identità stilistica della formazione, anche se il merito principale è ovviamente dovuto alle composizioni e agli arrangiamenti della ...

Album Review

Claire Cope: Every Journey

Read "Every Journey" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
April 28, 2025

Consider British pianist, composer/ bandleader Claire Cope. She debuted as a fully formed artist via her excellent septet set Small World (Self Produced, 2020), a deftly crafted classical/jazz hybrid. On her second recording, the album at hand, Every Journey, she employs an eleven-piece ensemble, building on the atmosphere of her debut, painting translucent layerings and weaving a loose net of textures into gorgeous, expansive soundscapes. With composer-bandleader Maria Schneider as a major touchstone, Cope creates luminous arrangements. She cites Schneider's ...

Album Review

Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View

Read "An Ever Changing View" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
September 16, 2023

Whatever view Matthew Halsall is sharing here, it is drawn from life and correspondingly picturesque--not just always changing, but always colorful and fascinating. This View comes partly from the sea-and-sky vistas he enjoyed while creating it, splitting time between England and Wales. Partly, it also comes from a couple of years collecting a trove of percussive odds-and-ends, and cheerfully playing with all the organic sounds they offered. Tinkering with those tones, with no strict framework in mind, he produces a ...

Album Review

Matthew Halsall: An Ever Changing View

Read "An Ever Changing View" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
August 28, 2023

Based in the northern English city of Manchester, trumpeter Matthew Halsall debuted on record in 2008 with Sending My Love (Gondwana), a stylish take on the meditative end of the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Halsall's emergence pre-dated by over half a decade that of the London alternative scene vanguarded by musicians such as Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, and his trajectory has continued to progress quite apart from it. This is unusual in England, a small ...

Album Review

Chip Wickham: Cloud 10

by Peter Jones
November 13, 2022

Is it OK for music to be background? In other words, does all music have to be listened to with the same degree of concentration and freedom from distraction? It may be a moot question in these greatly distracted times. Here's another, related question: is the music you want on in the background necessarily inferior to the stuff you need to pay attention to? This new album from flutist/tenor saxophonist Chip Wickham is in the genre of spiritual ...

Album Review

Matthew Halsall: Salute To The Sun

Read "Salute To The Sun" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
November 7, 2020

Trumpeter and composer Matthew Halsall is an inspirational figure on the British scene, as a musician and as the founder of the successful Gondwana Records label. Based in the northern city of Manchester, two hundred miles and a lifestyle away from London, Halsall debuted in 2008 with Sending My Love, on which he unveiled his distinctive spiritual-jazz take on the less-is-more modalism and lustrous sound of Miles Davis circa Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959). Since then, Halsall's bands have accelerated ...