Jazz

₹4,200 for a Gold section ticket – which is still just the third best section at the venue – is the kind of price usually paid for a multi-band concert held over two days. And here I was spending that much for a 90-minute show. I wasn’t the only one. Tickets to Jacob Collier’s Mumbai concert at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) were being sold at the pace of Bumrah’s bowling and I was grateful to have grabbed one. The 29-year-old is the only British artist to have won a Grammy for each of his first four…

Twelve years ago, Noreen Davies had a dream. In it, the artist and cafe owner, then 72, saw herself wielding an unusual instrument. “There was a jazzy tune on in the background and I was playing along on a trombone, bending the notes and having a great time,” she says. “When I woke up, I knew I had to learn it.”She headed to her cafe in Leominster, Herefordshire, and had a meeting with her accountant. “At the end, I asked him if he knew anyone with a trombone I could try out and he said he had five! Turns out he played in…

In a Dev Diary from Atlus, sound director Toshiki Konishi has discussed bringing the music of Persona 5 Tactica to life – check it out exclusively at NME. As Tactica is a strategy role-playing game (SRPG), Konishi explained that scoring it with traditional RPG music wouldn’t work as players spend more time listening to the same song in battle. However, the sound director still wanted to keep elements of Persona 5‘s music alive in different ways. “I wanted to focus on the horizontal connection of the music,” shared…

A song that has had 94m plays on Spotify since its October release begins with 64 seconds of cosmic, atmospheric music. Over a burbling analogue synthesiser and occasional ornamentation from piano and trumpet, we hear a soft, female voice narrating a journey: “Travelling forever in the dark / Darkness into blackness.”This sample from Azimuth’s 1977 album track The Tunnel is followed by Drake and Yeat rapping on IDGAF, the second most played track from Drake’s UK/US No 1 album, For All the Dogs (“Fuck the bitch, I make her…

Carla Bley, the American jazz composer-pianist celebrated for boldly avant-garde work as well as her uplifting and beautiful takes on the genre’s mainstream, has died aged 87.Her death was announced by longtime partner and musical collaborator Steve Swallow, who said the cause was complications from brain cancer.Bley’s impish, blithe yet pointed approach to her craft meant she recorded right across the jazz spectrum, from straightforwardly lovely piano pieces (the likes of Lawns became standards and hits on streaming…

Ezra Collective’s recent Mercury win was a victorious moment for the band and also a reminder that UK jazz is still thriving. But within the scene’s melting pot of musicians, is there a stylistic diversity that perhaps the word “jazz” is yet to fully encompass? That’s the sort of existential question Tim Doyle has been mulling over lately. One of the UK’s most exciting percussionists, the 32-year-old goes by the alias Chiminyo, and has named his latest EP series after a conversation about whether the scene was less about…

South African jazz has taken a maximal turn in recent years. Artists such as the collective Spaza and drummers Tumi Mogorosi and Asher Gamedze have each released records that channel free jazz to produce a collective cacophony of sound. It is a social statement as much as a sonic one, an effort to connect with a sense of Black community consciousness through the emotive openness of improvisation.Thandi Ntuli with Carlos Niño: Rainbow Revisited album artwork. Photograph: Shabaka HutchingsPianist and vocalist Thandi Ntuli…

There aren’t many jazz performers like Japanese pianist Hiromi Uehara. With her hair artfully piled almost a foot above her head, the 44-year-old launches into muscular assaults that traverse everything from fast-paced bebop to contemporary classical, monumental power chords and prog-fuelled excursions on the synth: a maximal sound that brings crowds to their feet, whooping instead of the usual respectful applause of the jazz club.“My audience is so wide-ranging; I remember a recent show in Italy where there was a very…

Since relocating to London, Virginia-born Judi Jackson has established herself as a compelling live performer and burgeoning songwriter, blessed with a powerful, pitch-perfect voice – confirmed by her headline performance at the Southbank Centre tomorrow (Sunday) as part of the London jazz festival. Her desire to stand in the line of great divas stretches back to her teenage years, which explains why this second album, after 2021’s all-original Grace, draws principally on the great American songbook, a personal selection…

Leny Andrade, the jazz singer described as “the Ella Fitzgerald of Brazil” by Tony Bennett, has died aged 80. She died on 24 July of Lewy body dementia, her carers told NPR.Born in Rio de Janeiro in January 1943, Andrade became one of the most successful jazz singers in her country, and earned substantial fanbases in Europe and the US, where she later settled.She studied classical piano as a child but as a teenager segued into performing bossa nova and samba-inflected jazz at Rio nightclubs, with her recording career…