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Huntsville in Dalston
The Cafe Oto wasn’t exactly thronged for the return of Huntsville to Dalston last night, but the audience was highly attentive and rewarded the Norwegian trio with warm and sustained applause at the...
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The Necks in London
1. Originally built as a roller-skating rink, the BBC’s Maida Vale building was taken over by the corporation in 1934 as the principal location for the recording of its musical output. It contains six...
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Pieces of Robert Wyatt
When I read, in the new issue of Uncut magazine, that Robert Wyatt has decided to stop making music, I felt an immediate pang of dismay. So I rang him up to see if he really meant it. His reply was to...
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Trondheim Voices in Bremen
They were only invited at the last minute after their compatriot Mette Henriette had been forced to withdraw from the Jazzahead! festival in Bremen, but the women of Trondheim Voices provided me with...
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Jazz Abstraction
As I was on the way to see the blockbuster Abstract Expressionism show at the Royal Academy the other day, it was pointed out that jazz and AbEx seem to share a special relationship. I suppose that has...
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A night at Silent Green
Last summer I was blown away by the latest album from Catherine Christer Hennix, the 68-year-old Swedish-American composer, singer and keyboardist who studied with La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath...
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Intakt in London
A packed house celebrating the 70th birthday of the bassist and composer Barry Guy provided the best possible start to the Swiss record label Intakt’s 11-day festival at the Vortex on Sunday night. The...
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Jazz in Britain, Part 1
The title of this two-part series is a homage to John Muir, a friend of 40-odd years ago. As a BBC radio producer, Muir saved John Peel’s career at the corporation in 1968 by giving him a Radio 1 show...
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Han Bennink at Cafe Oto
Cafe Oto, 12 August 2017: John Coxon, Han Bennink and Ashley Wales The great Dutch drummer Han Bennink is famous for his anarchic humour and his resistance to orthodoxy: he’s known for using the heel...
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Terje Rypdal at 70
If you were to draw a straight line connecting Hank B. Marvin to Jimi Hendrix and then extend it a bit further, the next point on the line would be Terje Rypdal, the Norwegian guitarist and composer...
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Doubling Downes
Vyamanikal + 2: Tom Challenger, Alex Bonney, Lucy Railton, Kit Downes The profound sense of peace that descended over Hall 2 of Kings Place last night as the set by an expanded version of Vyamanikal...
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The uncommon tenor
Lou Gare held his tenor saxophone aslant, like Lester Young, whose light-fingered articulation and disdain for the obvious he shared. Gare was born in Rugby but it was in Plymouth in the early 1960s...
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Elaine Mitchener’s ‘Sweet Tooth’
The architect Nicholas Hawksmoor completed St George’s, Bloomsbury, one of his half-dozen London churches, in 1730, at a time when the transport of slaves from Africa to the New World was booming, with...
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Pohjola/Kallio: ‘Animal Image’
Four years ago, the gifted Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola made his debut on the Edition label with Bullhorn, a small-group album of exquisite modern jazz in the line of descent from Herbie...
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Riot in Dalston
There are many worthwhile things going on in jazz at the moment, and one of them is the collaboration with open-minded young musicians from the straight world. Last night at Cafe Oto there were two...
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The Necks at EartH
At Cafe Oto, the Necks’ usual London home, we listeners are close enough to see the details: exactly which rattling device Tony Buck is wielding his right hand, or what use Chris Abrahams is making of...
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More music for a new society
The first time I saw Christian Lillinger, with a trio called Hyperactive Kid at Berlin’s X Jazz festival a few years ago, I found it impossible to take him seriously. It was as if some New Romantic...
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Punkt 2019
Kristiansand’s Punkt festival was the brainchild of Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, who had the idea of setting up an annual event featuring instant remixes of every performance. The first edition was held...
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Flutter and wow
After several books in which he perceptively explored the place and meaning of sound in our lives — including Oceans of Sound, Exotica, Haunted Weather, Sinister Resonance and Into the Maelstrom — now...
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A happy birthday
The pianist Steve Beresford is celebrating his 70th birthday this weekend with three shows at Cafe Oto, mixing and matching friends and colleagues each night under the rubric PIANO TOYS MUSIC NOISE....
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