Melody Gardot: Preacherman
US singer-songwriter Melody Gardot undoubtedly went to the crossroads and back when she spent 2004 in hospital recovering from a road accident, and became an artist through music therapy. Now she sounds as if she visited another crossroads, transforming herself from the cool, blond, purring, million-selling singer of love songs and sambas, and coming back as a brunette, the hard-hitting frontwoman of a wailing blues and soul band, with a repertoire that tackles racism, poverty, betrayal, and life on the margins. Gardot might have risked accusations of a cynical career move were she not so focused and distinctive. She’s eccentric, restless, serious, eloquently descriptive of the joys and woes of the life she almost lost, and certain that music deserves to be more than just entertainment. She played two rare small-room gigs this month to celebrate the 50th birthday of London’s Pizza Express jazz club. One of the standout songs on a blistering first night was Preacherman, co-written with her drummer Chuck Staab. The song uses the 1955 murder of black teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi to view contemporary America, blighted by the violent deaths of young African-Americans, including Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Director Calum MacDiarmid’s video evocation of Till’s murder (with one of Till’s cousins in the cast) accompanies Gardot’s searing, blues-steeped vocal. Both have been embraced by the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and its civil rights campaigns.
Duke Ellington: Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue
The Proms pay their respects to jazz most years – in 2008, the festival even commissioned some edgy new music from Gwilym Simcock and Jason Yarde. But, unless you count Seth MacFarlane’s Frank Sinatra celebration with the John Wilson Orchestra, or the jazz inflections in Leonard Bernstein’s or Guy Barker’s new trumpet concerto, The Story of Swing was about it for anything resembling full-on jazz blowing in 2015. This celebration of 30s and 40s big-band music was a sparky show, particularly in its second half, but its narrowness of remit – a stretch between 1935 and the late 40s that was mostly the work of commercially popular white bandleaders – made one long for a sharper angle in the story arc. For example, they could have touched on swing’s most famous epilogue in 1956, when Duke Ellington’s band (by then widely written off as passé), came back with this storming late-night performance at the Newport jazz festival. Led by a 27-strong chorus, an R&B and gospel-style break from saxophonist Paul Gonsalves whipped the crowd into euphoria, put Ellington on the cover of Time magazine and his music back in the mainstream.
Nils Økland: Blå Harding
Nils Økland, the Norwegian virtuoso of the multi-stringed hardanger fiddle, makes some of the most exquisite sounds in contemporary music. At root a traditional artist immersed in his country’s folk songs, Økland has performed in jazz settings, with classical musicians, and on his last album Lumen Drones he pursued an enthusiasm for the sound of old-school psychedelic rock bands such as the Doors and the Velvet Underground. But Økland’s latest album, Kjolvatn, is hauntingly closer to folk music and very understated jazz. Here’s an earlier version of the exquisite Bla Harding, an old Økland favourite that’s also a high point of the new album.
Elliot Galvin Trio: Blues
Robert Glasper was the focus of attention on the recent International Jazz Piano Trio festival at Ronnie Scott’s, but the young local pianist Elliot Galvin’s trio offered a fetchingly English-eccentric prelude to Glasper’s soulful Americana on the first night. The solemnly modulating morph of an old jazz formula he just calls blues was a feature of his fine set. Galvin, bassist Tom McCredie and drummer Simon Roth are on tour from 2-18 September.
Gil Evans: Las Vegas Tango
It’s impossible to think of Michael Gibbs – one of the most creative and scandalously overlooked jazz composers and arrangers of the past 40 years – without thinking of his biggest influence, that master of subtle colouring and understatement, Gil Evans. Cuneiform Records have released Gibbs’ 2013 collaboration with guitarist Bill Frisell and Hamburg’s NDR Big Band, a set of buoyant orchestral reworkings of classics Frisell has recorded down the years. There’s a smoky account of Gil Evans’ Las Vegas Tango on the tracklist; an unforgettably brooding jazz theme, originally recorded for The Individualism of Gil Evans by an all-star Evans lineup in 1963.
Avishai Cohen/Diego Urcola: New York Division
Composer and bassist Avishai Cohen and his New York Division played a thrilling Barbican gig in July – this passionate performer’s usual energy level being cranked even higher by the addition of some snappy Big Apple sidemen to his regular lyrical group. One of the reinforcements was Argentinian trumpeter Diego Urcola, here delivering one of the rousing duets with Cohen’s bass that punctuate New York Division gigs.
Joanna MacGregor and Andy Sheppard: Spiritual
In 2006, the genre-vaulting classical pianist Joanna MacGregor and elegant saxophonist Andy Sheppard released the album Deep River, a jazz re-examination of the spirituals, gospel music and blues MacGregor played as a church pianist in childhood. The Josh Haden/Johnny Cash classic Spiritual was a standout track. The versatile MacGregor added artistic directorship of the famous Dartington International Summer School to her multiple commitments this year. Sheppard is one of her non-classical guests, teaching, then playing with his own band on 23 August, and with MacGregor on a live accompaniment to the 1927 silent-movie classic Sunrise on 24 August.
Angélique Kidjo, Lizz Wright, Simone, Dianne Reeves: Four Women
I‘ve never forgotten an awe-inspiring episode in a concert dedicated to women in music, in which the American vocalist Lizz Wright stunned both herself and the crowd on a tribute to Mahalia Jackson. Wright wound up quivering as if she’d been possessed as her delivery of Jackson’s How I Got Over caught fire, but whatever she performs she is the most consistently emotionally honest as well as sublimely musical of singers. Wright has a new album outin September – Freedom & Surrender, steered by Larry Klein (also Melody Gardot’s producer), and with guests including Gregory Porter. On this 2009 recording at Jazz à Vienne, she takes the reverberating second chorus (preceded by Angélique Kidjo, and followed by Lisa Simone Kelly and Dianne Reeves) on Four Women, by Simone’s legendary mother Nina.
Loose Tubes: Like Life
The biggest UK jazz story of 2014 was the reconvening – after a quarter-century absence – of Loose Tubes, the game-changing big band of the 80s that had included then rising stars such as Django Bates, Julian Argüelles and Ashley Slater. They won Jazz FM’s Live Experience award for their Cheltenham Jazz festival gig in May 2014 – from a public vote up against Jamie Cullum at the Love Supreme festival and November’s Blue Note 75th anniversary concert. Loose Tubes upcoming album, Arriving, includes their first new material released since their heyday. The band play the Hertfordshire jazz festival on 18 September, and are back at Ronnie Scott’s from 23-26 September.
Dave Holland: Mr PC
Lastly, a look forward to this year’s London jazz festival, for which a new batch of headline performances was recently announced. One of the most intimate, but most tempting, is a solo performance at the Wigmore Hall on 20 November by the British-born double-bass virtuoso Dave Holland, a sideman for legends such as Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, and a hugely influential composer and leader in his own right. Bassists will be queuing for it, but so will plenty of listeners tuned to the cutting-edge jazz developments of all kinds.
