Nigel Jarrett

Unlike rock and pop music – I think those two labels cover the gamut – jazz is not everywhere. It is so not-everywhere that you often have to seek it out or hope that, in a sense, it will seek you out. As I mentioned briefly in a print issue of JJ a few years […]

Swedish flautist Anders Hagberg's latest album is described as “a poignant and timely response to a world in turmoil”. So, it might be expected to reflect at least some of the militancy of activists who chuck confetti on to Wimbledon tennis courts and sit down in the middle of busy main roads.

Duke Ellington had in a sense outlived himself when he made his final recording at the unlikely location of Eastbourne in 1973. It was not so much late Ellington as survivor Ellington, his best work a matter of history and the man himself surging fitfully like a battery on the wane.

Black lives mattered a lot in 1970s America. Myriad calls to attention included the Black Power movement and black-run artistic ventures, such as the one instituted by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell under the banner of Music Inc.

UK saxophonist Tim Garland and American pianist Geoffrey Keezer perform together on this admirable duo album as though celebrating its many attractions, not least Garland's use on seven of the nine tracks of the rare mezzo-soprano saxophone, reputedly one of just a score in existence. Worth some research.

As a companion to Chris Searle's impressive new book chronicling the international growth and technicolour splendour of jazz, one other volume suggests itself: Visions Of Jazz: The First Century (OUP 1998), by the American critic Gary Giddins. The final sentence of Giddins' book declares that “jazz is everywhere”, which provides an appropriate lift-off for Searle's.

There are times when clarinet-wielding Anat Cohen seems to have invaded and taken up residence with thanks in locations normally occupied by the saxophone, which she also plays. But she allows the clarinet both to maintain and extend its character in her celebrated foursome Quartetinho by establishing a chamber-jazz format, one willing and able on this album to deal with the melodic eccentricities of Thelonious Monk's Trinkle, Tinkle and say something about complex chamber jazz and Monk at the same time.

Doug MacDonald Trio: Live In Beverly Hills Fourteen years is a long time for a recorded jazz gig to become available, especially when its instigator confesses that his drummer on the date “just happened” to tape it. Even by jazz standards, it seems hyper-casual. But here it is: a rough-cut live session in 2012 by […]

Everybody digs pianist Bill Evans in Grant Gee's superb docudrama Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Or, rather, everybody dug Bill Evans. For Bill is spiralling downwards after the death in a car crash of his trio's bassist Scott LaFaro. He sinks into non-creativity and recognition of tacit family friction. His loyal but envious schizophrenic brother Harry later shoots himself, and his father, Harry Sr., while cold-turkeying Bill in Florida, confesses having scrubbed his hands raw in order not to appear uncouth to his wife, Bill's mother. Bill's hands, apart from their owner's sometime view that the fingers were too fat for playing the piano, were also too preciously soft for over-cleansing.