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Results for "Denys Baptiste"
Ravi Coltrane Quartet: Cosmic Music Tour
by Chris May
Ravi Coltrane QuartetBarbican Hall London October 11, 2022 London's go-to concert venue for high-grade international jazz in friendly and comfortable surroundings, the Barbican Centre is no stranger to celebrations of the music of Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane. In autumn 2017, A Concert For Alice And John presented bands led ...
Beyond Afrobeat: Kokoroko's World of Black Music
by Peter Jones
London-based octet Kokoroko has been led by trumpeter-vocalist Sheila Maurice-Grey since she formed it in 2014 with percussionist Onome Edgeworth. The band's original idea was to update Afrobeat for a 21st century audience, inspired by the likes of Ebo Taylor, Tony Allen, and Fela Kuti. It was the extraordinary public reaction to their first release--a single ...
James Kitchman: First Quartet
by Chris May
In the pen portrait of London-based guitarist James Kitchman which is included on the website of his record label, Ubuntu Music, Kitchman singles out the five jazz musicians who have most inspired his playing. Four of them are saxophonists John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins and guitarists John Scofield and Bill Frisell--titans all, frequently cited as influences ...
Giant Steps: Diverse Journeys in British Jazz
by Chris May
Giant Steps: Diverse Journeys in British Jazz David Burke 240 Pages ISBN: 9781908755483 Desert Hearts 2021 David Burke's survey of British jazz musicians of colour does not begin promisingly. The first sentence of his Foreword reads: “Jazz is, of course, African-American in provenance, just as the greatest ...
Giant Steps: Diverse Journeys in British Jazz
Giant Steps: Diversity Journeys in British Jazz features conversations with many of the artists who have engineered the cultural transformation of British jazz over the past four decades. A new wave of the genre emerged in the 1980s, spearheaded by the Jazz Warriors, a collective of black musicians which launched the careers of bassist Gary Crosby, ...
Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter
by Chris May
Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees.
Denys Baptiste: Pathfinder For The New London Jazz
by Chris May
Bandleader, composer and educator Denys Baptiste is among the generation of musicians, many of them of Caribbean or African heritage, who pointed the way for the younger players who have emerged on the London jazz scene since around 2015. Baptiste's contemporaries include saxophonists Jason Yarde, Soweto Kinch, Steve Williamson and Courtney Pine, and trumpeter Byron Wallen, ...
New Jazz From London: Top 20 Paradigm Shifting Albums
by Chris May
After a lifetime trying to get on an equal footing with its American parent, British jazz has finally come of age. Since around 2015, a community of young, London-based musicians has forged a style which, while anchored in the American tradition, reflects the Caribbean and African cultural heritages of many of its vanguard players. The scene ...
Dinosaur: To The Earth
by Chris May
Britain's Edition label has remained independent of London's post-2015 alternative jazz scene, whose aesthetic is formed in part by the emphases of identity politics and which now, in 2020, has gone overground with the signing of three bands led by movement auteur Shabaka Hutchings to Impulse! in the US. Edition, which was founded in 2008 by ...
Wildflower: Season 2
by Karl Ackermann
On paper, the UK trios Wildflower and Ill Considered bear an obvious resemblance. Each features the outstanding reed player Idris Rahman and bassist Leon Brichard, and both groups are groove-oriented progressive jazz. Wildflower is the slightly more melody-driven and the less raw of the two bands, with intricate improvisations interwoven throughout. Season 2 sees Rahman altering ...
