TOP NEWS JAZZ

My friend Marcus Price brought the ultimate in style to fashionistas on Tyneside for more than four decades. Such was the reputation of his eponymous menswear shop that many visiting celebrities, including Bryan Ferry and Bob Dylan, popped in to see what was on offer. Those who could not afford ... read more

Everyone has a letter they wish they’d written, says Gwyneth Herbert, who found that in the simple act of putting pen to paper she re-learnt how to communicate and connect I am disconnected. Over the last month, the threads of my imagined future have been unravelling. Untethered, I’ve fallen up ... read more

Queen Elizabeth Hall, LondonJulian Joseph removed Wagner from his reimagining of the Celtic romance. The result was laborious and over-complicatedClive James once said that watching a great actor with a bad script was like watching a Bugatti lubricated with hair oil. It’s a simile that constantly springs to mind when ... read more

(ECM)The friendly relations between contemporary forms of jazz and classical music are taken for granted these days, and this is a particularly fine example, a kind of jazz-inflected chamber music. It is a set of duets for tenor saxophone (Turner) and piano (Iverson), by players who delight in each other’s ... read more

Traded for a bottle of whiskey as a child, he grew up with burlesque dancers and liquor store owners, and was nearly killed in a horrific car accident. Yet through his sculpture and music, he has become a true American visionary“First,” says Lonnie Holley, “let’s tell the audience who we ... read more

Singer and guitarist who by the 90s was called ‘the greatest living bluesman’Talent unrewarded, hopes frustrated – familiar tropes of the blues life, but few musicians struggled against them as long as the singer and guitarist Otis Rush, who has died aged 84. Though early recordings such as All Your ... read more

(Real World)There is commendable ambition and skill behind this collaboration between Bokanté, the self-styled “super group” founded by Michael League of the New York jazz-funk outfit Snarky Puppy, and the renowned Dutch big band Metropole Orkest (active since 1945). League was inspired to form Bokanté to showcase the Guadaloupe-born singer ... read more

One is a food critic, the other a Hollywood star … so what happened when they played jazz together?Jeff Goldblum has huge hands. I know this because we are finger to finger at the keyboard of a Steinway grand piano in a glitzy central London hotel lobby, and he easily ... read more

Cavalo RecordsIn 2009, a riotously style-scrambling band of former Middlesex University jazz students called Led Bib made a big impression at that year’s Mercury prize. Like all the other jazz contenders who have ever made the shortlist, they didn’t win, but the sax-hollering, rhythmically wilful quintet managed to announce that ... read more

The Egg, BathWith two turntables, a street’s worth of houses and a German fairytale, performance poet Toby Thompson creates a beautiful show for over-sevensChildren live in the moment but by around eight – my daughter Aggie’s age – their thoughts stretch beyond next Christmas, beyond when they grow up and ... read more

(Jagjaguwar)A lifelong outsider artist, Alabama-born Lonnie Holley came to renown for his visual art, and in 2012 for his first foray into music. MITH is the s elf-taught piano man’s third outing, and although neophytes might struggle with Holley’s shruggy attitude to tunefulness – his free-ranging sound recalls, at different ... read more

Nadine Shah and Sons of Kemet were the hottest tips, but Wolf Alice ended up winning. Follow all the action from the red carpet and ceremony here 10.27pm BSTMassive kudos, then, to Wolf Alice. But before we go it’s worth pondering what the point of the prize even is. As ... read more

Genre-hopping rockers claim £25,000 prize for an album the Guardian called ‘an exuberant jumble’Wolf Alice have won the 2018 Hyundai Mercury prize for their second album, 2017’s Visions of a Life.On receiving the award, frontperson Ellie Rowsell said: “This means so much to pick this up with my three best ... read more

Ronnie Scott’s, LondonThe saxophonist and his trio explore the border between jazz and hip-hop, switching fluently between styles in their restless search It’s been 15 years since alto-saxophonist Soweto Kinch breathed life into the British jazz scene with a Mercury-nominated debut album, Conversations With the Unseen. He appeared to be ... read more

The ‘token’ jazz, folk and avant garde nominees for the UK’s most prestigious music prize are the ones who stand to gain the most from it – but they are being ignoredThe question posed most often, and most crabbily, in the history of the Mercury prize is: what’s the point ... read more