We Out Here – it started as a compilation album, and it since snowballed into something much bigger; a brand of jazz? An event? A movement? Whatever stamp you want to put on it, one thing is clear to see and hear: Gilles Peterson’s inaugural We Out Here festival this August is the result of a buzz that has seen jazz and related music break from its box and spill out into the mainstream.
The Texan defends his new album, Somebody Save Me, by asserting that he is a singer, and only a singer, because: that's how stories are told.
There’s no keeping Joe Lovano idle on the recording front. After nearly three decades as the preeminent star on Blue Note Records, the tenor saxophonist has found a new home at ECM Records as a leader with Trio Tapestry, a sensitively lyrical interplay with pianist Marilyn Crispell and his longtime colleague drummer Carmen Castaldi.
Take a tour of music history by way of Quincy Jones' golden-selling record collection. The inimitable Q himself takes us through some of the records of which he is the most proud, and shares an anecdote or two about how they came to be. This trip down memory lane is like walking through a hall of fame.
By reediting Demos 1973-75 and Águia Não Come Mosca, Far Out Recordings and Mr Bongo celebrates jazz-funk brazilian band Azymuth and the cult status they have achieved.
In talking to Qwest TV, Carla Bley laughs a lot as she sifts through some of her significant historical moments of melody-making and free improvisations and even dredges up a memory that she has never talked about before.
Pannonica de Kœnigswarter was the friend and muse of the American jazz world. By supporting musicians, exploding codes, cadences, and 'proper' tones, Pannonica was driven by an endless appetite for improvisation; she helped spurn the entire bop revolution. Here, Qwest TV takes a look back at the extraordinary life of an enlightened adventurer whose ear, passion and intuition gave bebop the means to exist.
Despite not being known as a mecca for soul and funk, Timmion has quietly released some of the most glowing records out of Finland, artfully honed and respectfully crafted to the originators that came before.
The Montreux Jazz Festival archives were officially declared part of the UNESCO Memory of the World collection back in 2013. That should tell you all that you need to know about the kind of cultural value they offer. Since 1967, the event has acted as a cradle for great musical moments, each one giving off a quality of timelessness as well as feeling fixed to its own particular period. While it can sometimes feel difficult to pin-point and identify these moments whilst they are happening, the vast visual history on offer – through filmed concerts – allows us to revisit and refresh what has since past into collective memory.
ECM Records didn't put out the daring first albums of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but the German label did produce some of that exciting and enduring band's best developed and tightest programs.
