With the death of Cecil Taylor a few weeks ago we lost one of the great explorers of the borderland between freeform jazz and new music – an experimental "polar region", in the words of the writer Alex Ross, where distinctions blur and "works of classical, jazz, or rock descent can sound more like one another than like their parent genres.
Bath Festival applied radical surgery to their roster of festivals in 2017, merging the literature and music events and running a single, multi-arts programme over two weeks in May.
Catching bands at the beginning of their journeys is so often a joy.
Since its beginnings in 2006, Brighton's festival of new music, The Great Escape has had very little jazz programming, so it was inspiring to see a selection of some of the best acts from the new wave of British jazz.
In recent times this event has had a tenuous relationship with jazz, as R&B and pop headliners kept pushing the 'real' exponents of the genre lower down the bill.
Released last month on Basho Records, Birdsong/Cân yr Adar fuses disparate elements – from jazz, folk and contemporary classical music – into something transcendent and utterly singular.
Chelsea's salubrious jazz den, the 606 Club, is to mark its 30th anniversary at its Lots Road locale with a starry 12-nights of over 30 Brit-jazz names strongly associated with the venue, including an extremely rare club appearance by jazz star Jamie Cullum on 22 May.
Genre-defying London-based group Collective X, led by singer Alya Al Sultani, are set to launch their debut album Love & Protest this Friday, 11 May, at Stratford Circus, London.
A blazing afternoon sun, beer-drinking crowds, and smooth electronic beats suggested summer had arrived for Love Supreme at the Roundhouse, a one-day spin-off of the weekend-long festival.
During its unlikely spell as the post-war capital of West Germany, Bonn was the butt of numerous jokes about its size.
