Best jazz albums and concerts in 2025
5 Mathias Eick: Lullaby. (ECM). Mathias Eick has added another great album to his impressive discography this year. The eight compositions, in which the Norwegian trumpeter draws on his childhood, are reassuringly hopeful. The power of Eick’s music is revealed by the omission of superfluous frills. American trumpeter Wynton Marsalis may not believe in the […]
North Sea Jazz Report 2024
Friday 12 July 2024 ‘Some festivals save the best act for last, we begin with it,’ said presenter Mijke Loeven preceding the concert by saxophonist Chris Potter, pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist John Patitucci and drummer Jonathan Blake. The super quartet got off to a brisk start, but allowed more stillness and lyricism from some twenty […]
Brad Mehldau: Portrait of the genius musician as a young man
Brad Mehldau has never been keen on giving interviews. From his low piano stool, deeply bent over the keys, he seems to shield himself from the outside world. After the publication of the first volume of Mehldau’s memoirs, his media shyness becomes more understandable. Instead of sprinkling crumbs of information, the pianist chooses to describe […]
Rockit Festival 2022
Even for a modest act like the Bill Frisell quartet, enthusiasm is high at the Rockit Festival at Groningen’s Oosterpoort. Last year, this one-day Northern version of North Sea Jazz was cancelled at the last minute because of Covid. This must be the reason for the audience’s exuberance. Singer Petra Haden, cellist Hank Roberts and […]
The 25 most memorable moments of North Sea Jazz
Since North Sea Jazz 2020 has been postponed for a year (you feel that the sentence is not right, but it sounds promising) we look back on the 25 most memorable moments of the festival days I have visited since the nineties. Music is not a competition, but when I studied the programme overviews of […]
North Sea Jazz Festival 2019
Friday 12 July North Sea Jazz starts in drizzly conditions, but the temperatures rise to great heights in the halls of the world’s largest indoor jazz festival. The three-day Rotterdam festival is aimed at audiences of various ages and this is reflected in the musical line up: 91-year-old Burt Bacharach plays a generous selection from […]