The EFG London Jazz Festival’s final day allowed the fleet of foot and this reporter to speed across the capital to embrace jazz in its period glory and then to take in a bracing look at the music today.
Hosted in the city’s Cultural Centre and featuring a line-up of artists that would put many much larger festivals to shame, Pančevo, a small city just 22km outside of Belgrade, seems to have managed the neat trick of striking the right balance between funding, artistic integrity and admission price to produce a classy event.
The Cuban Mela was inarguably the LJF’s most vibrant closing event.
If there is such a thing as the short straw for improvising musicians it may well be a booking in the days immediately after the London Jazz Festival.
Consummate performer and every singer’s vocal idol, Liane Carroll, sidles up to the piano, still in coat and scarf, and starts chatting and joking with her audience about the ‘Cassandra incident’ earlier in the week.
WordTheatre, a company specialising in live readings of stories by actors, presented ‘And All That Jazz’ at the St.
The Jazz Nursery, set aboard a magnificent replica of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hinde, hosted no less than three high quality emerging acts in one evening as part of the 2015 EFG London Jazz Festival.
Last Thursday saw the launch of the Tubby Hayes documentary, A Man in a Hurry, at Foyle’s bookshop in London as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.
We were promised a smorgasbord of jazz royalty at this gig, and we certainly got it: great musicians, great tunes, great arranging and great playing.
After a lovely low-key opening set from Femi Temowo, featuring a Lagos-style version of The Beatles’ tune ‘Blackbird’ and a song called ‘A Moment in Time’, inspired by Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, both of which will feature on Temowo’s album-in-the-making Blood is Not for Drinking, the audience was left to ponder the role of music in relation to conflict, in the wake of the tragic events that unfolded in Paris just the previous evening, as we waited for US vocalist Cécile McLorin...
