The latest project for drummer Jack DeJohnette is a live album Trio Beyond: Saudades based on a tribute project to fellow drummer Tony Williams’ Lifetime, a group that was at the forefront of the jazz-rock revolution in the late 1960s. DeJohnette teams up with organist Larry Goldings and guitarist John Scofield for the album. Stuart Nicholson talks to Jack about Tony Williams and recalls Jack’s tenure with Miles Davis especially the sessions in Washington DC recorded at the Cellar Door club and describes how De Johnette’s own group Special Edition in the 1980s provided a jumping off point for a new generation of jazz leaders
10.08.06

Master drummer Jack DeJohnette is part of a continuum in jazz that stretches back to the 1960s when the Chicagoan was a member of Charles Lloyd’s seminal quartet and when he made his debut as a leader. The line continued the next decade via Miles Davis and the groundbreaking album Bitches Brew, and then into the 80s and on with his own influential group Special Edition. With the foundation of the Keith Jarrett Standards Trio, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, a new chapter in both DeJohnette and Jarrett’s career began, the birth of a group that would revitalise the trio format and then influence a myriad of jazz trios keen to break the mould just as DeJohnette and Jarrett had done themselves.
01.05.08

Jan Garbarek’s English tour this month, culminating in a London Jazz Festival appearance at the Royal Festival Hall on 18 November, will feature, for the first time in this country his new group with drummer Manu Katché and bassist Yuri Daniel. Yet, despite the changes in personnel, Garbarek’s unique vision as a composer and performer has remained constant since the early breakthroughs in his career. Undoubtedly the key saxophonist in European jazz and a role model for Scandinavian musicians since the 1970s, Stuart Nicholson talks to Jan exclusively for Jazzwise about his early inspirations and the course of a remarkable career which has changed the face of European jazz. 25.10.07

Misunderstood in his own lifetime, but in time elevated to the pantheon of composers that make him as relevant today as he was in the heyday of bebop, the totemic presence and music of Thelonious Monk forms the bedrock of a new monumental work by Jason Moran. The pianist, who tours the UK this month, with an Anglo-US band, has taken Monk’s At Town Hall and reimagined it for the jazz of today. Kevin Le Gendre talks to Moran about how he got inside the mind of the one and only Monk.
01.05.08

Jazzwise, the UK’s biggest selling jazz magazine, is delighted to announce that Empirical by Empirical has been voted the Album of the Year for 2007 by Jazzwise writers.
 
Who could have foretold that when Empirical bagged their first ever press as a freshly minted band in the Jazzwise Taking Off section exactly 12 months ago their eponymously-titled debut album, produced by Courtney Pine and released in July on the Destin-e label, would amass the most votes from Jazzwise writers barely a year later.
30.11.07

One of the most respected musicians of his generation John Etheridge has never been one to restrict himself to one musical context. His career has seen him in a multitude of musical situations from playing with Soft Machine to French violin legend Stéphane Grappelli to his Zappa project the Zappatistas and with classical guitarist John Williams. As the latest release by the Soft Machine Legacy band is released, Duncan Heining looks back with John on some career highs and one or two lows. 27.07.07

John McLaughlin draws on the energy of the music he created with the Mahavishnu Orchestra to weld it on to everything that has gone since for his eagerly awaited “zen” project. With its hard driving, abrasive edge at times, it is hardly a fluffy product of some dreamy new age.

While there are respectful nods to esteemed colleagues such as Wayne Shorter and Michael Brecker, the spiritual strength of the Dali Lama informs McLaughlin’s concept as the guitarist hits new improvisational peaks and challenges the growth of conservatism in jazz. Exclusive interview: Stuart Nicholson

10.08.06

John Surman is one of the totemic figures of British jazz, one of the select number revered and admired in Britain and abroad, both for his technical skills and for his audacious approach to jazz and improvised music. His latest album The Spaces In Between is just one of a raft of new projects that Surman is involved with in the coming year, showing a wide range of Surman’s interests. Interview: Duncan Heining 
17.04.07

Pianist and composer Julian Joseph embarks this month on the premiere of his most ambitious project to date, a jazz opera called Bridegetower, commissioned by the City of London Festival and English Touring Opera, inspired in part by the 200th anniversary of the abolition of transatlantic slavery, with a libretto by writer Mike Phillips. 03.07.07