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Article: Year in Review

Chris May's Best Releases of 2012

by Chris May
December 20, 2012

Christian ScottaTunde AdjuahConcord RecordsIn 1959, when Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker's jazz critic, published a collection of his columns, he titled the book The Sound of Surprise. The promise of the unexpected, wrote Balliett, was jazz's most precious quality. In a year which went on to include the release of ...

Article: Album Review

Stuart McCallum: Distilled Live

Read "Distilled Live" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
December 19, 2012

Emerging from the interzone inhabited by post-Pat Metheny guitar jazz, electronica, minimalism and ambient, Manchester guitarist Stuart McCallum's music combines the lush, the layered and the looped with real-time emotional engagement and vigor. Made with a large ensemble including acoustic string and woodwind sections alongside the electronica, Distilled Live sounds rather like an orchestrated version of ...

Article: Year in Review

Chris May's Best Jazz Books of 2012

by Chris May
December 16, 2012

Are the best books always about the past rather than the present, or is it simply easier to write about events on which the dust has settled? Whatever. These three books are all about the past and each is outstanding.Matthew RuddickFunny Valentine: The Story Of Chet BakerGrippingly written and meticulously ...

Article: Catching Up With

Stan Sulzmann: Neon Quartet

by Chris May
October 24, 2012

Stan Sulzmann is among the most singular saxophonists in the UK, with an instantly recognizable, lush but rough-edged sound, and a distinguished track record as a composer and arranger for large and small bands.Born in London in 1948, Sulzmann is approaching veteran status and is a source of inspiration to many of Britain's emerging ...

Article: Album Review

Marco Benevento: TigerFace

by Chris May
September 5, 2012

When a renegade instrumentalist such as keyboardist/sonic adventurer Marco Benevento records an album with a relatively big budget, and with the shock-horror addition of a vocalist, it can be bad news for the core audience. Bye bye bohemia, hello mainstream. TigerFace was tracked, not at Benevento's usual Brooklyn location, but at Los Angeles' EastWest studio, where ...

News: Event

Fela NYC: Fresh From Africa at British Film Institute

August 15, 2012

New Nigerian Cinema and African Odsseys are screening Fela NYC: Fresh From Africa at the British Film Institute on London's Southbank at 2pm on Saturday 18 August. The 90-minute Fela Kuti documentary, directed by Edward Jaheed Ashley, is a mixture of interview, reportage and performance footage, shot in New York in 1986. All About Jazz's Chris ...

Article: Book Review

Bob Willoughby: Jazz - Body and Soul

by Chris May
August 8, 2012

Jazz: Body and SoulBob Willoughby176 pages, hardback, slipcaseISBN: 978 1 901268 58 4Evans Mitchell Books2012To the wider world, Bob Willoughby is the Los Angeles photographer who took a raft of iconic photographs of movie stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe ...

Article: Album Review

Chris McGregor: In His Good Time

Read "In His Good Time" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
July 30, 2012

Founder of South African group the Blue Notes and, later in London, the Brotherhood of Breath, pianist Chris McGregor (born in the Transkei to Scottish missionary parents) was among the first musicians to take what became known as “township jazz" beyond South Africa, when he and the Blue Notes went into voluntary exile in 1964. Like ...

Article: Book Review

Funny Valentine - The Story of Chet Baker

by Chris May
July 30, 2012

Funny Valentine: The Story of Chet BakerMatthew Ruddick828 pages, softbackISBN: 978-1-907732-71-3Melrose Books2012Grippingly written and meticulously researched, Matthew Ruddick's 828-page opus is the definitive biography of trumpeter and singer Chet Baker. More than that, it is a vivid account of the junkie subculture that ran ...

Article: Extended Analysis

Mose Fan Fan: Musicatelama

by Chris May
July 6, 2012

Mose Fan FanMusicatelamaSterns2012Considering the barbarism of Congo's Belgian colonial regime, which stripped the country of everything bar the light bulbs when independence was won in 1960, it is a wonder that music as beautiful Congolese rumba was created in the late 1940s and 1950s. But the style transcended ...