Rabshakeh

Joao Paulo, Paulo Curado and Bruno Pedroso - As Sete Ilhas De Lisboa

Kim Pensyl – Pensyl Sketches #1

Is this Branford Marsalis doing Keith Jarrett?

The hurdy was indeed gurdy. Autocorrect hates folk music. Although fom the context I accept it could have gone either way.

For the past couple of months I have been occasionally joking about the likelihood of Gen Z having a classic jazz revival, following on from the Sea Shanty revival of the pandemic. Well, the joke is on me, because it looks like it was already happening. There is a new club that has opened up behind Kings Cross in London (or moved recently), which specialises in trad jazz and folk nights, and is achieving a measure of success with young people. https://www.jamboreevenue.co.uk/upcoming-events/ Pretty mixed stuff that appeals to Tiktok minded Gen Zers: ceilidh, klezmer and cabaret, but the mainstay appears to be traditional jazz. As jokingly predicted, it all comes wrapped in social media inclusivity-type language that could have been dreamt up by the Babylon Bee or Guido Fawkes blog. The acts look very pastichey, but that's the nature of the TikTok era. And perhaps the original trad jazz revival could be labelled pastichey too. Clearly this sort of stuff is getting bums on seats. My wife accidentally wandered in there last night and witnessed an Irish folk performance (featuring a hurdy furry) with dancing, that she said was pretty abject, but she was impressed at the number of young people in there.

Ethan Iverson, who has an on/off worth reading substack, has done an article with some excerpts from old Downbeat Blindfold Tests. You can find it here if you want it: https://open.substack.com/pub/iverson/p/tt-507-blindfold-tests?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=az9yj Fun stuff. It is amazing how free people were with their opinions in those days. Jazz was a small world then as now and it must have been strange to come out with such aggressive opinions and then have to share a stage with the subject a few days later.

None of these people are a 1/4 as popular as The Roots though.

Colin Wilkie, Shirley Hart, Albert Mangelsdorff, Joki Freund – Wild Goose What a bizarre record. A British folk singing duo and then the cream of German free jazz. It is like a non-parody version of that record Vic Reeves did with Evan Parker.

Mogadon-Bop Edit: Sorry, 'Spiritual Mogadon-Bop'. We want this thing to sell.

This is going to be massive in certain areas of the internet. I can see the RYM lists of micro-sub-genres already.

Nice big boombap sound, please. Give Tord what he needs.

Worth remembering that The Roots are at least adjacent to jazz. Certainly jazzy enough: competent fusion musicians (including ones who dabble in credible fusion side projects: note The Philadelphia Experiment lower down the list) playing behind rappers. Questlove is as close to being a jazz celebrity as anyone in 2025.

Are you serious?! I clicked on this thinking it would be so much worse. There's tones of stuff on here that is unquestionably jazz. A mix of older statesmen/women, younger musicians and some more adventurous stuff. It seems unobjectionable. You should see what Montreux has on.

Ha! Some of them are super expensive non-music without resolutions, but there are a few records from that scene that are recognisably jazz but just very slow and sensitive: Jakob Young for example. It would be a fun experiment. Change the speed setting and whack up the bass.

Yeah. Mostly the ones I already knew. Vesala, some judicious Garbarek, and Stenson. The weaker ones are the endless releases by the younger musicians that at the time just seemed to be churned out by ECM and which, with the benefit of the internet, really were just being churned out. Tord Gustavsen etc. All released with album covers that just seem to be stock imagery of dull grey landscapes. A whole generation of young musicians who seemed to be picked to fill a niche.

Interesting that what is very much absent from this list is not so much European musicians as Nordic musicians (save for a few). I am currently doing a Spotify plunge into those Scandi ECM mainstays that filled the jazz sections of my youth, which is what brought me to this thread. ECM's output in the first 15 years of this millennium was heavy with Norwegians, Swedes and Finns, plays very considered expensive music. It is not all bad, but what I would say is that it is a surprisingly low hit rate. Probably the lowest for any run on a record label that I can think of. And there is so much of it.

Have you listened to his earlier records? Yo me those were completely dismissible whereas this is decent enough. It is like something on ECM.

Another one who is very popular with the Reddit crowd.

I actually gave it a go, and I agree with you that this is not at all a bad record. I have only listened to his first few, which were competent. This is much better. I don't hear Eick but I do definitely hear modern ECM, with the piano playing muted role behind the trumpet, and with more compositional subtlety than I would have expected

Is there maybe a difference between the hype that these Young Lions received and the focus on the likes of Joey Alexander? The Young Lions were a record label push and, if the musicians didn't catch, they were quickly dropped and ended up obscure. Whereas Joey Alexander continues to be genuinely popular (in jazz terms). If you go on Reddit and ask the jazz fans there to recommend you good recent jazz the likes of Joey Alexander will be mentioned immediately, along with Hiromi and Bill Charlap (the three practicing jazz acoustic musicians whom Reddit seems to love the most). Joey Alexander isn't going to lapse into obscurity. Nor is he "young" at this stage by any measure. He is seven albums in and ten years into his recording career. The failing Young Lions of the late 80s and early 90s never got that kind of grace. I think if you're looking for overhyped youngsters today you should be looking away from acoustic jazz, which has effectively been deserted by the critics. The critical and modern jazz orthodoxy has long since shifted towards mixed genre crossover and "spiritual jazz", fronted by younger musicians who look the part. The last seven or so years has seen a flood of new entrants, now clearly ebbing fast. Many of the new entrants seem to have already effectively tapped out.

Joey Alexander is big on YouTube, along with others, like Hiromi Uehara. That's what that community likes. You could hardly call either of them overhyped, given that they're not really mentioned by critics, but something about them has caught the eye of the Reddit community. To add to @JSngry's earlier point, there was also a larger pool of talent that was connected directly to the previous hard bop era pool of talent in historical terms, and they had a larger commercial audience. Musicians like Alexander are just kids who do well at music at school and then get to record. There aren't many of them and they're selected to please teacher, not other musicians or the buying public (commercially this stuff is a non-event in 2025). It isn't the same thing as having a natural well of hundreds of talented players from regional towns already semi-developed, and used to playing for audiences ranging from university jazz clubs, old ladies in churches, to kids hanging around jukeboxes.

What is this record? Is it a comp?

I'm told that it does not sell. If you label a beer as "mild" it is commercial death. So they label it as an approximate style (depending on the type of mild) like "red ale", "brown ale" or "porter". The porter at the ex-Jerusalem Tavern is very much in the fruitier mild style.

Bobby Bradford with John Stevens Bought at Bob's Blues and Jazz on my recent trip to Chicago

I think in the micro brewing era stout and porter is probably the most interesting area. I think milk stouts tend to be quite reliably good. @mjazzg - In case you're interested, St. Peters seems to have upped its game in this area recently. The former Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell has reopened under a new and stupid name and has two good ones that really impressed me: one nice rich stout and a fruity porter that was really a mild in porter's clothing.