Jazz in Elsewhere

Jameszoo and Asko Schönberg: Music for 17 Musicians (Brainfeeder/digital outlets)

2 Jun 2025 | 1 min read

A challenge perhaps and the title is the clue as it references Steve Reich's famous Music for 18 Musicians. In 2022 contemporary Dutch composer Jameszoo (Mitchel van Dinther) released the album Blind (which came with tarot deck and a short film), mostly improvised music which used vintage synthesizers alongside disklavier (a motorised piano) and which also used other pieces of music... > Read more

Big Game

Mark de Clive-Lowe: Past Present, Tone Poems Across Time (digital outlets)

5 May 2025 | 1 min read

Recently expat composer and keyboard player introduced this album to Elsewhere readers with an interesting essay about how he came to write this tribute to his father. De Clive-Lowe described his father – who died in 2011 – as strict and overbearing but, looking through his archive of photos and letters when he was in Japan for 20 years from 1953, he came to see a different... > Read more

Acceptance

Anouar Brahem: After the Last Sky (ECM/digital outlets)

28 Apr 2025 | 1 min read

It has been almost 20 years since we first wrote about Tunisian oud player Brahem (the ECM album Le Voyage de Sahar) whose subsequent albums have always been worth hearing. Oddly enough although we heard them we only ever wrote about one other. That said, he hasn't recorded that much since Sahar, just three albums under his own name prior to this one. We therefore welcome the... > Read more

Dancing Under the Meteorites

Hayden Chisholm, Jonathan Crayford: Release And Return (Rattle/digital outlets)

17 Mar 2025 | 1 min read

In this country's numerically small but busy jazz community, this album was almost inevitable: two mid-career performers sensitively enjoying each other's company. Both players have appeared many times but separately at Elsewhere: alto saxophonist Chisholm here, pianist Crayford here. But we could find no album of them together, which makes this album of seven duets especially welcome.... > Read more

JC Ballad

Landaeus/De Heney/Osgood: Dissolving Patterns (digital outlets)

17 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

Perhaps because we've had a long affection for ECM albums dating from the early Seventies – and more recently because we've got family in that part of the world – we sometimes gravitate towards Scandinavian jazz. Here pianist Mathias Landaeus, bassist Nina De Henry and drummer Kresten Osgood – all seasoned artists who first worked together in 2013 – take the contract... > Read more

Asteroid Heroes

RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Jaki Byard: Blues for Smoke (Candid/digital outlets)

10 Mar 2025 | <1 min read

This 1960 solo album by pianist Byard gets a welcome remastering and reissue because Byard seems a largely forgotten figure. His powerful playing and inventiveness showed him capable of working in an almost barrelhouse style as well as playing with Charles Mingus (notably on Black Saint and the Sinner Lady), Art Blakey, Roland Kirk, George Benson and in big bands. His distinctive solo style... > Read more

Jake's Blues Next

Unwind: Embers (Rattle/digital outlets)

24 Feb 2025 | <1 min read

Many decades ago in a conversation-cum-interview with the New Zealand-born, Grammy winning arranger, composer and pianist Alan Broadbent, he spoke of an important lesson he has learned: that the spaces between were just as important as the notes themselves. The space or silence allowed the notes the chance to breath and have more life of their own. It's a lesson which can be learned by... > Read more

The Rapture of Prayer

Callum Allardice: Elementa (Earshift/digital outlets)

3 Feb 2025 | 1 min read

We'd hope that Wellington-based guitarist Callum Allardice wouldn't need much of an introduction: he won a number of awards for his compositions (three APRA jazz awards) and his group The Jac have been featured at Elsewhere as was he with his previous album Cinematic Light Orchestra. There is a fluidity about his style – more correctly styles, his reach is wide – which has... > Read more

Solitude

Kim Paterson, Alex Ventling: Conversations (Thick/digital outlets)

27 Jan 2025 | 1 min read

More than a decade ago when reviewing trumpeter/flugel player Kim Paterson's album The Duende we noted that for someone who has been so important in New Zealand jazz he was sorely under-represented by albums under his own name. In fact back then in 2012 we couldn't think of another, besides the one in hand. Paterson's name may be more familiar to wider audience now because he was in the... > Read more

Cry Me a River

Jakob Dinesen: Slow Flow (April/download)

27 Jan 2025 | <1 min read

Grammy-winning Danish tenor saxophonist has played with some of the contemporary greats (Paul Motian, Jeff Watts, Steve Swallow, Tony Allen, Eddie Gomez) but with his own group he builds a bridge between European and African instrumentation. His band includes djembe (drums) and cello alongside keyboards, electric bass and – for two pieces on this new album – drums. That... > Read more

Sat Wei Nam

Aurora Hentunen: Little Further (digital outlets)

11 Nov 2024 | 1 min read

Now this is interesting: Aurora Hentunen is a Finnish pianist/composer/vocalist who steers her own quintet and is among the brighter lights of European jazz. As far as we can tell she is now based in Amsterdam and tours regularly. Of Little Further, she tells us in an email, “the album's music reflects the state of being during the last few years, forced collective stagnation and... > Read more

Pressured Speech

Primitive Art Group: Primitive Art Group 1981-1986 (Amish Records/digital outlets)

21 Oct 2024 | 3 min read | 1

From the late Seventies to the mid-Eighties, the Primitive Art Group in Wellington carried the banner for improvised music sometimes, often erroneously, referred to as free jazz. Because they didn't tour and their albums – as well as records from the numerous spin-off projects by the group's five members – were in limited editions (300 copies), they didn't make much of an impact... > Read more

Lannie's Revenge

RECOMMENDED RECORD: Dr Tree, Dr Tree (WallenBink)

21 Oct 2024 | 3 min read

From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which comes as a double with an extra record of previously unreleased material, in a gatefold sleeve with important liner notes and credits. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Given the resurgence of jazz in the Seventies after pop and rock had... > Read more

Revulva: Revulva (digital outlets)

21 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

Even more so than “pop” or “rock” -- and vastly more than “reggae” -- the word jazz is immune to easy definition. It contains multitudes. The form known as jazz has been around more than a century and is constantly changing shape, drawing more threads into its complex weave and is as comfortable at adopting world music as it is assimilating aspects... > Read more

Bush Bash

Nubya Garcia, Odyssey (Concord/digital outlets)

14 Oct 2024 | 1 min read

It seems a very long time since this exceptional British saxophonist's 2020 debut album Source, which was in our best of the year releases. Her music has undergone numerous remixes (one by Mark de Clive-Lowe) and she's done guest spots (Nala Sinephro, Ezra Collective among them), but this ambitious album is a step in a different but equally rewarding direction. On the Source she reached... > Read more

Set It Free (ft Richie)

Taka Nawashiro: Lifescape (digital outlets)

4 Oct 2024 | <1 min read

Now mostly based in New York where this album was recorded, guitarist Nawashiro from Saitama, Japan won the John Coltrane Award when he graduated from The School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in 2020. He has a smooth, swinging and inventive style although the namechecking of Pat Metheny in his PR doesn't quite stack up. There is a beautiful fluidity to his playing across these eight... > Read more

6 to 11

Ezra Collective: Dance, No One's Watching (digital outlets)

30 Sep 2024 | <1 min read

Britain's jazz-cum-world music ensemble Ezra Collective have gone from strength to strength in the past three years, their 2022 album Where I'm Meant To Be won the Mercury Prize which I believe the first time a jazz group has picked up that award. Guests on that album included Sampa the Great and Emile Sande. On this double album – after a short dubby intro which could have... > Read more

Shaking Body

INTRODUCING HERBIE HANCOCK'S BAND (2024): He headhunts the best

26 Sep 2024 | 3 min read

Among the many problems some people have with jazz is there seems to be no concept of “a band”. Players shift around constantly and the leader's name on the album cover is the only constant over a career: every album, new players. That's because in this demanding, improvised idiom – where the performer is simultaneously the composer – artists want to be... > Read more

LacLu: self-titled (digital outlets)

1 Sep 2024 | 1 min read

LacLu is guitarist Keith Price (academic/teacher in the jazz faculty at Auckland Uni) and two recent graduates, saxophonist Francesca Parussini and drummer Maximillian Crook, recorded here in the Kenneth Myers Centre in Auckland, the former IYA radio building on Shortland Street. The four spare, considered and spacious pieces hint at their nature through the titles of Price's originals the... > Read more

Friends and Whanau

MIKE NOCK, INTERVIEWED (2024): The art of having serious fun

31 Aug 2024 | 6 min read

For a man who has spent his life in the earnest art of jazz, Mike Nock laughs a lot, enjoying his deep well of anecdotes, appreciating a joke at his own expense and – when it's suggested a hallmark of his diverse career is that there's no obvious hallmark – laughs until he's breathless. It's no surprise Norman Meehan's 2010 biography of 83-year old Nock was titled Serious Fun.... > Read more