Jazz in Elsewhere
Interviews, overviews and reviews of interesting historic and contemporary jazz musicians and music.
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Marks, Nandayapa, Henderson: Campechanos (iiii/bandcamp)
31 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
In a striking cover photo by Jeff Henderson taken in the Palacio de la Escuela de Medicine/School of Medicine Museum in Mexico City comes this bristling, muscular and energetic collaboration between Aotearoa New Zealand musicians and artists from Mexico. Here is Henderson on alto sax, vocals and a duck caller with guitarist/tuba player Misha Marks and drummer Gustavo Nandayapa. The... > Read more
Sesos
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Bennie Maupin: The Jewel in the Lotus (ECM/digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
When ECM founder Manfred Eicher launched his jazz label in the late Sixties (with Mal Waldron's Free At Last) he had to look around for American talent because most of it was signed to major or independent labels. He was canny because he alighted on great musicians who were sometimes band members in groups lead by Miles Davis (Keith Jarrett the most notable example), were drifting between... > Read more
Past is Past
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Devils Gate Outfit: When the Rivers Run Red (Kiwijahzz/digital outlets)
13 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this limited edition (of 100) which comes with full credits and short explanatory note by Riki Gooch on an insert sheet, a framable cover and a download code. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Recorded live at Wellington's Meow, the Devils Gate Outfit is akin... > Read more
Jane Ira Bloom: Songs in Space (Outline Records/digital outlets)
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Has it really been eight years since we offered a potted profile of the wonderful soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom and subtitled it “an artist going beyond place and time"? We mentioned in passing her early Nineties album Art and Aviation. Since then we've reviewed a couple more of her albums, one of them being in our best of 2021 list. Now she returns with duets and... > Read more
I Could Have Danced All Night
AUCKLAND'S FIRST JAZZ CONCERT, 1950, AT AUDIOCULTURE: Shedding Some Bloody Light
11 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
The words have written themselves into the history of great New Zealand phrases alongside All Black Peter Jones' comment broadcast live after a 1956 Springbok test (“I'm absolutely buggered”), or prime minister Jim Bolger's dismissive words after the 1993 general election: “Bugger the pollsters.” For those there on the night of August 7, 1950, Peter Young's... > Read more
Edward Ware, Audun Waage, Stein Urheim: Endless Column (digital outlets)
8 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
We have passed this way previously with drummer/composer Edward Ware, an expat Kiwi living between New York and Barcelona. Two years ago we reviewed his Taking Shostakovich Out which we liked for a number of reasons as you may see. This time out Ware is with trumpeter Waage and guitarist Urheim, and once more we are quite taken with it for its measured jazz and group improvisations.... > Read more
The Circling Sun: Orbits (digital outlets)
4 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Auckland's The Circling Sun – whose 2023 Spirits debut we called “utterly entrancing” – is a collective around drummer, producer and arranger Julien Dyne and saxophonist Cameron Allen -- both having appeared at Elsewhere many times – tapped into 1960s Latin American jazz and bebop. But this new album sees them push even further into new sources, which... > Read more
Amina
The Clear Path Ensemble: Black Sand (digital outlets)
28 Jul 2025 | 1 min read
On recent releases we've seen local jazz musicians pull from the spiritual quests of people like John and Coltrane, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders (Lucien Johnson's highly recommended Wax///Wane and Ancient Relics albums) and those leaning towards the Latin American direction (Julien Dyne and Cameron Allen's on-going Circling Sun project). There have been those around Jeff Henderson... > Read more
Temple Block Sustain
LIONEL HAMPTON WITH ILLINOIS JACQUET: Tenor taking flight in '42
21 Jul 2025 | 2 min read
Most rock and pop biographies follow a very standard pattern: a little about the artists' background and home life, meeting fellow travellers, early struggles, career taking off, troubles and travails and . . . However that story ends: drugs, death, rehab or second coming etc. Jazz biographies however, because of the very nature of the music and its creation, tend to have greater... > Read more
Flying Home (1942)
SOME SOUNDS TO RATTLE YOU (2025): And other sonic delights
14 Jul 2025 | 3 min read
Once again while our attention was elsewhere, Auckland's Rattle released a few albums in quick succession. This year for Rattle started with a drought but then came the flood and we managed to pick up some of the first deluge. Now we take a big breath and dive in again to work by musicians who have appeared at Elsewhere before, in some instances many times. Rattle's output being the... > Read more
Transcendence: The Music of Pat Metheny (digital outlets)
7 Jul 2025 | <1 min read
Now here's an interesting concept, the music of guitarist Pat Metheny explored by a guitar-less American trio of bass (Christopher Dean Sullivan), drums (Karl Latham) and keyboards (Bob Gluck, who published a book about Metheny's music last year). Given Metheny's melodic skills – and that he had Lyle Mays as his longtime keyboard player – this actually makes more sense than... > Read more
Offramp
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