Jazz Articles about Laura Jurd

About Laura Jurd

Album Review

Glorious Assembly Jazz Orchestra: Glorious Assembly

Read "Glorious Assembly" reviewed by Mark McKergow

by Mark McKergow
June 6, 2026

The Glorious Assembly Jazz Orchestra is the creation of Emmy Award-winning film composer David Mitcham . After a career writing music for the screen, often with jazz undertones, Mitcham has chosen to expand his ambitions by directing a full-on extended big band playing new compositions on Glorious Assembly. The 20- piece group features some of the UK's top players, with additional specialists on flute, E-flat clarinet, bass and contrabass clarinet, and tuba. The palette is further expanded by performers doubling on ...

Live Review

Brilliant Corners 2026

by Ian Patterson
March 23, 2026

Brilliant Corners 2026Black Box/Various VenuesBelfast, N. IrelandFebruary 27-March 7, 2026 Few events signpost the time of year quite like a city's flagship contemporary music festival. For one week every March, as winter gradually recedes, Belfast's aptly named Brilliant Corners illuminates jazz--and jazz-adjacent music--in many of its myriad forms. Inevitably, some of the more outré music ignites the old 'but is it jazz?' debate, but for most of the faithful who attend year upon year, musical labels are of ...

Album Review

Laura Jurd & Paul Dunmall: Fanfares & Freedom

Read "Fanfares & Freedom" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
March 11, 2025

Well this is an entertaining premise. Free jazz maven Paul Dunmall as featured soloist in a suite composed by up- and-coming trumpeter Laura Jurd. Actually, the reality is more complex. It might be more accurate to say that the unfettered spirits of Dunmall's quartet, with bassist Caius Williams, drummer Miles Levin and pianist Liam Noble, offer the contrast with Jurd's score for a brass quintet. The unlikely combination came about as a commission from the Cheltenham Jazz Festival by promoter ...

Album Review

Corrie Dick: Sun Swells

Read "Sun Swells" reviewed by Geannine Reid

by Geannine Reid
January 28, 2024

Corrie Dick is a multi-instrumentalist who has recorded on drums, piano, vocals, synth, guitar, and trumpet. As a composer, Dick is known for his dynamism, his melodic slant, and his playfully subversive melding of genres. Presenting his sonically inventive drumming, which has a rhythmic epicenter of a new era of innovative British jazz, is Dick's release Sun Swells . The album's theme is to create a folk-rock-jazz with rock instrumentation and color by Rob Luft on guitar and Tom McCredie ...

Album Review

Moss Freed / Union Division: Micromotives

Read "Micromotives" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
August 11, 2023

A question any composer for improvisers must face is whether they can create something more worthwhile than what they might come up with if left to themselves. It can be a tough call. For some, such as Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra or Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet, the ultimate conclusion was no, while for others such as Anthony Braxton and Barry Guy the answer has been far less clear cut. British guitarist Moss Freed falls somewhere between the two ...

Album Review

Laura Jurd: The Big Friendly Album

by Chris May
September 7, 2022

The Big Friendly Album is what it is called and that is exactly what it is. London-based trumpeter/cornetist and composer Laura Jurd's fourth album under her own name is a big hearted, gorgeously lyrical, feel-good romp, which does not preclude cerebral engagement but which wears its complexities so lightly that one barely notices them. Jurd last came to the attention of All About Jazz during The Great Pause, with the release of the perfect little masterpiece To ...

Album Review

Dinosaur: To The Earth

Read "To The Earth" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
June 7, 2020

One of the flag bearers of contemporary British jazz, Dinosaur's rise to more international renown accelerated with its signing to Edition Records, and the subsequent release of Together, As One (2016) and Wondertrail. (2018). Formerly known as the Laura Jurd Quartet, the band had already been going since 2010, releasing one album, Landing Ground (Chaos Collective, 2012) to general critical approval. Each album displays significant personality--the embrace of strings, or analogue keyboards--and Jurd's refusal to tread the same stylistic water. ...