The Jazz Podcast

Long time friend of the show Huw joins the show to tell us about his incredible new music. His new single 05/05/21 with his band Di-Cysgodion is out today and we celebrate by listening to the track and diving into all the musical details. 

He's also promoting and performing at concerts at the London Jazz Festival at the London Welsh centre and we hear about all his exciting plans and ideas for the festival. 

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Spike has played saxophone for over 40 years, with many musicians, in Australia, the USA, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Greece, Singapore, Italy, The Czech Republic, Holland, Turkiye, and New Zealand.

He's performed at countless festivals and clubs, from stadium stages to people's kitchens, with both famous and unknown musicians, in front of very large and very small crowds. 

He's also been a recording session musician for many diverse artists, helping them make their music a reality, by performing, composing, arranging, and producing on over 250 albums, including soundtracks for film and television. 

Spike spent many years studying too and have been awarded a Masters of Music In Jazz Performance, a Bachelor of Music, a Bachelor of Education, and an Associate Diploma of Jazz Studies, and a Graduate Diploma in Research.

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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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