Think piece

A few thoughts on the way I have changed as a listener and reviewer since Covid: on such coma inducing matters as formats; relying much less on traditional record label branding as a guardrail; the ever thorny subject of so-called authority bias; publicist induced Pavlovian reactions; and being far less "tinny" eared - ideally.

A jazz narrative.

"It's the work, dear boy, it's the work"

At last amid the gloom a renewed sense of Belonging emerges plus an Irish jazz resurgence and we are on the cusp of the dawn of a new age at Ronnie's moving on up

Let's not stifle genuine reaction or smother it in schmooze. You can make decent points even if the direction happens to be positive, kind and jazz partisan. And certainly marlbank is pro jazz, not anti. That's our bias. Other than that there is no partiality.

Never regret thy fall, / O Icarus of the fearless flight / For the greatest tragedy of them all / is never to feel the burning light - Oscar Wilde

A few thoughts on a select few piano trios that prove exceptions to the idea that 2025 hasn't been a great year for the piano trio.

Well. What, jazzer, jazz lover. Fellow shuffler in the anorakerie, gets you up in the morning? Hoking in the bins, perhaps. That's not always an ideal career glide path, is it gentle geriatric, Ed Reardon fan, once a proud roué. It might not be optimally clover. But it's an answer. Shoplifters of the world unite - take over.

Trump is no friend of jazz and more to the point the music is under attack again when artistic leaders like Jason Moran cease to have positions of prominence at leading cultural institutions in the States.

The wrong place for the right people - in the words of the great Barney Josephson of Cafe Society renown "you have a feeling. You hear something, and you say, ‘This is it!’ You go ahead and you do it. You don’t analyze. You have to follow your hunches'.”

''Recognisability'' in the general unengaged public's eyes is completely at odds with what the reality of jazz is to people who are closer to it.