Pianist Jim Watson’s wide-ranging career has seen him collaborate with an amazing array of artists across the jazz and pop genres, including Manu Katche, Kurt Elling, Sting, Richard Bona, Chrissie Hynde and MeShell NdegeOcello, to name just a few. This versatility bears fruit in both his compositions and choice of covers on his solo album Calling You Home.
A graduate of Leeds College of Music (now Leeds Conservatoire) and London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Watson is also known for his skill on the Hammond organ, but it is his piano work that is the focus here as he brings together six original compositions alongside jazz standards and some unusual rock/pop choices.
The album opens with the rolling rhythms of…
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Pianist David Helbock and bassist/cellist Julia Hofer have things in common: a playful curiosity combined with the urge to try out new things and to have fun. Both of these Austrians are also perfectionists…and natural communicators…and that’s why their musical combination works so well. “I was looking for a new duo partner,” says David Helbock, “because although I am completely passionate about my ‘Austrian Syndicate’ project, it’s a really tricky thing to put together, a large band…lots of keyboards. Together with ACT CEO and producer Andreas Brandis, the idea of an acoustic duo reduced to its emotional essence was finally born – a format in which musical communication works more directly than in any other line-up. And I quickly came…
Uncoiling and recoiling around an ever-shifting rhythmic core, listening to 
As naïve or as idealistic as the notion might seem to some amid the current circumstances and fractures in the world, there’s thankfully still no real telling what might happen when inspiration strikes. Each of us can, of course, navigate the world with the ready list of influences or factors in our head, primed to make cool conversations and good impressions; but at that critical moment when things become more than the sum of their collective parts, there’s nothing else for it, but to simply pursue that impulse.
It’s uncommon to have two violins in a klezmer band; more frequently, one violin vies with clarinet and other solo instruments for virtuosic dominance but, on Two Strings – the new album from highly renowned US klezmer fiddlers 
As genres mutate and multiply, the etymologists of electronica delve deeper into the arcana of minute differences and emerge with hair-split explanations of the latest viruses inflecting the worlds of club and home listening.
This stellar outing by the Yale Symphony Orchestra is distinguished by splendid playing on the part of the 1965-founded ensemble; what most recommends the release, however, is a set-list featuring works by Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, and three contemporary composers, Christopher Theofanidis, Bernard Rands, and Omar Thomas. Including Copland’s Billy the Kid suite is a can’t-miss proposition, but the YSO and its musical director William Boughton deserve credit for featuring material from Ellington’s ballet The River, which not only reminds us of his gifts as a composer but makes us question why his name isn’t a more familiar part of symphony programmes. If the ensemble’s playing doesn’t quite match the finesse of a world-class…
Chance happenings sometimes take music to the right place. For Spanish-German, Cologne-based singer-songwriter 
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Newcastle-based singer, musician and disability activist 
Irish singer, composer, performance artist and puppeteer, 
London-based vocalist