Live and kicking: led by bassist
Petter Eldh, this album has a raw energy that captures Koma Saxo’s gigs well, with their mix of jazz, hip hop and free improv. Born in Sweden, Eldh is perhaps best known in the UK for his work with Django Bates. Here he brings together musicians who are all bandleaders in their own right: Germany’s
Christian Lillinger on drums, and three sax players – Finn
Mikko Innanen and Swedes
Jonas Kullhammar.
Euro Koma explodes with a playful, Ornette Coleman-ish theme – the bass pins everything to stop it flying away as the saxes trade 4s, like scribbling wildly in the dark. The saxes are weighty but Lillinger’s drum and bass-influenced cymbals lift everything. It sounds wonderfully chaotic, but they all career together towards a final head.
When BarnBridge founder Tyler Ward decided to change his profile pic a few weeks ago, he inadvertently created a Pepe the Frog NFT meme craze embraced by celebrities and the DeFi community that was on track to reap more than $60 million in sales on the OpenSea auction platform. Then the wheels fell off rather spectacularly. Magazine chats with Ward on Monday, Feb. 22, after the first 20 of 1,069 Non-Fungible Pepes were sold at an average price of $62,671 each, and he can’t quite believe it.
“We sold like $1.3M worth of Pepes, like 20 of them,” he says. “One of them went for $200,000!”
Below are the results of NPR Music's 8th Annual Jazz Critics Poll (my 15th, going back to the poll's beginnings in the Village Voice). These are
The 10 best jazz albums of 2020 John Fordham
Pat Metheny – From This Place
Being both a bestselling jazz-fusion superstar and an experimental collaborator with John Zorn and Ornette Coleman takes rare agility, but guitarist Pat Metheny has managed both. Metheny’s 2020 album, performed by his current live band (UK pianist Gwilym Simcock, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Antonio Sánchez) with guest appearances from vocalist Meshell Ndegeocello and harmonica virtuoso Gregoire Maret, showcases his famously cinematic compositional muse, shrewdly balanced with the group’s off-the-leash inventiveness, and for the most part subtly applied synthesised orchestral effects. Read the full review.