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Sun Ra

Guide by Richard Williams, Melody Maker, 4 September 1976

WHEN IT comes to buying records, what's a bargain? Probably the best value I ever had was paying a princely 75 pence for a mint ...

Al Jarreau: Has The Adult Contemporary Songwriter Eclipsed The Jazz Singer?

Interview by Mark Rowland, Musician, January 1985

FOUR JARREAU brothers grew up in Milwaukee. They all sang. Three still live there. "My older brother had a fine tenor voice," Al recalls. "The ...

Scott Joplin: The Great Pianoforte In The Sky     

Retrospective by Fred Dellar, New Musical Express, 25 May 1974

IT WAS ALMOST as hard as getting to Dylan – but, eventually aided by an agent called Godwin, who knew everybody worth knowing, I was ...

Wynton Marsalis Toots His Own Horn

Interview by Miles Marshall Lewis, Ebony, 8 October 2013

YES, WYNTON Marsalis has soul. The knee-jerk criticism of the 51-year-old jazz trumpeter ever since his self-titled 1981 album has been that, while always technically ...

Charles Mingus, Erik Mingus: Eric Mingus: The big brand

Interview by Adam Sweeting, The Guardian, 4 July 2002

There's the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra... and then there's Eric Mingus. He talks to Adam Sweeting about life in a jazz dynasty ...

Wynton Marsalis: Shock of the New

Profile and Interview by John Lewis, The Guardian, 2 March 2007

Wynton Marsalis almost explodes with rage when he talks about hip-hop. So why has the jazz stalwart recorded a track on which he breaks into ...

Joe Sample: Classic Invitation

Interview by Jeff Lorez, Blues & Soul, 25 May 1993

Joe's new Invitation album of standards provides him with the musical therapy he felt he badly needed and gave him the chance to "move on"... ...

Louis Armstrong: Navigating the Swamp of Louis Armstrong Releases

Discography by John Swenson, Offbeat, 1 August 2001

ONE OF the happiest side effects of the Louis Armstrong centennial celebration is the reconfiguration of this master musician's catalog. For many years, much of ...

Albert Ayler: My Name is Albert Ayler

Retrospective by Richard Cook, The Wire, January 1988

Still misunderstood and neglected, the man who took jazz saxophone to its furthest limits awaits a new appreciation. Richard Cook offers a personal view. ...

Mose Allison: Who Is... Mose Allison?

Retrospective by Geoffrey Himes, Music Aficionado, October 2016

THE LEGENDARY British organ player Georgie Fame once described his hero Mose Allison as "the jazz version of Bob Dylan." When an interviewer asked Fame's ...

Nina Simone: Always Searching for a Key

Obituary by Ian Penman, The Wire, June 2003

The realisation that she was black in a country run by whites, a woman in a world run by men, turned Nina Simone into the ...

Dexter Gordon: The Exile's Return

Interview by Brian Case, New Musical Express, 27 May 1978

Fashion and fate have dealt a few blows — but now DEXTER GORDON is cutting in, recapturing America and standing CBS on its head. The ...

Count Basie, Sun Ra, Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz: OK, smarty, so how do y'shift the whole world off its axis?

Report by Brian Case, New Musical Express, August 1976

Simple. SUN RA knew that one way back. Every musician on the planet just gotta play a C7th — all at the same time. While ...

Chet Baker Gets Lost In Time

Retrospective by Paul Nelson, Musician, October 1990

It takes a tough hopper to be cool ...

David Bowie, Kendrick Lamar, Courtney Pine, Kamasi Washington, GoGo Penguin, Thundercat, Robert Glasper, Shabaka Hutchings, Comet Is Coming, The, Sons of Kemet, Donny McCaslin: The new cool: how Kamasi, Kendrick and co gave jazz a new groove

Essay by John Lewis, The Guardian, 6 October 2016

A generation of jazz musicians has grown up with hip-hop in its blood. The result is the thrilling reinvention of a genre that has been ...

Bobby McFerrin

Profile and Interview by Tim Page, Newsday, 30 July 1995

CONDUCTING IS the most mysterious of musical talents. Who hasn't wondered what that person was really doing up there anyway, making those funny faces, testing ...

Bad Plus, The: The Bad Plus: Artfully drawn characters

Interview by Geoffrey Himes, Downbeat, January 2013

The Bad Plus is often described as a jazz-rock trio, but their recent studio album, Made Possible (eOne), is the first to use electric instruments. ...

George Benson: Kingsize Benson

Profile and Interview by Richard Cook, NME, 16 July 1983

So just how did this work a day guitarist called GEORGE BENSON sidestep the critical vitriol of the jazz and soul purists to become one ...

Cecil Taylor: Culture Spinach and Chaos Theory

Comment by Don Snowden, Rock's Backpages, April 2018

ONCE I DECIDED to write something on Cecil Taylor moving on to the next phase, I went back and counted the number of his albums ...

Big Star, John Coltrane, Funkadelic, Spiritualized, Suicide, Johnny Copeland, Balanescu Quartet, The, Charlemagne Palestine, Bedouin Ascent: Invisible Jukebox: Spiritualized

Interview by Mike Barnes, The Wire, July 1998

Every month we play a musician a series of records which they're asked to identify and comment on — with no prior knowledge of what ...