New Orleans fest navigates the compromise between pop and jazz

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, now in its 55th year, increasingly looks like a major rock and pop festival, with a series of niche festivals running alongside the headline acts. The conundrum with the ongoing moniker of Jazz Fest, as it is popularly known, is that to sustain a profitable festival, the vast majority of attendees are attracted to the marquee acts. While festival organisers are rightly proud that about 80% of the extraordinary array of musical talent...

Reviewed: Noa Levy & Paul Edis Trio | Michel Petrucciani

Noa Levy & Paul Edis Trio: Portrait In Evans | Michel Petrucciani: Kuumbwa New (American) gal in town, San Francisco vocalist Noa Levy joins the...

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....

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...

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: 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...

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...
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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...
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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 04/66: Eddie Harris – The In Sound

Sixty years ago, Steve Voce, declaring himself resolutely out with the Out Sound, couldn't square Harris's immaculate tone and technique with the way he deployed them

JJ 04/66: Paul Desmond – Glad To Be Unhappy

Sixty years ago, Mark Gardner was glad to find that while the jazz scene in general lacked good taste and sincerity, those qualities were abundant in the work of Paul Desmond and Jim Hall

JJ 04/86: Wayne Shorter, interviewed by Mark Gilbert

Forty years ago, Mark Gilbert had his first go at fathoming the mysterious roots of the tenor and composition giant

New Orleans fest navigates the compromise between pop and jazz

The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, now in its 55th year, increasingly looks like a major rock and pop festival, with a series of niche festivals running alongside the headline acts. The conundrum with the ongoing moniker of Jazz Fest, as it is popularly known, is that to sustain a profitable festival, the vast majority of attendees are attracted to the marquee acts. While...

Reviewed: Noa Levy & Paul Edis Trio | Michel Petrucciani

Noa Levy & Paul Edis Trio: Portrait In Evans | Michel Petrucciani: Kuumbwa New (American) gal in town, San Francisco vocalist Noa Levy joins the trio of UK 2023 Parliamentary Award winning pianist Paul Edis with eminent reedman Alan Barnes added to three of the 10 tracks. All titles are associated with Bill Evans and have lyrics variously written by Edis, Carol Hall, Paul Lewis,...
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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