Nigel Jarrett

The tenor-saxophone luminary is heard between 1996 and 1999 with Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Mulgrew Miller, Monty Alexander and more

French bassist leads pop-flavoured funk-rock originals including some substantial jazz trumpet solos as well as rap and other vocals

Teasing liner notes often amuse in telling one little about the music being played. This is especially true of the latest album by Garden, the trio led by Norwegian tenor-saxophonist Mathias Hagen, which everywhere attracts admiring attention to its quality as a threesome venture exploring a variety of generally subdued moods capable of being moderately cheerful.

Three partly related themes this month: the squirts of album releases from busy record labels; the number of albums recorded live at famous venues; and the tributes being paid to the music of others, a province long dominated commercially and perfected to sometimes ludicrous extent by the pop/rock fraternity.

Mid Wales Opera is like many other touring companies in scaling down for relatively small venues those works written to fill out bigger ones; but, unlike most of them, it has made an art and a virtue of miniaturisation.

All but two of the charts on Doo's Blues, the Dusko Goykovich album I review below, are by the Serbian trumpeter himself, including the most unlikely jazz title ever, The Wedding March Of Alexander The Macedonian . It's worth noting Goykovich's contribution – he died last year – to the still hazily differentiated category of European jazz.

Bassist and composer Ursula Harrison, winner of BBC Young Jazz Musician 2024, didn’t have to cast widely for an influential exemplar: her mum, bassist Paula Gardiner, founder of the jazz course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, was on hand. But whereas her mother might cherish a definition of jazz with sturdy […]

When Robert Johnson decided to “dust his broom” in 1936, he had embarked on what today might be described as stalking. Like a lot of other male-orientated blues lyrics, his indicate how he'd been mistreated by a woman and was determined to phone her, write to her, or otherwise contact the “no good doney” wherever she was. He'll go to great lengths and distances; not just to West Helena and East Monroe in Arkansas but to “Chiney” and the Philippines. The desired conclusion of such a pursuit, one assumes, was to wreak revenge rather than renew vows or talk things over.

An author bold enough to decide on the most significant individuals and happenings in his zone of interest and write a book about them might be thought vindicated, to his own satisfaction at least, by a decision to update it. That's to say, it's a moveable feast.