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Hannah Brine talks to Tara Minton about her new album, 'Blue Sky Now.'

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Tara Minton speaks with Lorna Reid about her new album, songwriting and more. 

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Fini joins Rob Cope to chat about her 5th studio album, Last Night of the World. 

Fini Bearman is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist & composer who has built an impressive profile on the UK Jazz scene as both an imaginative and expressive soloist and as a side-woman. She tours regularly across Europe and notable performances include Ronnie Scotts, The Sage Gateshead, The Barbican, The A-Trane (Berlin), Cafe Mercedes Jazz (Valencia), Manzioli (Izola, Slovenia) and Dizzys (Jazz at the Lincoln Center, New York). Festival highlights include the London Jazz Festival, Manchester Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival,  'Jazz Voices' in Lithuania and ’Voicingers' in Poland.

Fini has been supported by the Arts Council & Musicians Benevolent Fund and has been nominated for awards including London Jazz Singer of the Year (Global Music Foundation).

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Daniel Vildosola and John Waugh may come from opposite sides of the Atlantic—one from the sun-scorched deserts of Arizona, the other from the rolling hills of Northumberland, UK—but together, their music finds an effortless middle ground. Drawing from their vastly different environments, they’ve created a sound that feels natural, fusing Americana and jazz with a sense of place and history that’s both personal and expansive.

Individually, they’ve cut their teeth on the world stage in pop music—Vildosola, a long- standing member of HÆLOS, producing various artists, and more recently, touring extensively with CMAT. While Waugh has spent over a decade playing with the chart- topping powerhouse, The 1975. Despite their success in the pop world, they now find themselves retreating to intimate venues, where they can explore a more organic, jazz- infused sound, drawing from the folk traditions and stories of their respective homes.

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(In) Love explores the different aspects and essences of love, through a simple yet sophisticated musical language, reflecting the singer and song-writer’s experience gathered during the last years. The original songs which compose this collection include jazz, world music, bossa nova, and also a jazz ballad composed by the music veteran Ivan Lins, with lyrics written by Sofia Hoffmann. Enjoy!

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Gwilym and Emma have teamed up to record a new album Big Visit on ACT, which is out now. They sit down with Tara Minton to share their thoughts on the new music. 

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Out February 7, 2025, Griot Songs marks the return of the Omar Thomas Large Ensemble after more than a decade, featuring soloists Jason Palmer, Mark Zaleski, Alex Brown, Mark Cocheo and others

 “Griot Songs firmly plants Omar Thomas in the pantheon of distinguished and exceptional writers. He blurs the lines stylistically in the best of ways with a texturally compelling 'heart and soul' sonic story all his own.”

– Grammy-winning drummer/composer Terri Lyne Carrington

“Omar Thomas… proves himself a modern-day griot - summoning influences, traditions, and narratives from both past and present, framing them in a manner that is at varying times tender, dramatic, mystical, and joyful - but always absolutely captivating!” – Grammy-nominated composer/bandleader Chuck Owen

In West African tradition, the griot is a storyteller, poet and musician whose songs become a repository for a community’s traditions and history. Sixteen years in the making, Griot Songs – the breathtaking third release by the Omar Thomas Large Ensemble – is a distinctly personal and emotionally vibrant take on the role of the modern griot. Through his visionary compositions and arrangements, Omar Thomas spins captivating narratives from his own experiences, inspirations and heritage.

It’s been over a decade since the release of the Omar Thomas Large Ensemble’s last album, We Will Know: An LGBT Civil Rights Piece in Four Movements, which Grammy Award-winning drummer and composer Terri Lyne Carrington hailed as a “thought provoking, multi-layered masterpiece.” The big band made its auspicious debut in 2013 with I Am, which entered the iTunes Jazz Charts at #1. But Griot Songs, out February 7, 2025, is the project that Thomas has envisioned since initially forming the ensemble for his graduate composition recital at New England Conservatory in 2008. The earliest versions of three of the pieces on the album date back to that time, with the remainder spanning several years of composing, revising and dreaming.

In the meantime, Thomas established himself an acclaimed and in-demand composer for wind ensemble. In 2019, he was awarded the National Bandmasters Association / Revelli Award for his wind composition “Come Sunday,” becoming the first Black composer awarded the honor in the contest’s 42-year history. In addition, he’s a respected educator currently serving as Associate Professor of Composition and Jazz Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

 Griot Songs marks Thomas’ impassioned return to his roots. “I was ready to reintroduce myself as a big band composer,” he declares.

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The French Impressionists revolutionized the art world by privileging the emotional and spiritual perception of the natural world over its literal reproduction. Hailing from France, harpist Isabelle Olivier has always felt an innate affinity for Impressionism and discovered its echoes within her other artistic passions, primarily the parallel worlds of jazz and classical music.

On her vibrant new album, Impressions, Olivier conjures a bold musical landscape from the lush and stirring hues of her diverse influences. Inspired by tenor sax icon John Coltrane’s revered composition “Impressions,” she explores the confluences of jazz and Impressionism with a painter’s instinct for complementary colors, forms and textures.

 “I think about Impressionism as a combination between elegance, minimalism, spectral notions, feelings and vibes – things that you can feel but you cannot explain,” Olivier describes. “Looking at Impressionist art is like becoming part of nature, to the point where you forget that you’re human. I love this feeling.”

Out now in Europe and in the US/Canada on March 21, 2025 via Olivier’s Rewound Echoes imprint, Impressions features a versatile and genre-fluid ensemble that includes the harpist’s sons – pianist and accordionist Tom Olivier-Beuf and electronic musician Raphael Olivier – along with a string quartet (violinists Mathias Naon and Anne Le Pape, violist Cyprien Busolini and cellist Jean-Philippe Feiss) and drummer Baptiste Thiebault. In addition to Olivier’s Impressionism-inspired compositions, the album is interspersed with a number of group improvisations that suggest or were suggested by impressionistic ideas – from the misty, crepuscular “Fog on the Lake” to the stark, pointillist “A Pizzicato Life.”

With its many references to Chicago art and artists, Impressions brings together the two metropolises that Olivier calls home – the Windy City and the City of Lights, Chicago and Paris. The album bridges various landmarks for the harpist, including her roots in jazz and classical music, as well as her love for aural and visual art. These seemingly divergent poles have never been separate in her mind – she was introduced to her instrument in the first place by Duchess, the harp-playing cat in Walt Disney’s jazz-inflected 1970 animated film The Aristocats. Not long after finishing her classical studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon, she co-founded the jazz quartet Océan with the Moutin Brothers, well known figures on the French and American jazz scenes.

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Trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler (1930–2014) was one of the most enigmatic and influential musicians in recent memory. His instantly recognisable sound was a driving force within every major innovation in modern European jazz during the last half of the 20th century.

More importantly, his life provides us with a profound example of the way music can manifest itself in the most unlikely of vessels. As a lonely and shy teenager in Canada, he sought refuge from his difficult home life in the friendships he forged through a mutual love of bebop. After an unexpectedly bold move to London at the age of 22, he struggled with his confidence for years before making his first big break with the John Dankworth Orchestra. Kenny would soon find his voice in a triumvirate of musical communities: straight-ahead jazz, the burgeoning free scene, and in the busy recording studios.

Throughout his life, he constantly pursued personal growth while investing in his friends from every corner of the music business who would bring the inimitable beauty, precision, and chaos in his compositions to life. And in an artform where individuality represents the highest level of expression, Kenny was peerless. Indeed, few jazz artists of any era developed such a fingerprint in one area, let alone becoming immediately identifiable as virtuoso instrumentalists, improvisors, and composers.

Kenny Wheeler’s life is a compelling – and fundamentally human – story. This book brings together over 130 original interviews and new archival and biographical research on Wheeler’s life and music, chronicling his journey from small town Canada to international acclaim. It is as much a perspective on the history and development of jazz in Britain and Europe as it is the extraordinary tale of this improbable pioneer.

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The members of all-star family jazz band The 3 Cohens — featuring Anat Cohen (clarinet), Avishai Cohen (trumpet) and Yuval Cohen (soprano saxophone) — have always taken time out from their ever-burgeoning careers as soloists and bandleaders to reconvene for music-making together. The siblings developed a deep musical bond growing up in Tel Aviv, with improvising together becoming second nature for them. The 3 Cohens recorded four studio albums over a decade: 2003’s One, 2007’s Braid, 2011’s Family and 2013’s Tightrope, with the last three released by Anzic Records, the indie label founded by Anat with kindred-spirit producer-collaborator Oded Lev-Ari. DownBeat put The 3 Cohens — with Anat the middle child to the elder Yuval and younger Avishai — on the cover of its January 2012 issue, hailing the trio’s “chemistry, alchemy, telepathy.” Ten years on from that milestone, the 3 Cohens reunited for a live collaboration with Germany’s lauded WDR Big Band (a Köln-based ensemble that has been performing jazz on West German Radio since 1957); the program showcased tailormade arrangements by Lev-Ari of compositions by himself and each member of The 3 Cohens, as well as two of their favorite classics: Gerry Mulligan's “Festive Minor” and the Louis Armstrong hit “Tiger Rag.” The performance was recorded for a very special live album, Interaction. 

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