The Bad Plus is often presented as an American jazz trio from Minneapolis. A more appropriate description would be that of three adventurous musicians playing instruments traditionally associated with jazz (drums, double bass and piano) but composing tunes following Rock structures, or de-constructing famous Pop anthems. Over the years, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Tears for […]
Jazz
Dave Brubeck: Piano Blues
Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) will of course be remembered as a brilliant musical explorer, a virtuoso improviser, a prolific composer with a fondness for odd time signatures and a great ambassador for jazz music in general. Yet, Dave Brubeck still regarded himself simply as “a composer who plays the piano”. The pianist is also often quoted as saying: One of […]
Misha Alperin: Her first dance
Two simple chords, a few notes on the piano and a soaring theme on the flugelhorn. Neither classical nor jazz but floating somewhere in between, a slow piece replete with subtle internal rhythms, “Her first dance” is a superb composition by Ukrainian pianist Misha Alperin. Instantly captivating and quintessentially spellbinding. Misha Alperin’s Her First Dance was […]
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard “The Gramophone” for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson’s music is of the same calibre. “The feeling I have something to say, the great difficulty […]
Brad Mehldau: River Man
Any version of Nick Drake’s River man will always stop me in my tracks. The unusual time signature and the eerie contemporary classical arrangements to the original song make it such a rich ground for covers. If Norma Waterson’s version introduced me to the song, it is Brad Mehldau’s cover I keep coming back to. […]
Ibrahim Maalouf: Will soon be a woman
Born in Lebanon and now based in France, Ibrahim Maalouf is a young jazz trumpet player whose sound can truly be described as unique. Ibrahim Maalouf plays a “hybrid” trumpet fitted with a fourth valve, allowing him to play the quarter tones specific the Arabic melodic modes and scales. The instrument was designed in the late […]
