Reviewed: Ray Charles | Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet | John Lee Hooker

Ray Charles: The Genius Of Ray Charles Brian Morton’s sleeve-note questions whether Ray Charles was a jazz singer, an R&B singer or a pop singer. He was clearly all of those but several of the albums he recorded during the 50s and early 60s really established his jazz credentials: The Genius After Hours (1956), Soul Brothers with Milt Jackson (1957), Ray Charles at Newport - where he played some unexpected bebop alto on The Spirit Feel - (1958), The Genius...

Reviewed: Siril Malmedal Hauge & Kjetil Mulelid | Guido Spannocchi | Anton Toorell

Siril Malmedal Hauge & Kjetil Mulelid: I Remember Oranges Not everyone can be Simon and Garfunkel; duos are a tricky thing. Vocalist Siril Malmedal Hauge...

Reviewed: Alyn Shipton’s New Orleans Friends | Jack Wood

Alyn Shipton’s New Orleans Friends: The Oxford Concert In a musical landscape where virtually every new title promoted as ‘jazz’ would be unrecognizable to the...

Reviewed: John Lewis & Sacha Distel | McCoy Tyner | Melissa Aldana

John Lewis & Sacha Distel: Afternoon In Paris  During the 1970s French singer and entertainer Sacha Distel performed a number of times at the London...

Reviewed: Henri Texier | Anat Cohen Quartetinho | Mark Wade Trio | Joe Lovano

Henri Texier: Healing Songs Veteran French bassist Henri Texier is calling on past compositions of his to be applied as balm to brows fevered by...

News in brief...

Web radio station One Jazz marks Miles Davis’s 26 May centenary with a non-stop 48-hour broadcast, Miles Runs the Weekend Down, 23-24 May, including a strand on MD’s notorious Downbeat blindfold tests.

Among the big names coming up at Ronnie Scott’s, London, May-July are Yellowjackets (22-23 May), Dave Weckl/Tom Kennedy Project (27), Chris Potter Trio (28), Billy Cobham with the Guy Barker Big Band (8-11 June), Monty Alexander (22-24), Steve Smith & Vital Information (26-27), Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Chris Potter, Larry Grenadier and Eric Harland (8 July), Eliane Elias (15-16), Kenny Garrett (17-19) and Carmen Lundy (24-25).

Attila Kleb of JazzFest Budapest says he’s been fighting for a real jazz festival, undiluted with “performances by pop and rock stars”. This year, 27 June – 2 July, the city invites such as Pat Metheny, Marcus Miller, Charles Lloyd, Mike Stern and Ravi Coltrane.

Among the soul and pop that dominates the 2026 Love Supreme Jazz Festival in Sussex, 3-5 July (e.g., Temptations, Four Tops and Sister Sledge) is some jazz-related music from such as Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano, Joe Webb and Emma Rawicz.

The fourth MoonJune festival, devised by the indefatigable Leonardo Pavkovic and describing itself as a festival of “eclectic music”, takes place in Teramo, Italy, 22-25 July 2026 and includes Soft Machine w. Gary Husband, Gong w. Steve Hillage and Diego Amador’s Flamenco Free Jazz.

Reviewed: Gordon Grdina’s Nomad Trio | Mark Lockheart, Huw V. Williams & Jay Davis | Steve Wilson

Gordon Grdina's Nomad Trio: Ash This is the third album by the Nomad Trio. I don't know if the personnel has been the same for...

Reviewed: Buster Williams | Phil Sargent

Buster Williams: Pinnacle This is a vinyl reissue of bass player Buster Williams' debut album as a leader, originally released on Muse in 1975, in...

Reviewed: Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns | Kevin Figes: | Jason Kruk

Hedvig Mollestad Weejuns: Bitches Blues Norwegian guitar supremo Hedvig Mollestad, who also goes by the name Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, follows her last album, Bees In...

Reviewed: Lilly Hertzman | Gustaf Lunggren | B.I.T.

Lilly Hertzman: Heartshaped Some detect a Nordic influence in Lilly Hertzman’s new album, Heartshaped, but it is more reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s more jazz-influenced years....

Reviewed: Elina Duni, Rob Luft | Ahmad Jamal | Jon Henriksson | Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra & Sean Irvine

Elina Duni, Rob Luft: Reaching For The Moon Albanian-born singer Elina Duni is now on her sixth ECM recording, her third with British guitarist Rob...
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Reviewed: Modha | Sun Ra and his Arkestra

Modha: Through The Cycle Modha released their debut album Through The Cycle in 2023 and have...
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JJ 04/76: Dexter Gordon – Stable Mable

Fifty years ago, Steve Voce observed that the bare-bones setting of tenor and rhythm exposes weakness but that in Dexter's case there wasn't any

JJ 04/86: Loose Tubes

Forty years ago, Mark Gilbert welcomed one manifestation of the 80s jazz 'revival' that properly reflected the vitality implicit the term

JJ 04/86: Herbie Hancock / Foday Musa Suso – Village Life

Forty years ago, Mark Gilbert was disappointed that Herbie Hancock seemed disinclined to relieve the monotony of 40 minutes of noodling kora

JJ 04/66: Freddie Hubbard – The Night Of The Cookers – Vol. One

Sixty years ago, Mark Gardner enjoyed the sparks flying when two creative, virtuoso bebop trumpeters - Freddie Hubbard and Lee Morgan - locked horns

Reviewed: Ray Charles | Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet | John Lee Hooker

Ray Charles: The Genius Of Ray Charles Brian Morton’s sleeve-note questions whether Ray Charles was a jazz singer, an R&B singer or a pop singer. He was clearly all of those but several of the albums he recorded during the 50s and early 60s really established his jazz credentials: The Genius After Hours (1956), Soul Brothers with Milt Jackson (1957), Ray Charles at Newport -...

Reviewed: Siril Malmedal Hauge & Kjetil Mulelid | Guido Spannocchi | Anton Toorell

Siril Malmedal Hauge & Kjetil Mulelid: I Remember Oranges Not everyone can be Simon and Garfunkel; duos are a tricky thing. Vocalist Siril Malmedal Hauge once more joins with pianist Kjetil Mulelid on I Remember Oranges. The Norwegian pair have worked together, and it shows, as an old friendship shows to a stranger. Filled with originals and a few carefully chosen covers, the release is...
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New releases April-May 2026, S-Y

Sánchez, Christopher: Latin Jazz Meets Opera They say : Latin Jazz Meets Opera is a deeply personal album. It tells the story of Christopher Sánchez’s life through...

New releases April-May 2026, P-R

Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2026, including John Pachnos, Peter Furlan, Phoenix Trio, Raimonds Pauls and Ron Reider // Editor's pick: Peter Furlan

New releases April-May 2026, M-O

Records offered for review to Jazz Journal in March-April 2026, including Doug MacDonald, Albert Marquès & Rachel Therrien, Wes Montgomery, Novos Londrinos and Audrey Ochoa // Editor's pick: Audrey Ochoa

Jazz, blues and spiritual Ealing

Ealing's Walpole Park is the scene for a number of summer festivals, including those dedicated to jazz, blues and comedy. In fact, Ealing claims to be the birthplace of British blues, its connections with the British blues boom including...

Swanage Jazz Festival presents ‘pure jazz’ in over 30 concerts

Visitors to this year's Swanage jazz festival, 10-12 July, can expect to see what the festival calls (and what appears from the names clearly to be) the "purest" jazz festival lineup on the south coast (or, one might add,...
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Trinity Laban settles with Martin Speake over his remarks on jazz and skin colour

Following a two-year dispute the Trinity Laban conservatoire in South London has reached a private settlement with Martin Speake, a former teacher of saxophone at the college who attacked critical race theory and the proposition that the UK jazz...

Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story Of The UK Jazz Explosion

For a geezer of my vintage the great and most fruitful UK jazz explosion occurred in the late 60s-early 70s, fuelled by South African expats and musicians from the West Country and then, somewhat in contrast, there was the...

Judith Owen: ‘I dream of being unladylike’

We might assume from past photoshoots that Judith Owen, Wales-rooted and now resident in - where else? - New Orleans, is a raunchy bar-room blues belter but her new album, Suit Yourself, shows her aptitude for more subtle shades

Satoko Fujii and Natsuki Tamura: making music never heard before

Stan Getz, Miles Davis, Red Rodney, Corky Corcoran, to pick a few names at random, all began playing professionally in their teens. I remember...

Gianluca Pellerito, drum wunderkind

I first encountered drummer Gianluca Pellerito through social media and quickly became one of his 330k followers on Instagram, but it was seeing this...

Count Me In… 02/26

Oh for a schism, an entertaining rupture in the ranks so that one can watch militants spit venom across a void. Jazz had a famous one at the turn of the 1950s – "la mère de tous les schismes",...

Obituary: Ralph Towner

With the death of Ralph Towner (1940 - 2026) contemporary jazz lost one of its most prolific and distinctive voices. How many musicians can you think of whose work covers the range that Towner explored in the now rippling,...
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JJ 04/96: Soft Heap – A Veritable Centaur

Thirty years ago, Simon Adams heard some vital music from a 1980s Softs offshoot featuring Elton Dean, Mark Hewins and Pip Pyle

JJ 04/96: Herbie Hancock – The New Standard

Thirty years ago, Richard Palmer had no problem with jazzing superior rock but found these interpretations didn't add much to Prince, Steely Dan, Wonder, Nirvana et al

JJ 04/96: Alec and John Dankworth Generation Big Band – Rhythm Changes

Thirty years ago, enjoying a varied and virtuoso set, Eddie Blackwell sounded to have discovered the best of British, among them Tim Garland, Gerard Presencer, Stuart Hall and Robin Aspland