Jazz Articles about Rob Luft

About Rob Luft

Album Review

Hypnotic and many of its antonyms--stimulating, arousing, reviving--are old school hyperbole which very often separates the hack from the veteran of critical science. But sometimes those everyday words are exactly what need to be said to tell of music unlike everyday and most others. Words Unspoken is just that. Blowing free and unhindered since 1966, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Terje Rypdal, Archie Shepp, Bill Frisell and John McLaughlin, British multi-reedist John Surman needs no lengthy introduction. He just ...

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

Alex Hitchcock: Dream Band Live In London

Read "Dream Band Live In London" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
January 18, 2024

Viewed in retrospect, the abiding memory of 2023 is that it produced too many jazz albums prioritizing technical facility over emotional engagement. In London, New York and elsewhere (but not, so it seemed, in Chicago), musicians appeared to focus on virtuosity rather than feeling. Dullsville. For the record, some of those albums that did put soul on, at the least, an equal footing with cerebralism, are to be found in the Best Albums of 2023 round-up which can be read ...

Profile

Rob Luft: Burning the Candle at Both Ends

by Peter Jones
November 14, 2023

What kind of musician gets asked to write a concerto for a 65-piece orchestra--the BBC Concert Orchestra, no less--when still in his twenties, and when he has never previously written for an orchestra? Well, somehow or other, UK guitarist Rob Luft is that kind of musician. Writing for an orchestra is something he has always wanted to do, and the work receives its world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London's South Bank on November 16th as ...

Album Review

Rob Luft: Dahab Days

Read "Dahab Days" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
October 23, 2023

The beauty of holiday snapshots is that they can capture the good times (interesting places, pleasant sights) without necessarily reminding you of the possible downsides (weather issues, travel hassles, deadly pandemic, etc). Rob Luft's stay in Egypt might not have been a true vacation, considering that it came during a rampant period of Covid-19. Still, if his memories of the time included any lingering worry or uncertainty because of the circumstances, Dahab Days shows few discernible hints of it. He ...

Album Review

Rob Luft: Dahab Days

by Chris May
October 6, 2023

In an interview with AAJ in 2020, Rob Luft was asked to name six all-time favourite albums. Number one on his list was Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset's Dream Logic (ECM, 2012), a duo project with electronicist Jan Bang. Said Luft: “It's an album that really sounds like dreams, it's wonderful how it floats for forty-five, fifty minutes and teleports you to another place. The production is impeccable and the sound is so glistening." Luft could have been ...

Album Review

Elina Duni: A Time to Remember

Read "A Time to Remember" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
July 3, 2023

Someone once described Leonard Cohen's music as “uplifting in a peculiarly depressing way." The music of singer Elina Duni and guitarist Rob Luft is not depressing, though it certainly is uplifting. It is, however, full of tristesse, of sadness for things that are lost, be they people or places. This feeling goes deeper than mere nostalgia. Listening to A Time To Remember and its predecessors, Duni and Luft's Lost Ships (ECM, 2020) and Duni's Partir (ECM, 2018), ...