Category: Features

August 15, 2016 / Features - Archive

Heard any Bach on a banjo lately? If that conjures up a tinny twanging to drive you screaming from the room try a dose of Bela Fleck. Who else uses the much-maligned instrument to play Bach and Bartok, to duet with jazz maestro Chick Corea or to colour the desert-tinged…

August 12, 2016 / Features - Archive

At first it was a form of light relief: someone to sing a few songs and break up the real business of playing jazz. Then it became the fashion, so every band in the 1930s – the swing era’s heyday – suddenly had to have a singer. For women it…

June 25, 2016 / Features - Archive

He always thought differently. At high school he wrote “Mr Weird” on his clarinet case. No one argued. Wayne Shorter’s verbalised thoughts come out like his saxophone lines: squalls of rapid–fire ideas, some cryptic asides, and big pools of lucid silence while he lets what he’s said sink in. His…