The 1960s was most certainly a golden age for British modern jazz. It was as if, having learnt the ‘how-to’ of jazz from America, British musicians began to find ways of making it their own. Not that the music created by African-Americans was forgotten or its continuing potentialities neglected. More that it became possible to allow other influences to come through – from pop, rock, folk and even European art music. Musicians emerged – Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Graham Collier, Michael Garrick, Keith Tippett, Kenny Wheeler and many more – whose achievements and reputations still hold sway here and across Europe, if still largely ignored in North America.

‘This guy’s done this really weird music for Gavin’s film. If you’re coming to the diploma show.’ Alfie, introduced us and John said, ‘Come to the Little Theatre Club – I’m starting a club and we’re going to need musicians.’ So, I was welcomed there.”

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #170 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...

The cab ride is a potent symbol of New York. A journey across town affords the opportunity to see the multiform concrete canvas of the city, and to hear, certainly if the windows of the incumbent vehicle are rolled down, the volleys of noise which duly pepper the streets. Extremes of sound and vision, big music and tall buildings, are real.

Seth Rosner is in a yellow hybrid taxi heading from his office in Brooklyn, to a meeting in Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. This steady motoring of no more than 15 minutes, that will shuttle him south down Lexington, an avenue where skyscrapers gain a moustache of cloud from their high altitude kiss with the sky, serves as a metaphor for the dynamism currently running through the New York jazz scene. If a phone interview with Rosner, who runs the Pi record label with Yulun Wang, happens in the back of a car that is because time is short, and if he patches in his associate then that is a practical solution to a basic scheduling problem. Things have to keep moving.

 This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #170 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...

Talk about making a statement. When Lionel Loueke first played in the UK he was a complete unknown. But no one who saw him would forget the impact he first made. The scene: the stage of the Town Hall on a spring night in Cheltenham during the 2005 jazz festival, then celebrating its tenth birthday with a special programme in the grand old Gloucestershire spa town. Loueke was on stage in front of an expectant audience as a member of the Herbie Hancock band, in town for the first time.

It wasn’t just that Loueke, from Benin in west Africa, long since a resident of the US via Ivory Coast and then Paris, was new. It was one of his guitars, a beautiful looking transparent Yamaha model that you rarely see. He’d got it after moving to New York, and with the lighting on stage easily picking out the internal parts of the beautiful instrument it was an image that stuck on the brain. But who was this guy?

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #170 – to read the full article click here to subscribe and receive a FREE CD...