Features

Liane Carroll - In Praise Of Slow

Recorded in just four hours, Liane Carroll’s new album, ironically titled Slow Down, underlines just what the singer/pianist has achieved over a career that saw her begin singing as a teenager. Something of a “best kept secret” for much of her career it’s only in the last few years, as Peter Quinn explains, that Liane has got the recognition that she deserves.

I’m happily ensconced with Liane Carroll in Porters Wine Bar, an appealing watering hole in Hastings Old Town and one of the singer’s regular gigs for the past 18 years. An effusive and animated conversationalist, in between the various “hellos” and “how are yous” from seemingly everyone who passes by our table, Liane is relating a childhood anecdote that’s revealing on several counts.

“I was about eight or nine and I was put in a choir at an Anglican church, St Peter’s in Malden. Over the road was the Catholic church, St Teresa’s, and they used to have a Mass slightly earlier than our Sunday service. I’m not a religious person at all, but the music was so passionate. It was ‘put the fear of God into all of you’ music. So I went home and asked my Mum if I could become a Catholic and she almost fell off her chair. I said, ‘I just want to sing at St Teresa’s, they’ve got better music.’ It wasn’t that it was better music, it was just more moving.”

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Jack DeJohnette - Rhythm Symbol

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.

Christine Tobin and Phil Robson - Coming of age

Daring to be different, singer Christine Tobin is set to delve still deeper into the consciousness of her fans and newcomers alike if the arrival of her brand new album Secret Life of a Girl is anything to go by. An emotional and personal stirring, one step beyond her previous album, the dark Romance and Revolution, Tobin on Secret Life inhabits the world of the young characters in the songs, representing different stages of an untold story, an incipient self awareness and maturity. The album is released at a time when her partner and regular musical colleague, guitarist Phil Robson, releases Six Strings and The Beat, a Bartók-infused strings album flavoured by post-modern jazz and African music alike. Stuart Nicholson talks to the pair about the story behind their albums and their quest to follow the road less travelled while long time fan, Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, describes her reactions to that voice.

Jason Moran - Sphere of influence

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.