Miles Davis and John Coltrane were born a hundred years ago this year, four months apart, and the EFG London Jazz Festival gives its 34th edition, from 13th to 22nd November, to both of them, with centenary concerts at the Barbican, EartH and Olympia. Around those tributes the programme travels to Mali and Lisbon, Havana and Tunisia, KwaZulu-Natal and Iran, and this is our guide to that side of the ten days, the Rhythm Passport route through them, from a Ugandan club takeover at the Jazz Cafe to Persian setar meeting Senegalese kora at Kings Place.
Serious, the London promoter that runs the festival, has booked more than 70 venues. Next to Royal Albert Hall and Barbican Hall, many are rooms where the audience sits a few feet from the band: Green Note in Camden, the jazz room of the Toulouse Lautrec, a French brasserie in Kennington, the Bull’s Head, the Thames-side jazz pub in Barnes, and the Hackney Wick waterside, where Number 90 has a canal terrace and Grow a floating pontoon stage on the River Lea. Tickets are sold by each venue or through Serious, and both weekends bring free music to the Southbank Centre, the Barbican and Milton Court.
It all started in north London. Serious set the festival up in 1992, and the first edition, in May 1993, ran across Camden, Hackney and Islington, opening with a party at Union Chapel headlined by New Orleans’ Rebirth Brass Band, with the South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim on that first programme. Co-founder John Cumming wanted to call it the North London Jazz Festival until director David Jones chose the wider name, and over three decades it has grown to more than 300 shows a year and an audience of over 100,000, which Serious bills as the biggest pan-city music festival in Europe.
These days its centre sits a couple of miles south of that first party, in the City. From Monday 9th, four days before the first concert, The Jazz Social takes over a shop unit at City Point on Ropemaker Street, a few minutes’ walk from the Barbican, and runs for two weeks as the festival’s pop-up club: a bar open until 1am at weekends, an official Blue Note Records shop stocked with vinyl and Japanese imports, free lunchtime gigs, secret piano sets, and live radio from Jazz FM and One Jazz. Asha Puthli, Nicolas Meier, Leon Foster Thomas and David Kayode all drop in on those broadcasts in the days around their own shows, and on Tuesday 10th the lunchtime slot goes to Latin jazz, with the Damian Bresnan Latin Quartet playing a free Guildhall School set.
Friday 13th November
Opening day starts at The Jazz Social, where Puthli joins Jazz FM’s live broadcast at 10am, the night before her Barbican concert. At 1.30pm the Clore Ballroom at the Southbank Centre hosts Simmer Down, its free reggae meet-up and daytime dance, run with Tomorrow’s Warriors.
In the evening the two birthdays get their party. At the Barbican, Coltrane 100: Both Directions at Once takes its name from the lost album of 1963 studio sessions by Coltrane’s classic quartet, which only came out in 2018. Two tenor players a generation apart share the front line: Joe Lovano, the Cleveland-born veteran, and Melissa Aldana from Santiago de Chile, who won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 2013. Behind them sit South African pianist Nduduzo Makhathini, who now records for Blue Note, bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts. Miles gets a younger, louder tribute the same night in Dalston, where Yorkshire trumpeter, singer and producer Emma-Jean Thackray, shortlisted for the Mercury Prize last year, brings Dear Miles – A Love Letter to EartH and takes Davis’s electric period, the music of Bitches Brew and after, onto the dancefloor.
The night’s global music starts out east, at The Wilds in Barking Riverside, a new neighbourhood on the north bank of the Thames, home to the South Asian strand, where drummer and tabla player Sarathy Korwar starts on his own and then brings in saxophonist Chris Williams. Korwar was born in the US, grew up in India and has made his records in London, folding jazz, electronics and Indian folk and classical music into one sound. In the solo part of the set, all of that rests on his tabla and drums.
He has also picked the acts for Late Night Jazz, which runs in the Elgar Room upstairs at the Royal Albert Hall from 9.30pm. Tonight that means Cinna Peyghamy, a Paris-based Iranian who plays the tombak, the Persian goblet drum, against modular synths, as he does on his debut Music for Tombak & Synth. It is also the only relaxed performance of the ten days.
Tonight is also the first night of Éire Eile (Another Ireland), a new Irish strand presented with the National Concert Hall in Dublin that runs right through the week. It opens at Stone Nest, the arts venue on Shaftesbury Avenue, where Donegal blues guitarist and singer Muireann Bradley plays a sold-out show with BLÁNID opening.
Across town, Trinidadian steelpan player Leon Foster Thomas takes his own set to Fulham Pier, the new riverside venue built into Fulham FC’s Riverside Stand. In Putney, Manchester guitarist Aziz Ibrahim, who once stood in for John Squire in The Stone Roses, launches Lahore to Longsight at the Half Moon, the debut album he recorded 25 years ago and finally released in July. At Jamboree in King’s Cross, the brass and woodwind collective DiBrasspora reworks klezmer and Moldovan tunes for a modern brass band, and back at The Jazz Social, One Jazz turns the room over to salsa with Salsa Select.
Nyege Nyege, the Ugandan collective behind the festival of the same name on the Nile at Jinja and the labels Nyege Nyege Tapes and Hakuna Kulala, hosts its first ever night at the Jazz Cafe in Camden, the latest finish of the opening night. Ugandan DJ Kampire, whose mixes have run on Resident Advisor and FACT, leads it with more guests still to be named, and from 10.30pm to 3am the floor moves through Afro-house, gqom from Durban, kuduro from Angola, Tanzanian singeli at full speed, techno and global bass.
Saturday 14th November
Nicolas Meier starts Saturday early, on Jazz FM’s morning broadcast at The Jazz Social, and down on the South Bank the Clore Ballroom inside the Royal Festival Hall gives the whole day, free, to Tarana, four sets that pull South Asian and Arab music into jazz. It opens at 12.30pm with East Meets West, a set from London’s Ismaili community that puts jazz harmony and improvisation together with Indian classical singing and tabla. At 2pm Nepali-born drummer and tabla player Anmol Mohara brings the folk music of his homeland into jazz, and at 4pm Urvashi push qawwali and Arabic tarab through experimental jazz, drum and bass and rave. To finish, bassist Shri Sriram plays new arrangements of his own music, a mix of Indian classical, jazz and drum and bass, with a 30-piece community jazz orchestra put together for the day. Out in Barking at 1pm, the Dhol Academy, one of the UK’s longest-running dhol schools, plays a free set at the Rivergate Centre.
Soul Mama in Islington is afrobeat all day: saxophonist KoyeSax and The Fortune Collectives start with a brunch at 1pm, and at 8.30pm the Dele Sosimi Afrobeat Orchestra takes over, led by the keyboard player who came up in Fela Kuti’s Egypt 80. At 2pm the Toulouse Lautrec in Kennington has the gypsy jazz quartet Fidelio Hot Club, playing 1930s Hot Club swing in the spirit of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli.
At 3pm Stone Nest has a matinee from Palestinian musician Faris Ishaq, who plays with everything strapped to him: the nay, the ancient reed flute of the Middle East, at his lips, a frame drum on his leg and percussion under his feet. That set-up lets one man play both tashbib, the improvised shepherd music of Palestine, and the stamping rhythm of dabke, the mix that runs through his new album Jasad.
Back in the City at 4pm, The Jazz Social turns Caribbean for Sounds of Saint Lucia, presented with the island’s tourism authority and free to walk into. A small line-up of the Endurance Steel Orchestra opens on steelpans. Then saxophonist Denys Baptiste and bassist Gary Crosby play the music of Sonny Rollins, whose parents came from the US Virgin Islands and whose “St. Thomas” grew out of a Caribbean tune his mother used to sing. DJ Scarba carries it into the night with calypso, soca, chutney, bouyon and dennery segment, the hard-driving carnival sound that came out of Saint Lucia.
In the evening Puthli has the Barbican Hall, with Sarathy Korwar back in town and sitting in alongside sitarist Anoushka Shankar and trumpeter Yazz Ahmed. Puthli’s career has crossed free jazz, disco and pop. She trained in raga and opera in Mumbai, ended up singing on Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction in 1972, cut the cult track “Space Talk”, helped give cosmic disco its floating vocal sound on records such as The Devil Is Loose, and has lately been rediscovered through reissues and a collaboration with Gorillaz. Her UK dates are rare, and this one comes with a full band.
At the same hour, Cadogan Hall in Chelsea opens Global Connections, the international series, presented again with Turkish Airlines. L’Antidote came together during the pandemic, when Iranian percussionist Bijan Chemirani, Albanian cellist Redi Hasa, familiar from Ludovico Einaudi’s band, and Lebanese pianist Rami Khalifé recorded together in southern Italy: Persian rhythm underneath, Mediterranean melody on top, a classical pianist’s harmony in between. After them, flautist Naïssam Jalal and pianist Roberto Negro play Landscapes of Eternity, duets that grew out of Jalal’s travels through North India and its Hindustani music.
The Royal Festival Hall belongs to Goldie, the drum and bass pioneer behind Timeless, who plays Dare to Dream twice, at 5pm and 8.30pm, with his live band, an orchestra and special guests.
Away from the big halls, Saturday night follows two threads. The first is Turkish. At St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate in Marylebone, clarinettist Serkan Çağrı opens with taksim, the free, unmetred improvisation that traditionally leads into a Turkish piece, before sharing the stage with the German pianist and singer Olivia Trummer, while out at Highams Park Jazz Club the Turkish Cypriot guitarist Okan Ersan plays his Eastern Mediterranean jazz-rock. The second thread crosses the Atlantic. Bogotá’s Los Pirañas bring their instrumental mix of cumbia, champeta and psych rock to the Jazz Cafe, with Eblis Álvarez looping his guitar through a laptop over Mario Galeano’s bass and Pedro Ojeda’s drums, and at 9pm Jamboree pairs Venezuela with Congo, as Baldo Verdú opens with Afro-Venezuelan music before the Congolese-British singer Liz Ikamba plays her alt-pop and Afro-soul. Late Night Jazz closes the day at 9.30pm in the Elgar Room with the Gary Crosby Quintet and Mingus Moves, the music of Charles Mingus led by the bassist who co-founded Tomorrow’s Warriors.
Sunday 15th November
Sunday packs in the most global music of the ten days, starting at 1pm at Kings Place, the arts centre on the canal basin behind King’s Cross. Setar player and singer Kiya Tabassian of the ensemble Constantinople and Senegalese griot Ablaye Cissoko have been playing together since 2012, Persian setar answering Mandinka kora, and they come back to the building with Estuary. Percussionist Patrick Graham joins them for pieces built around the image of a river running out into the sea.
At 2pm, back in the Clore Ballroom, the free Sound Lines afternoon is all voices and drums. Afro-Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale Itaúna opens with Echoes of Naná, ten years after the death of Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos, improvising on Naná’s ideas and letting each performance come out differently. London’s Akolá Tambó, whose name means “remember the drum”, play bullerengue, the Afro-Colombian drum and dance music of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, kept alive in the maroon villages founded by people who escaped slavery. To close, amarílis, a choir of Portuguese women living in London, sing the polyphonic songs of the mondadeiras, the women who sang together as they worked the fields of rural Portugal.
Stone Nest has two sets, at 3pm and 6pm, from Austrian handpan player Manu Delago and Brooklyn’s Max ZT on hammered dulcimer, both instruments struck by hand, both full of ringing overtones. Delago has played his steel drum with Björk and Anoushka Shankar; Max ZT learned his craft as far afield as Senegal, with the Cissokho griot family, and India, with the santoor master Shivkumar Sharma. They met nearly ten years ago and named their February album Deuce because they play facing each other, both about to turn 40.
At 4pm The Jazz Social goes Irish, with the London-based DJ collective Donegal Social Club spinning alongside a pop-up Gaeltacht, an Irish-language corner run with Croí na Gaeilge. At 4.30pm Kings Place’s smaller Hall Two has Tunisian violinist Zied Zouari and percussionist Imed Alibi playing as Duo Safar with guitarist Justin Adams, moving between Arabic classical music and jazz, with Adams, who produced Tinariwen’s early records, adding desert-blues guitar, and the same hall returns at 8pm with Jerusalem-born Palestinian violist Samer Rashed and Strings of the Levant, which mixes maqam with Saharan rhythms and jazz improvisation.
Wales gets a look-in at 7pm at the London Welsh Centre on Gray’s Inn Road. The Awen Ensemble (awen is Welsh for poetic inspiration), led by trumpeter and flugelhorn player Emyr Penry Dance, mixes modal and spiritual jazz with British and Irish folk, and the new trio CymanVa CynVamol makes its debut with a drone-heavy take on Welsh identity.
Three headliners share the evening in three different halls: fado, Tunisian oud, and Cuban piano and percussion. At the Royal Festival Hall, Mariza sings fado. She was born in Mozambique, grew up in Mouraria, the old Lisbon quarter that claims to be fado’s birthplace, and was singing along with the fadistas in her father’s taverna before she could read. Twenty-five years after her first album, Fado em Mim, she is touring Amor, a new album due at the end of the year.
At the Barbican, Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem plays After the Last Sky, his first album in eight years. He took the title from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who asked where the birds should fly after the last sky, and Palestine runs right through the track list, from “The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa” to “Edward Said’s Reverie”. It is hushed, patient chamber music: Brahem’s oud and Anja Lechner‘s cello trade melodies over Django Bates‘s piano, with Norwegian bassist Mats Eilertsen standing in on this tour for Dave Holland, who played on the album.
At KOKO in Camden, pianist Alfredo Rodríguez and percussionist and singer Pedrito Martínez both come from Havana, but they reached their duo from opposite ends of Cuban music. Rodríguez went through the city’s conservatories before Quincy Jones heard him at Montreux in 2006 and took him under his wing. Martínez learned the drums and songs of Afro-Cuban religious and folkloric music on the street, won the Thelonious Monk Institute’s hand drum competition after moving to the US, and has since played with everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Paul Simon. “I came from the folkloric side and Alfredo came from the classical side,” Martínez says. “You put those things together and you come out with an extraordinary and different sound.” Their album Duologue runs from Cuban standards to originals they wrote together, and London DJ Tim Garcia opens.
At Milton Court, Japanese saxophonist, composer and producer Yasuaki Shimizu, whose career runs from crossover pop to film scores and folk-electronic hybrids, plays with his sister, the singer-songwriter Mieko Shimizu. It is sold out.
Sunday’s late listings reach from Shoreditch to Barnes. In Shoreditch, brothers Andy and Christy Leech bring their Irish electronic duo Le Boom to Village Underground for Éire Eile, with multidisciplinary artist AE MAK in support. Cuba and Brazil take over two jazz rooms: at Ronnie Scott’s, Cuban pianist Zahili Gonzalez Zamora leads an Afro-Cuban jazz trio, and at the Bull’s Head in Barnes, Brazilian guitarist and singer Mario Bakuna plays the songs of João Gilberto, the singer and guitarist who gave bossa nova its hushed sound. Up in North Finchley, Ghanaian-born pianist Ed Bentley brings his Afro Jazz Express to the B3 Lounge at The Bohemia. The night closes at 9pm at The Jazz Social with a double bill: Swiss harpist Julie Campiche, then Albanian-Swiss singer Elina Duni with guitarist Rob Luft.
Monday 16th November
Melody Gardot, who started writing songs while recovering from being hit by a car on her bike at nineteen, sings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, and the day’s one global booking comes in support: Belgian-Cameroonian singer and kora player Lubiana opens.
Tuesday 17th November
Cadogan Hall’s lunchtime series, Out to Lunch, books two global acts this week: at noon in the foyer Nicolas Meier brings his World Group and new album Elysian Drift, switching between fretted and fretless guitars and pulling in jazz, Turkish music and flamenco. At 2pm Leon Foster Thomas is a guest on One Jazz’s live broadcast at The Jazz Social.
Ronnie Scott’s has an early set at 6.20pm from Vietnam-born composer Huu Bac Quach, whose Montreal quintet sets the đàn bầu, erhu and quena against contemporary jazz.
Cuba comes back in the evening as chamber music at Cadogan Hall. Pianist Roberto Fonseca, whom many first heard with Buena Vista Social Club, and cellist Vincent Segal play Nuit parisienne à La Havane, which won them a Cubadisco Award this year. They have been friends for almost twenty years, since a pair of solo concerts at Rome’s Palazzo Farnese, and working with Fonseca sent Segal back to the classical cello he played as a child. Much of the album was written in advance and the rest was left to the moment in the studio, so expect some of the music to be made up on the night. Harpist Marysia Osu opens.
At the same time, Milton Court belongs to Estonian singer and violinist Maarja Nuut. She started out as a classical violinist and found her own voice in the village songs she heard on pre-war Estonian recordings, and her new piece, Combing Hair into Sand (Liivast juukseid kammides), sets poems by Estonian writers including Eha Lättemäe for voices, violin, percussion and electronics. British vocal collective Shards, whose choral sound grows out of improvisation, open the night and then join her, with Swiss drummer Nicolas Stocker on percussion.
Tuesday closes at 9pm at the Jazz Cafe, which hosts Ella & The Bossa Beat, a night of Brazilian jazz and bossa nova.
Wednesday 18th November
Wednesday starts with Brazil and the second Out to Lunch booking, at lunchtime in Cadogan Hall’s foyer, where the trio Djangada rework songs by Gilberto Gil and Dorival Caymmi through Afro-Brazilian rhythm and bossa nova. At the same hour, London composer David Kayode is on One Jazz’s broadcast at The Jazz Social.
In the evening, Fatoumata Diawara brings Massa to the Roundhouse in Camden. It came out in June, a record about motherhood, faith and memory made with the French pop star -M-, who co-produced it and wrapped her Malian songs in pop. She sings nearly all of it in Bambara and plays guitar, which she taught herself. Diawara left Mali at nineteen and has spent her career using her songs against forced marriage and female genital mutilation. The Thanda Choir, more than fifty voices from Khayelitsha in Cape Town, open the night with gospel and traditional South African song.
Union Chapel in Islington has Norwegian-Brazilian singer, composer and producer Charlotte Dos Santos, with her mix of jazz, soul and R&B, and Argentine trio TRÍADA, newly signed to Verve, opening.
Wednesday’s smaller rooms reach from Eritrea and Brazil to Wales and Nigeria. At 7.15pm Sarathy Korwar returns for Ryman in Rhythm in the Barbican Art Gallery. At 8pm, trombonist Rosie Turton and singer Miryam Solomon, who has Swedish and Eritrean roots, play as MAAR at Green Note in Camden, while the 606 Club in Chelsea hosts A Night of Brazilian Delights with Samara, a Brazilian band that plays the 606 regularly and mixes samba and baião with jazz. Back at the London Welsh Centre, bassist Twm Dylan’s Trons Tew lines up Johnny Griffin, Alice Coltrane and The Meters next to Welsh traditional music, with saxophonist Rhys Ponting and his group in support. At 8.30pm in Brixton, Nigerian-born, London-raised percussionist and singer Sola Akingbola, long the percussionist in Jamiroquai, leads The Eegun Rhapsodies through Black Atlantic funk at Freight.
Thursday 19th November
Union Chapel’s second global night in a row belongs to Bongeziwe Mabandla, on his debut here. He grew up in Tsolo in the Eastern Cape and moved to Johannesburg to make a go of it. He sings in isiXhosa over folk guitar and soul, a sound he has shaped for years with producer Tiago Correia-Paulo, and Ndingubani, out in August, is his latest album. South African singer Zola Marcelle opens.
Éire Eile has two Belfast acts tonight: Robocobra Quartet play the ICA on the Mall, and at the Vortex in Dalston, Córas Trio take traditional Irish tunes apart and put them back together with electronics and group improvisation.
Two Thursday gigs go back to the Paris of the 1930s. At 7pm at Sinfonia Smith Square in Westminster, Scottish guitarist Martin Taylor and trumpeter Guy Barker present The Spirit of Django, a tribute to Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-born Romani guitarist who built jazz manouche with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, and at the George IV in Chiswick, Trio Manouche share a double bill with The Capitano Cartel. In Kennington, Japanese pianist Riyoko Takagi brings her trio to the Toulouse Lautrec for the first of two nights, with sets at 7pm and 9.30pm.
The rest of Thursday evening runs from India and Sudan to Palestine and Turkey. At 6.30pm at The Bloomsbury Club, Pradipika brings together bassist and sitar player Jihad Darwish, saxophonist Tamar Osborn and guitarist Magnus Mehta for a mix of Indian classical music, free improvisation and electronica. At 7.30pm Sudanese singer Amira Kheir plays World Heart Beat in Nine Elms. At 8pm, The Cockpit in Marylebone hosts Makam Salam, where Palestinian singer Mira Awad and Turkish-born singer Olcay Bayır meet on the makam, the modal system shared by Arabic and Turkish music, and Shri Sriram is back at Kings Place’s Hall Two with Red Doors, a trio with Patrick Shaw-Iversen on Norwegian and Indonesian flutes and Harpreet Bansal on Indian classical violin, all set to dark electronic beats.
Thursday’s late sets are in small rooms from Hackney Wick to Brixton. At 8.30pm drummer Chiminyo, a member of Maisha whose NRG sessions mix improvised jazz and electronics, leads a free trio set at Number 90 in Hackney Wick. At 9pm, Havana and London-based pianist Eliane Correa brings En El Aire, her project setting jazz against Afro-Cuban folklore, to Hootananny in Brixton for a Queer Jazz night with Indy Newland opening, tickets from £5. At the same hour TRÍADA play a late set at The Jazz Social, followed by a Milestones DJ takeover.
Friday 20th November
Friday leans towards Africa from lunchtime. Ubunye, a Leeds six-piece that puts Zulu vocals over jazz, Afro-pop and funk, opens the day at PizzaExpress Live in Soho at 1pm. In the early evening Ronnie Scott’s turns West African: at 6.20pm Togolese drummer Kossi Mawun leads a trio built on the Watchi rhythms of southern Togo, and at 6.40pm Senegalese bassist and singer Alune Wade brings New African Orleans, which crosses afrobeat, juju and West African traditions with New Orleans brass.
Riyoko Takagi’s second night at the Toulouse Lautrec starts at 6pm, with another set at 9.30pm. At 7.30pm at World Heart Beat in Nine Elms, pianist Julian Joseph and tabla player Alok Verma play their Silk Road Duet. At 8pm in Paddington, the Arabic takht ensemble Oxford Maqam plays 19th- and 20th-century Egyptian music at Grand Junction, with Syrian singer Rama Alcoutlabi in support. At 8.30pm Soul Mama in Islington welcomes the Ebony Steel Band, founded in 1969, and at 9pm Venezuelan pianist Edgar Macias leads a seven-piece tribute to Buena Vista Social Club at the 606 Club.
Saturday 21st November
The last Saturday opens with two free sets at 1pm, one on each side of the river. The Albany in Deptford fills its café with a Jazz Saturdays lunchtime set from Trinity Laban alumni, and in the Barbican’s FreeStage foyer, DJs from the London label BBE Music play Japanese jazz records.
The Japanese records are a warm-up for the evening, when the Barbican Hall goes to Tokyo. From 1974 to 1981 the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami ran a jazz club in the city called Peter Cat, named after his own cat, and the night is built around the memory of it, played at 5pm and 8.30pm and once more on Sunday afternoon. Murakami gave the idea his blessing, though he will not be in the room. Pianist Junko Onishi brings her trio and saxophonist Sachi Hayasaka her band TReS, while The Blend arrive a member short: their bassist Yoshio Suzuki died on 23 September, and the rest of the band are making the trip without him.
Downstairs in The Pit at 5pm, two musicians who came through Serious’s Take Five artist development scheme share the bill. Kayode writes from Yoruba tradition and the wider rhythms of the African diaspora, and his band includes Marlon Hibbert, who plays steelpan as Marlon the Pannist and founded the Endurance Steel Orchestra.
At 5.30pm The Jazz Social has the desert jazz of Arfoud Brothers & Sisters, a London collective founded by Abdelillah Ouahbi and named after the Moroccan oasis town of Arfoud, mixing Gnawa, North African folk, desert blues, afrobeat and highlife. At 7pm the Latin jazz band Sexteto Cafe plays its Mambo Instrumentales at Crazy Coqs, the art deco cabaret room beneath Brasserie Zédel, and at 8.30pm Albanian singer Ajo brings Gërshetat to Grand Junction in Paddington, drawing on the songs and dances of southern Albania. From 9pm Shuya Okino of Kyoto Jazz Massive DJs at The Jazz Social, the night before he leads his own band in Islington.
The centenary comes back at 8pm at Olympia. In March 1963, the year of the lost album, Coltrane recorded his only album with a singer, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, six ballads carried by Hartman’s deep baritone, among them “Lush Life” and “My One and Only Love”. Branford Marsalis and Dianne Reeves bring it back. Marsalis and his quartet have recorded those songs with Reeves in the singer’s chair, so the pairing is already proven on record. To finish the night, Raffy Bushman plays Late Night Jazz in the Elgar Room at 9.30pm.
Sunday 22nd November
The last day starts at noon with Japanese Jazz Day at The Jazz Social. At 1pm conga player Williams Cumberbache, who has played with Goldie and Björk and leads the eight-piece Tumbaito, hosts a one-off edition of his weekly Canalside Sessions at Grow, a pontoon stage on the River Lea in Hackney Wick, with a guest still to be named. At 2pm, Milton Court has a free concert from the Guildhall Jazz Festival: Brazilian bassist Itiberê Zwarg and his Itiberê Orquestra Família, joined by the Guildhall Improvisers Ensemble. Zwarg spent decades in the band of Hermeto Pascoal and still carries Hermeto’s idea of “Universal Music”, which welcomes any style and any sound into the band. The Peter Cat night has its final performance at the Barbican at the same time.
In the evening Global Connections closes in the Barbican Hall with The Joy, five friends from Hammarsdale near Durban who started singing together as teenagers after turning up early to choir practice. Their harmonies come out of the Zulu mbube and isicathamiya traditions and hold a room with harmony alone: their debut album was cut live in a single take at Church Studios in Crouch End, voices only, and they have since sung with Doja Cat at Coachella.
Two singers close the South Bank’s ten days. At 6.30pm in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Cécile McLorin Salvant, whose recent records move between English, French and Haitian Creole, sings with the BBC Concert Orchestra, and at 7.30pm in the Royal Festival Hall, Samara Joy from the Bronx, who won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2023 singing standards, plays with Lucy-Anne Daniels opening.
At 7pm the Toulouse Lautrec has El Chamuyo Quartet launching their debut EP of Argentine tango, with Kamila Bydlowska on violin, Simon Cook on bandoneon, Adam Dyer on piano and Juan Pablo Mauro on double bass. At 7.30pm the final night moves to the dancefloor at Islington Assembly Hall, where Kyoto Jazz Massive, the project brothers Shuya and Yoshihiro Okino started in Kyoto, plays a set that runs from jazz-funk through broken beat to soulful house, with Shuya at the helm and the Paris-based Echoes of a New Dawn Orchestra behind him. At 8pm Mozambican saxophonist Moreira Chonguiça leads a seven-piece band through Afro-fusion, funk and Mozambican traditions at Ronnie Scott’s, and Bristol’s veteran roots reggae band Black Roots, formed in 1979, play the Jazz Cafe.
You can find the full programme, with links to every box office, on the EFG London Jazz Festival website