The leaves began to fade
Like promises we made
How could a love that seemed so right go wrong?
– Sammy Cahn from ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’
“I’ll remember all winter long”: Newcomer Alice Milburn (25) is an English jazz singer from Portsmouth, doyenne of the Vaults regular jazz night in Southsea. Much more than a demo or statement of intent First Expressions was recorded in the Hampshire summer at a Gosport studio.
If you like Stacey Kent and Naama you will be in your element dipping into these things she did last summer. Very girl next door it’s the show song type Broadway and bebop “classic” approach to the genre driving things along. So it’s retro and very much a period piece. Milburn has a persuasive voice. She’s an old soul. It’s an enjoyably mercifully uncheesy profile raising start to getting to know her sound.
Covers include the 1930s James F. Hanley Thumbs Up song that Renée Zellweger performed on the soundtrack for brilliant 2019 Judy Garland biopic Judy, ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.’
First Expressions is not dark as night or torch song fodder which I prefer. But nevertheless I liked her ingénue take on the Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn 1940s classic that Frank Sinatra interpreted ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’ that has a vibrant bass contribution from bassist George Balmont. There’s a throw your head back gleefulness to the Milburn vocal too on the singer’s winning treatment of ‘It’s Almost Like Being in Love’ later on the song when the verse is carefully negotiated and the formidable scatting kicks in so when the words return it’s like she has shed a skin and found a new carefree spirit inside.
With the singer are also keyboardist Saul Hughes and drummer Josh Turn plus musical director trombonist Lloyd Pearce who solos on Milburn original ‘Brief Company’. The lyrics despair at the flakiness of a man desirous perhaps of a one night stand. The voice has confidence and personality.
‘Brief Company’ and ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart’ are among tracks streaming so far. The full album is out on 24 October. Scat is this steeped in the romance of the songs jazz thoroughbred’s strongest suit.
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Billy Childs, Triumvirate, Mack Avenue ****
With bassist Matt Penman and drummer Ari Hoenig. Highlights among the covers include the iridescent version of Miles Davis Kind of Blue classic ‘Flamenco Sketches.’
This is a studio album recorded at Power Station Berklee in New York City over three days of mid-May last year. The sound rings out clear as a bell.
Interesting the choice of taking the Jerome Moross melody of 1950s song ‘Lazy Afternoon’ for a spin. While very familiar as a vocal it isn’t so much as an instrumental. Larry Willis did a nice version on his 2011 solo piano album This Time’s The Dream On Me. But Childs is a very different pianist certainly in the weight of his chords and the triplet accents he dwells on. You can’t really compare the two.
What Childs does is more laidback and you almost feel the comfort he feels and knowledge he brings when he plays Thelonious Monk’s ‘Ask Me Now.’
Is this album as good as Childs’ The Winds of Change? To answer that you need to look at the originals some of which go way back to earlier precincts of Childs’ career.
Born on 8 March 1958 in Los Angeles, Childs began performing professionally while he was still a teenager and later honed his craft at the University of Southern California where he earned a degree in composition.
Childs has won five Grammy Awards and has performed with Yo-Yo Ma and Sting. He was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 for his significant contributions to the arts.
‘Heroes’ is strong, ‘Like Father Like Son’ where there’s memorable bass soloing from James Farm ace Penman even better. Childs takes all the time in the world setting up ‘Carefree’ with big chords interspersed by battering toms and brushes from Hoenig. It proves fun.
This is not a doomy album. So if that – fellow miserabilist – is what you want: it’s not here!
But don’t hold that against Trumvirate because it isn’t superficial either.
To be frank much as the trio ticks like a well maintained vintage clock it’s the piano playing I want to hear, less the piano trio as a unit.
There’s a pace to opener ‘One Fleeting Instant’ – the clue to the frenetic tempo is in “fleeting” – again another Childs original. Childs’ knack is to make an affinity for 1950s jazz sound hip and very much agenda setting for where we are in 2026 and I don’t mean we all hark back to wanting to be in the 50s. Far from it.
‘One Fleeting Instant’ appeared in a punchy, even faster but not at all furious, version on Childs’ 1980s era album Take For Example This.
‘Like Father Like Son’ with its slight feel of rubato in the bass line exists in an earlier version again going back to the 1980s found on Twilight Is Upon Us.
Another decent question is worth asking: is this trio as potent as Childs’ with Buster Williams and Carl Allen heard on late 90s album Skim Coat? Hmmm, the jury is out on that one. The tune to make a direct comparison with there is the new treatment of ‘Heroes’.
– Top stuff: See the marlbank best of the year list to date for mention of Triumvirate and more.
MORE READING
- The Winds of Change review (2023)
- Acceptance (2020) review
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Alcyona Mick and Liam Noble, Distant Plains: The Planets Revisited, Caliban Sounds/One Little Independent ***1/2
There was a certain serendipity in listening to Distant Plains this morning.
I think it came out as recently as Friday but I did not know about it until today.
Why serendipity?
Well after listening to the new Billy Childs I started thinking and making a playlist of players in the same realm at least a bit. Make no mistake though, gentle reader – this is very different to Triumvirate in several ways: idiomatically, format, approach and outcome included.
The obvious one was Gwilym Simcock.
And then I thought of Liam Noble.
The English pianist is here in a two piano album with compatriot Alcyona Mick best known for her work with Blink.
It’s quite an intense work, beginning as feverishly as you’d imagine, given the title, with ‘Mars, the bringer of War’. The approach is more a kind of Cecil Taylor type approach than a Childsian one.
But what’s here isn’t as “out” there as what Pat Thomas or Alex Hawkins do. Again individualism is key, while players may share some things in common there is a lot of width even within avant-garde jazz made by contemporaries or near contemporaries.
So lots of highly abstract chordal statements, big wodges of sound, poignant meaningful afternote pauses abound and yes it is stimulating.
A bit more background? Ok: Jointly composed – it is free improvisation in a spontaneous composition sense to avoid confusion. Playing in a free improv style is possible in other hybrid ways. How long have you got?
A “reimagination” – much used and abused word that – it’s of Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite through “a lens” of free improvisation. Listen blind, with no knowledge whatsoever of titles or further details, however, and I’d wager you would have no idea of that. How could you? Neither pianist quote thematic sections of Holst or play with motifs. It is instead a disciplined digression on an epic level of control and individualism that is built upon their own ideas as improvisers.
The pianists recorded the session at Abbey Road under the direction of Penny Rimbaud known for Thatcher era protest group merry pranksters the punks Crass. Rimbaud as Holst whisperer apparently played Leonard Bernstein’s recording of the suite to the duo immediately before the pair entered the studio. This prompt served as “the sole creative spark for their spontaneous performances.”
Alcyona, who is an alumna of the Birmingham conservatoire and has since carved out an interest in writing for film, was taught by the elder of the pair, Oxford educated Liam, 57, whose best work is found on the Basho label. I have heard Alcyona play largely standards in a duo several times with drummer/percussionist supremo Paul Clarvis with whom Noble has also worked in the trad jazz and cod opera loving band Pigfoot to effect.
Usually I am not a fan of two-piano albums. But I do really like this loads. It’s a wake up call.
‘Neptune’ has “ethereal vocals” from the Enya-of the-Squats, Eve Libertine also of Crass – and what a great way to draw this very special protest album of sorts to a close. Protest against what, you may well ponder, gentle reader. Complacency, perhaps. The pair exude the ability to rail against having to play mind numbing tunes, and dispel a reluctance in other circumstances even in themselves to be free in the moment.
Further reading
– A Room Somewhere 2015 review
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- Billy Childs, Triumvirate, Mack Avenue ****
- Alcyona Mick and Liam Noble, Distant Plains: The Planets Revisited, Caliban Sounds/One Little Independent ***1/2
- Miho Hazama and the Danish Radio Big Band, Frames, Edition **** recommended
- Eivind Aarset, Strange Hands, Jazzland ***1/2
- Anthony Joseph, The Ark, Heavenly Sweetness **** recommended
Miho Hazama and the Danish Radio Big Band, Frames, Edition **** recommended
I much prefer this to while clearly noteworthy, Live Life This Day.
Sadly I haven’t so far witnessed composer/arranger Miho Hazama live. But luckily I have heard the Danish Radio Big Band a couple of times, once at the Barbican when they were accompanying Van Morrison and once at Ronnie’s when I hung out with a couple of the cats in the old downstairs bar where artists and punters could commune together. I seem to recall a conversation about reeds. Both times were in the 1990s.
So an update. Firstly the DRBB is clearly going through a strong period artistically, a claim based on recordings only. That to my knowledge began in 2024 with the release of XL-LX particularly the “Roller Coaster” Bley-ian elements of that compendium of compositional inputs.
I think Frames is even better. It harnesses mellow voicing well. There’s storming trumpet and sax soloing in places and the tunes of Hazama’s are absorbing. I suppose there is a nod again to Thad Jones and Mel Lewis but there’s also a Gil Evans type thread it seems to me to be gleaned from Aura II. And “of course” without being too presumptive you think laterally of Palle Mikkelborg and resort to Aura – the great Dane’s work with Miles Davis.
Hazama, 39, also has led her own chamber orchestra m_unit – read a review of 2023’s Beyond Orbits. She trained in classical composition in Tokyo before moving to New York to study jazz under Jim McNeely. In 2019, she became the first female chief conductor of the Danish Radio Big Band. She also serves as a permanent guest conductor for the Metropole Orkest in the Netherlands and has been Grammy nominated for Dancer in Nowhere as well as Live Life This Day.
Do check out In the Middle of Nothing after listening to Aura. It makes sense the more you absorb the new sounds.
I liked the piano part played by Copenhagen based Pole Artur Tuźnik on ‘The First Notes’. Tuźnik is also on a much more old fashioned album called Monk & More that’s new this year. It’s a very rhythmic piece full of the sort of syncopated, complex, rhythms and pulsar shifts that separates the sheep from the goats. It’s super fine. What do you do when the album is over? Simple: play it again and again.
More reading
Eivind Aarset, Strange Hands, Jazzland ***1/2
Some people are just born to be innovative. Take guitarist Eivind Aarset on this new studio album. In the blend this time there’s room for violinist Sara Övinge and bansuri [Indian bamboo flute] player Mira Thiruchelvam.
Ambient spacey electro prog in complexion. That’s a style the Norwegian has championed for many years. Aarset’s phrasing, tone, and instinct are immaculate and more than sufficient to achieve a robust concept and vision.
More reading Lost River – 2019 review
The core quartet at work on this newly released album are Aarset on guitar and electronics, Audun Erlien on bass guitar, and both Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen on drums and percussion. These are familiar to long time EA followers from Phantasmagoria issued in 2021. ‘Slumberjack’ is the track I like best. There’s an arc to the sound and a drama that isn’t forced.
Thinking back I think my favourite album of the Norwegian’s is still 2017’s Electronique Noire but this to me is his best album since then.
There’s a raw earthiness to what he does which no amount of production erases. ‘Deep Green’ with the violin and bansuri adds a certain mysticism While perhaps a mood shift it is nevertheless welcome. But if the ‘Deep Green’ approach is extended you could rewardingly have a whole record in the vein at the risk for some of going full out into world music.
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Anthony Joseph, The Ark, Heavenly Sweetness **** recommended
There’s a John the Baptist quality to The Ark akin to a manifesto that’s a soul-searching secularised blueprint for our fractured times. Anthony Joseph walks and talks with the spirits. In a complete communion Archie Bell and the Drells, Ted Joans, Benjamin Zephaniah, Charles Mingus and Bob Kaufman are some of the residents of the pantheon suitably revealed and exalted among crunching beats and rock of ages grooves.
Upon the banks of an inconsolable river
An Afrofuturist concept album that mixes personal autobiography with imagined black history and future possibility. Guitarist Dave Okumu of The Invisible produces. Guests of the poet-vocalist-songwriter’s Anthony Joseph’s are Eska Mtungwazi, Tom Skinner of The Smile, Byron Wallen, Nick son of Dave (ex Billy Jenkins head) Ramm, and long time AJ compadre free jazzer Colin Webster. The materials grew from Okumu’s demos and loops that Joseph later developed into lyrics and a full studio session with Okumu’s band.
If you are into Sun Ra, Funkadelic and wider black cosmic traditions then this is up your street. I think of hearing Tony with Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA as a guest which was stimulating. It’s more manicured and better produced than before. And while definitely worth it go back to rougher but even better Spasm band stuff like ‘She Is The Sea’ for the real earthy building blocks in AJ’s back catalogue.
A remarkable artist seizes the agenda as so often. There’s a reach for the transcendental. You’d be a fool not to listen.
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Barbican adds Moses Boyd Pan-African drums night and Ben LaMar Gay date to Project a Black Planet
City of London arts centre the Barbican has added two further concerts to its Project a Black Planet summer programme, with Moses Boyd and Jamz Supernova co-hosting Panafrica in Rhythm and Ben LaMar Gay set for a special We Chree trio performance. Both events form part of the centre’s wider season, which runs from June to September 2026 and explores the influence of Pan-Africanism across music, art and culture.
Steam Down and Friends
Panafrica in Rhythm: Pan-Africanism through the lens of the drums is due at Barbican Hall on Friday 12 June, bringing together Boyd, Supernova and a line-up that includes Steam Down & friends, Jas Kayser, Jerry Brown, Kwake Bass, Asheber & The Afrikan Revolution and Bonita x SLICKnBOBBY Present: Dub vs Cumbia. Later in the month, Ben LaMar Gay presents We Chree at LSO St Luke’s on Saturday 27 June, with Rob Frye and Mike Reed joining him for a set drawing on jazz, hip-hop, house, avant-garde and Latin influences.
Rhythm celebration
Panafrica in Rhythm is billed as a celebration of rhythm, lineage and sound, with artists responding to works in the exhibition and presenting one-off ensembles in the Hall. Ben LaMar Gay’s appearance is presented as a showcase for Chicago’s experimental lineage and his pan-American approach to composition, following his 2025 album Yowsers.
At a glance
Project a Black Planet
Blue Moods, Directions & Expressions, Posi-Tone ***1/2
Centenially relevant given the Miles Davis theme, the timing is immaculate.
Followers of Marc Free and Nick O’Toole’s Posi-Tone will also be very familiar with the top players involved.
But don’t let the clunky title put you off.
What’s here isn’t stiff.
There’s rigour.
But rigor mortis won’t and hasn’t set in.
Feel good fare in the main – if you are looking for anything edgy though it’s notable by its absence.
That isn’t even a problem. Vinnie Sperrazza sees to that.
The drummer knits well with Mingus Big Band stalwart bassist Boris Kozlov. And there’s a feeling of blissful engagement rippling right across the sextet.
The more reflective aspects of the album are provided by vibist Behn Gillece especially on ‘Circle.’
Birth of the Cool evergreen ‘Boplicity’ proves most evocative. And the band is more convincing and comfortable tackling the early Milesian work than the later last period numbers.
It’s curious that there isn’t a trumpeter here – and while Eli Howell’s trombone playing is fine, I think you need trumpet to do justice to such a theme. Trombone isn’t at all an understudy to trumpet with the best will in the world as it conjures a completely different sound world even while remaining a kissing cousin. Kind reader, though, make no mistake, you won’t feel too brassed off.
Certainly the new Miles Davis tribute from Gregory Hutchinson addresses that necessity admirably with Ambrose Akinmusire fulfilling that trumpet role – so if you have to choose one Miles tribute this year go for Kind of Now.
Art Hirahara always sounds as if he is enjoying himself and the congeniality of the collegiality is a plus point. Hear the pianist comping on the Duchess’ excellent A Time for Love – the best jazz vocals album of the year to date and to which he contributes exquisitely in all the right places.
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Glasgow Jazz Festival 2026: 40th Edition Line-Up Announced
Artists from Around the World Take Centre Stage
Headliners include Courtney Pine at Saint Luke’s, Colin Steele celebrating Miles Davis’ centenary, and Martin Taylor at Òran Mór. International acts include Mario Biondi from Italy, South Africa’s BCUC, and Melbourne-born multi-instrumentalist Audrey Powne.
Emerging Scottish talent is also highlighted. The Old Fruitmarket hosts a Homegrown Showcase with Kai Ressu, Gaïa, Pippa Blundell, and Sekoya. The New Jazzwegians project on 14 June presents Azamiah, Nathan Somevi Trio, Sonedo, and Unoma Okudo as part of the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games Festival.
Venues and Highlights
Performances span the Old Fruitmarket, Saint Luke’s, Òran Mór, Drygate, and the Mackintosh Church. The festival includes genre-spanning events such as Fergus McCreadie’s piano trio commission, collaborations between Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Black Top, and free Late Night Jam Sessions hosted by Ben MacDonald.
Tickets are available now at jazzfest.co.uk. The festival receives support from Creative Scotland and the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games Festival Fund. Dates are 10-14 June.
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The W, Mikrokosmos, TYZart**** recommended
Béla Bartók’s influence on jazz via folk-inspired rhythms and complex harmonic structures provided a blueprint for modern improvisation.
You can discern that sense of harmonic Innovation through his “axis system” of harmonic substitution.
Bartók used polymetric structures, asymmetric patterns and high energy that aligns with jazz.
His night music fed into Third Stream aesthetics – a term suggested by Gunther Schuller – and when you consider particularly on the European chamber jazz scene how much of this jazz classical hybrid is around at the moment the influence of composers like Bartók recurringly still counts.
Chick Corea’s Children’s Songs (ECM, 1984) were directly inspired by the études in Bartók’s Mikrokosmos.
And Germany born London scene pianist Bruno Heinen who has in the past been inspired by Stockhausen and Vivaldi on work that he splices with a voracious jazz appetite returns this spring with his band The W inspired by Book 6 of Mikrokosmos.
Their earlier album Portrait (Ubuntu, 2023) was a revelation. But The W enter another dimension entirely here that is just as stimulating.
On Heinen’s website there is a brief explanation as to the thinking.
“Bartók composed these books of short pieces as an educational tool to teach his own son at the piano. In this album, Bruno uses cells and ideas taken from book 6 of Bartók’s work, as well as lyrics in the form of quotes from Bartók himself, to create a new suite.”
I had a pre-release listen some time ago and returned again to it today. It is first class, dark and brooding, full of jazz-rock/classical/prog interest and dramatic intensity from Vogel particularly, the abstraction and detailed harmonic exposition is compelling.
If jaded and searching for inspiring new music it’s a pick-me-up.
German classical label TYXart Records are the issuing record company involved.
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