Within the hidden treasure that’s the London Jazz Festival (13 – 22 November) is the gemlike Polish Jazz Festival, which featured the Marcin Wasilewski Trio at the Guildhall School music hall on Sunday 15th November. The Polish trio – not content with merely playing at this renowned London venue – stepped up their pan-European jazz…
| 21/11/2015
The grand old building of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Belgravia was the venue for tonight’s concert, where renowned duo Clara Cernat (violin) and Thierry Huillet (piano) played a programme of musical masterpieces, with works by Enescu, Saint-Saens, Gershwin and many more. The concert was dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Colectiv…
| 09/11/2015
It’s not often a pub in London survives two world wars only to end up becoming a thriving 21st Century Jazz Club, but The Spice of Life on Cambridge Circus has done just that and The Norwegian-Czech Jazz Quartet (NOCZ) exploded onto the stage tonight with their fiery, free jazz. NOCZ is a Norwegian/Czech band…
| 30/10/2015
This live album was recorded at a folklore festival in Náměšti nad Oslavou in the Czech Republic in early August 2014 and the three voices of the title belong to Irén Lovász from Hungary, Michal Elia Kamal (from Iran with a Jewish background) and Jitka Šuranská from the Czech Republic, whose idea it was to put the band…
| 30/10/2015
Commended by Vladimir Mendelssohn for his ‘outstanding personality not only as a viola soloist, but also as a chamber musician’, Mircea Belei entered the hall at St. Martin in the-Fields alongside pianist Attila Szekely, a graduate from the Music Academy in Cluj, to rapturous applause – and they began their first piece Kol Nidrei, for…
| 29/10/2015
It was Handel’s very own recital room at the Handel House Museum, Brook Street, where Alina Ratowska’s London concert took place. A resonant nostalgia filled the room: here Handel himself rehearsed his musicians and singers between 1723 and 1759. Ratowska, born in Gdynia, Poland (1976), gave us here an eclectic Baroque programme on the harpsichord with…
| 20/10/2015
It was a twenty-something crowd – mainly – that was basking in the glow of Oysland’s klezmer music: Klezmer, a label roughly alluding to Eastern European or Balkan Jewish music, making Oysland a Yiddish folk act. Being both Balkan and Jewish, the band’s set was European with an unmistakable combination of Middle Eastern, Romani and…
| 08/10/2015
My time machine has landed in the swinging 60’s, bang-dot in the middle of a beatnik jazz-den, the 606 Club, near classy Chelsea Harbour. I’m slightly annoyed this little gem of a venue has been sitting under my nose for decades without my knowing it, but happy to be at the Anglo Hungarian Jazz Festival…
| 27/09/2015
Continuing its now well-established association with the Hungarian jazz scene, and the Budapest Jazz Club in particular, the 606 Club is excited to present this three-day festival featuring some of Hungary’s finest musicians joining with British stars to perform in an extraordinary Trans-European jazz collaboration. Liliana Chachian (vocals), Steve Fishwick (trumpet), Gareth Williams and Jim Watson (piano) and Winston Clifford and James Maddren (drums) are among the…
| 16/09/2015
The actual venue for this gig was rather hard to find but was located in a small, hot and rather muddied tent on a field not far from Barking Town Hall. About a dozen people were present in the audience as the four-piece band launched into their first song. Muha began in 2004 and play…
| 20/07/2015