Very much looking forward to playing some gigs this month with an international quintet put together by young London drummer Phelan Burgoyne and featuring the great Jorge Rossy on vibraphone. Best known as a drummer (and particularly for his role  in Brad Mehldau’s trio from the mid ’90s to the mid ’00s), Jorge has, in more recent years, concentrated on the vibraphone. He also plays piano but is an amazing melodic improviser, regardlessof which instrument he plays. Here is his band with Mark Turner, Peter Bernstein, Doug Weiss and Al Foster playing Benny…

I have recently been listening to and reading about the work of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, one of the great writing partnerships of the American Songbook. This is largely in preparation for a gig I have coming with Will Arnold-Forster and Calum Gourlay on 17th November as part of Bopfest (Alison Neale and Nat Steele’s mini festival within the EFG London Jazz Festival. Our gig is a double bill with Freddie Gavita’s tribute to Clifford Brown). But it also feeds into a general desire, on my part, to learn more about…

Bud Powell’s solo on Celia, the pianist’s own composition named for his daughter, is one of the great bebop performances. A real one-chorus-wonder, it appears on the album Jazz Giant, which comprises two trio sessions: one recorded in 1949 with Ray Brown and Max Roach, and one from 1950 with Roach and Curley Russell. Celia is from the earlier session, which heavily features Powell’s compositions, with five of the seven tracks written by the pianist, whereas the tunes from the 1950 session are all American Songbook standards. Along with Celia, Cherokee (Ray Noble)…

On 24th October, the John Warren Nonet is playing at the Vortex in Dalston. The evening is being presented by Jazz Nursery, which is a monthly night that I help run. JN normally puts on gigs on the last Thursday of the month in the Southbank area, but this is our first collaboration with the Vortex, one of London’s best jazz clubs. John Warren is a great composer and arranger who has worked extensively with John Surman and many other greats of British jazz. His Tales of the Algonquin is a classic British…

I played live on BBC Radio 3 a few weeks ago with Alex Mendham & His Orchestra, which plays authentic 1920s/30s jazz and dance music and is resident at the Savoy Hotel in London. You can see footage from one of the tunes we played here, or listen to the audio from the whole show (In Tune, presented by Sean Lafferty) here.  

I wrote this on my old website a while ago, but thought I would repost here. I’ve been learning this Charlie Parker solo recently (transcription here). It was recorded in 1943, towards the start of Bird’s career and, although his style is plainly not yet fully formed, it is one of my favourite examples of his playing. The early years of bebop are not especially well documented due to the American Federation of Musicians’ recording ban between 1942 and ’43, and so this bootleg feels like a particularly important glimpse at both the…