TOP NEWS JAZZ

Jazz musician who was key to Davis’s sound was the last surviving player on the classic albumJimmy Cobb, the jazz drummer and last surviving player on Miles Davis’s seminal 1959 album Kind of Blue has died from lung cancer at age 91.Cobb was key in helping to achieve the cool ... read more

The New York musician, who has released one of the best LPs of 2020 so far, explains her love for Brandy and Kate BushI’m in my apartment in New York, and I’m trying to focus on the positive side of being in isolation, which is forced introspection. I just released ... read more

Founder of the London jazz festival who nurtured the careers of many musiciansWhile the economy of jazz has always been a fragile thing, the music’s inner resilience is founded on its practioners’ shared belief in the human value of their work. As the founder and presiding spirit of the London ... read more

(Lejazzetal)The New Orleans banjo maestro goes back to his roots An easy-going singer, virtuoso of the banjo and larger-than-life character, Don Vappie is as New Orleans as they come. His mixed-race Creole ancestors were living in the city before Napoleon sold it to the US in 1803. A century later, ... read more

My friend Dick Gilbert, who has died aged 82 after suffering from vascular dementia, was a BBC journalist, a jazz fan, a lover of pubs and of having a flutter on the horses.Politically, he was on the left, from his schooldays at Midhurst grammar school, West Sussex, where he impressed ... read more

The Oscar, Grammy and Brit-winning producer talks about his spiritual jazz quest and ‘the greatest drummer ever’, Tony AllenThe best arts and entertainment during self-isolationI don’t have a studio space at home because of noise levels, so I’ve brought a laptop home and am working on headphones, and it’s been ... read more

There’s shaken-up pop from Rina Sawayama, searching rap by J Hus and Jay Electronica, and invention everywhere from KeiyaA’s soul to Beatrice Dillon’s electronics. Music in 2020 cannot be confinedApple’s prettily meandering piano can at first seem benign, even whimsical, but this album – already being regarded by many as ... read more

During his long career as a magazine journalist, Les Tomkins compiled an archive of more than a thousand interviews with jazz musicians, many of them significant figures in the music’s history. Those who answered his questions included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Peggy Lee, Benny ... read more

Far from La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s Netflix series struggles to meld its story of poverty and precarity in the Parisian underbelly with its extended musical interludes If you come to The Eddy (Netflix) with hopes for a reprise of its executive producer and lead director Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-winning La ... read more

8 May 1985 Nina Simone talks to John Fordham about the message behind the bluesThe century’s great American singers have all wrestled – sometimes coolly, sometimes desperately – with the drive to keep the soul alive in the avalanche of the New World.If Frank Sinatra’s secret lay in the collision ... read more

Angélique Kidjo, Jeff Mills, Sébastien Tellier and more remember the late drummer: his humility, his brilliance, and his awesome sportswear Continue reading... ... read more

(Outhere)Thanks to the lasting influence of the late Fela Kuti, Nigerian Afrobeat has enjoyed a recent resurgence in the west while its close cousin, Ghanaian highlife, has slipped off the radar, despite dominating west Africa in the era following the second world war. Young Accra-based outfit Santrofi are determined to ... read more

Andy Hamilton and Gavin Selerie pay tribute to the alto saxophonist who was a founding influence on the ‘cool school’ of the 1950sJohn Fordham’s obituary of Lee Konitz (16 April) describes his commitment to spontaneous improvisation. In my conversations with Lee while producing his biography, he stressed that “my way ... read more

Our writers help you explore the work of great musicians. Next up: the deft genius who raged searingly at injusticeNina Simone in Concert (1964)Nina Simone is in the unusual position of being a towering genius who never recorded an undeniable, canonical masterpiece. If you choose your 10 favourite songs, there’s ... read more

(Edition Records)Almost exactly two years ago, Kurt Elling brought out The Questions, an album that demanded much of the listener – the opposite, you might say, of easy listening. The questions it asked were sociopolitical; he later summed them up as: “How did we get in this mess and what ... read more