Journalism

Active Listening with Billy Childs

I have been listening to Californian pianist, Billy Childs, for many years, initially through his partnership on many of the recordings of singer, Dianne Reeves. A solid citizen of the post-bop piano tradition (his blowing scissors were certainly sharpened in Freddie Hubbard's group in the late seventies) it is when Childs is in the driving seat for his own work that we see a passion for composition that seems a gloriously meshed feast of chamber textures echoing Debussy and Ravel.…

Read more

Soho Soul Explosion

For the Big LJF Friday Night Out, the always magical Dean Street Pizza Express Jazz Club played host to two contrasting artists on Friday 18th, each with direct historic lines to an earlier tradition steeped in jazz. Two houses, two audiences, two composing bandleaders with two firebrand trios. I was more than happy to be in both shows…

Read more

The Singer

Charlotte Church, 20, is a cultural phenomenon. After appearing as a child on a TV talent show to introduce her auntie Caroline, she zoomed to international fame and (famously) fortune, performing and recording all over the world and selling millions…

Read more

The Singer, December/January 2009-10

Standing in what can only be described as a 1970s dole office-fluorescent strip lighting, orange plastic chairs and brown carpet tiles – I am, again in a SCRAPE…

Read more

The Singer, October/November 2009

"Johann…!" I could feel the voice curdle slightly, akin to that soured whine of an Edwardian dowager aunt in a dreadful period film, Michael Winner-directed and starrring a Geraldine Mac-thingy or whatsername Dame Doohdah Rigg who used to be an Avenger. My Dearest and (Cheapflites agogo permitting) sometime Nearest is playing with fire…

Read more

The Singer, August/September 2009

Jodie's tight little face said it all really. Poured into a near-as-dammit Crimplene Uneasy Jet outfit, signature orange and gravestone grey, at a tender twenty-two was probably never on her teenage wish-list…

Read more

The Singer, June/July 2009

Mmm, I know. I will record the defining version of Gershwin's Summertime. This will be the one, that almost a century after his death, will deem all other versions… Sarah Vaughan, Jessye Norman,Sinatra, The Fun Boy three (the what? Google it, I did) mere musical mincemeat. Mine will go on… and on. It will reshape and modify all notions, present and future, of vocal interpretation. Will it buffalo…

Read more

The Singer, April/May 2009

Home Is Where the Heart Is. Or more precisely where one of my nineteen Nokia mobile 'phone chargers may be. Where do they go? Am I that stupid, that sloppy, that I will be forever donating them to happy hotel housekeepers the length and breadth of our green and pleasant…

Read more

The Singer, February/March 2009

One… two… three… four. I am counting the seconds until I deliver my pronounced, received and full throated mini-lecture to two nylon-clad monster teengirls who have wrenched open the car door to a shocked and frightened Charlotte. Here's the scene…

Read more

The Singer, December/January 2008-9

A Column Calamity has occurred today. Having a limited, nay, pointblank refusal to embrace anything that resembles computer pragmatics; copying, pasting, tools, files and all things "attachable" – oh and should it really read "Windows IS shutting down"… like "the shops IS closed"? No. Quite…

Read more

The Singer, October/November 2008

Having just profusely thanked the boy in Spanish yet again (I am so definitely in Italy) for my double espresso, topped with hot milky froth – my gratitude bolstered with the habitual, vaudevillian eyebrow-arching, head nodding and friendly gurning that always accompanies my British Jazz Singerman Abroad episodes, I'm basking in mid-morning shady repose, underneath a mammoth date palm on the terrace of my beautiful hotel, high in the lush hills south of Ancona, on the Adriatic coast…

Read more

The Singer, August/September 2008

I can't play tennis. I just can't. A reasonable jumpy-uppy serve will, after ten grumpy goes, launch the acid green furball somewhere towards the unsuspecting net. I can't play tennis. So… I don't. My inventory of can'ts also includes backgammon, football, sudoku, algebra of any kind, changing a wheel, ice-skating, press-ups and tequila…

Read more

The Singer, June/July 2008

"You do what? … you don't look like a jazz singer to me. How wonderful!" I was at a rather literary, rather Islington, chokingly arty dinner-party attacking my artichoke starter…

Read more