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Somewhere in my head, I carry a little list of bands that represent perfect self-contained mechanisms, regardless of category: the Modern Jazz Quartet, Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo Quintet, and the Chieftains.

I loved jazz as soon as I discovered it, but it was when I heard John Coltrane that I realised it could take me to a different place.

For 50 minutes at Wigmore Hall last night, the bassist Linda May Han Oh and the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana delivered a lesson in how to take the finest material from the past and weave it into something that belongs firmly to the present.

At a few minutes after eight o’clock last night, in an upstairs theatre on a Soho alley, you’d have had a job persuading me that Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” is not the greatest song produced by the 20th century.

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place.

On its own terms, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an extraordinary film, fully deserving the accolades and awards coming its way.

Sandy Denny was shy, impulsive, proverbially clumsy, liked a drink a bit too well, and was loved despite her frailties and peccadilloes by all who came under the spell of her voice and her songs.

Latimore’s “Let’s Straighten It Out” is one of my favourite soul records of the ’70s.

It isn’t often that I get to write about the noise of dust — which, in a form amplified by the Austrian soundartist Klaus Filip, turns out to be a sort of gentle crackling, used to accompany John Tilbury’s piano on a piece included in an elegant new boxed…

In the heat of Sunday afternoon I happened to find myself at a country music festival by the Thames, listening to Definitely Dolly — a Dolly Parton impersonator and her four-piece band.

After a somewhat lacklustre first half and a similarly underwhelming resumption, last night’s Prom concert commemorating the centenary of the birth of Miles Davis finally took wing in a sold-out Royal Albert Hall with a sultry version of “Once Upon a Summ…

Earlier today I closed the last page of Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s epic dissection of the first 15 months of Donald Trump’s second term at president of the United States.

Elias Stemeseder (left) and Thomas Morgan The new album by the pianist Elias Stemeseder and the bassist Thomas Morgan begins with variations on the piece from which it takes its name: Io Pur Respiro, a madrigal by the 17th century Italian composer Carlo G…

When I first met Lenny Kaye in 1970, his two immense contributions to contemporary culture were still in the future: (1) his compilation of the profoundly influential double album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, releas…

Georgie Fame’s career has been an affair of ups and downs, from the huge and unexpected success of “Yeh Yeh”, which knocked the Beatles off the No 1 spot in January 1965, to the medical problems — a fall from a ladder in 2019, breaking his hip and severing

The photo above was taken at the Institut Français in Berlin in 2017, during a Q&A session with the pianist René Urtreger following a screening to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in the UK as Lift to the…