I did the London Skyride yesterday. Days off are rare at the moment; even rarer are those that allow me to simply ride my ancient bicycle with no specific destination in mind. After lunch near Marble Arch with a friend I freewheeled it along to speaker's corner to hear some semi-sane ravings for old time sake. I used to be addicted to Speaker's Corner. Whilst half listening to a man warn of The Robots impending takeover I noticed hundreds of people wearing yellow jerseys with the words "Skyride" emblazoned across them. I cycled down towards Hyde Park Corner where they appeared to be congregating. As it turned out, our mayor Boris Johnson had closed down a huge part of central London to enable 50,000 cyclists to take to the streets without a car in sight. The route ran from Buckingham Palace, along the Victoria Embankment to St Pauls, to the Tower of London and back again. I merely planned to observe this post-apocalyptic/eco-warrior's wet dream car-less London; but instead, I became literally swept along into the whole event and completed the ride with a huge smile on my face. What a priviledge it was to pedal down Constitution Hill without a car in sight. London and it's September summer was on beautiful form. Dressed in all it's finery, with no Range Rovers to negotiate, the city revealed itself as a beautiful old friend. I was a tourist again in my own city. It was 15km in total and although teams of 7 year olds on BMXs seemed to race by every 30 seconds it was a pretty graceful experience. With speakers installed in Blackfriars Tunnel, Kasabian's "Fire" reverberated around the grimy old tube like psych-rock from the bowels of the earth. It was a great moment - unique and surreal - and a great reminder of everything this city can be.

The rough trade counter culture compilation of 2008 is a cassette with a USB stick inside it. I was actually disappointed to see that it wasn't a tape. I used to worship my tape collection, the mixtapes especially, recorded for me by friends and girlfriends. I still have a few at my parent's house and I'm going to try and dig out those musical relics and love them again. Send me some pictures of your old mixtapes or some old tracklistings and we can reminisce together.

I've got that year zero feeling again. A new album is in the can and I'm at that blissful stage where no one has actually heard the thing yet and no judgements have been made. If any of you have read Paul Auster's "The book of illusions" you'll remember the character who makes movies that no one ever sees. He seals them in a vault only to be seen once by one journalist after his death and thereafter destroyed.

Right now "The Pursuit" is in my car, it's on my iPod, it's on my home stereo and it's my favourite album. After it comes out I will probably never listen to it again unless by accident in a restaurant. It's an odd phenomenon, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

Spotify

Here is a list of the albums I loved this year. These are the albums I struggled to take off the record player. These are the albums I put on that on-the-go playlist on my ipod. These are the albums I left in my car stereo. These are the albums that stopped me from what I was doing. These are the albums that provided a soundtrack to what I was doing.

The following list is in no particular order and the ensuing comments are stream of consciouness and unlikely to make sense.

Mary Halvorsen Trio - Dragon's Head

I don't think I've heard a jazz record that I responded to quite like this for a long time. This ugly/beautiful free jazz sound is so captivating and fresh that just when you think it is passing over you in waves it hits you on the head with a claw hammer. Totally perfect and NOT for everyone, thankfully.

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah pt.1

You merely have to be human to love her voice, but here is an album that bursts with an avant-garde creativity to match it. Listen out for the track "Soldier" and dance accordingly. She dug me when she saw me play at an event in LA – I will die happy.

Walter Becker - Circus Money

The other half of Steely Dan proving that he has enough wit, groove and spine-tingling chord changes up his sleeve to carry them both. Warmly produced by Larry Klein and drumming on another level from Keith Carlock.

Fleet Foxes

On all the critics end of year lists and totally deserved. Crosby, Stills and Nash meets the Arcade Fire. An album for the car that you AND your Dad can get into.

Alan Barnes - Yeah!

Nothing remarkable here - just one the UK's greatest sax players leading a group of our finest mainstream jazzmen, playing music by one of the worlds greatest jazz composers (Horace Silver) with fire and verve. Nothing remarkable then.

Medeski, Martin and Wood - Radiolarians 1

Another superb set from the sometimes-free-jazz groovemeisters, this time road-tested before it hit the wax. Awaiting part 2 eagerly.

My Brightest Diamond - A Thousand Shark's Teeth

Otherwise known as Shara Worden, this Brooklyn based, classically trained singer and orchestrator has made a jewel of an album - both Buckley (Jeff and TIm) and Nina Simone inspired. "If I were Queen" is my favourite new love song.

Portishead - Third

One of those bands that helped me fall in love with music brought their challenging third album to the world after a long wait this year. "The Rip" according to my itunes, was apparently the song I played most this year and inspired the bassline of a new song of mine called "Music is Through" which may or may not make it onto my next album. Dark, interesting and will surely last a thousand years.

Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III

You don't have to be hip-hop fan to love the track "Dr. Carter", just a fan of brilliance and sheer ballsiness. Lil Wayne has a delivery like Ben Webster or Dexter Gordon. One of those rare hip-hop records you can listen to from back to front without skipping tracks.

Q-Tip - The Rennaisance

And here's another one. From beginning to end this album shines. It finally means I could take Q-Tip's "Amplified" album (now 10 years old!) out of rotation for a little while.

Polar Bear – Polar Bear

Real Jazz for the Non Jazz crowd. Music for anyone who has ears. I think this record is flawless and truly worthy of the word "cool" without becoming thusly "uncool". I'm making sense right? Jazz that sounds like it is truly a product of its time and place.

Deerhunter – Microcastle

Bradford Cox endlessly posts new music, mixes and side projects on his brilliant Deerhunter blog and still manages to make a brilliant "proper" album that is worthy of your hard earned cash. This was one of my "driving" albums this year and reminds me at times of the Wedding Present – which is one of the reasons I love it so much. Both pretty and truly rocking.

Flying Lotus – Los Angeles

This music is so behind the beat it makes Shirley Horn sound like the Arctic Monkeys. This is a record which creates such an atmosphere with its drone of crackles and static as beats skitter loosely above. Uncategoriseable.

Ben Folds – Way to Normal

My old hero who refuses to put out anything less than brilliant. The songs "Cologne" and "Brainwasht" are now firmly added to the bursting "Classic Ben Folds Collection".

Hauschka – Ferndorf

The beautiful sound of the prepared piano of Volker Bertelmann. I saw him quite by accident on a double bill with Max Richter at the Spitz Club. Playing a piano filled with all manner of objects and electrical tape he created the wonderful sounds you will hear on this very album.

M83 – Saturdays = Youth

I resisted this band for a long time as I have never been drawn to that whole 80s thing. I was missing out. This is truly epic stuff. If you find yourself drawn to that grandiose, epic Snow Patrol/Keane thing but prefer your stuff a little more "left", well here is your record. Huge music.

Esbjorn Svensson Trio – Leococyte

I have spoken a great deal about the tragic passing of the leader of this incredible band earlier this year. He leaves behind a difficult and brilliant album. RIP Esbjorn. You will be forever missed.

Happy New Year everyone. Thanks for listening.

Love

jc

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I taught myself to juggle in the summer of 1992. Another summer holiday in Cornwall that decided to spend half of the time raining. I can still do it now. Not very well mind you, but the basic skill is still there and I tend to bust out my juggling chops if I need to entertain a difficult child or a person of similarly low/high expectations.Right now, prior to the year where the fruits of this years labours will be fully seen, I am juggling. Keeping things in the air, getting it right, tweaking, making sure the colours are shining, checking that every inch is how I want it to be. It is a magnificent feeling and right now I'm not taking my eye off the ball for a second.I have been working on my new album in short creative bursts over the last 10 months. I recorded the bulk of it over the summer in Los Angeles and am just finishing up some tracks now back in London in order to create the full picture. I am a coiled mass of excitement. It is better than I could have hoped. The various risks have paid off and I cannot wait to get back out there and play it. It is so tough holding on to it in this way – like trying to keep a tiger in a cardboard box.In amongst all this, my involvement with Clint Eastwood reached a wonderful point where he asked me to write a song based on the theme of his original score for his new film "Gran Torino." I sat in his guest house with my good friends Michael Stevens and Kyle Eastwood (who work on the scores for all his recent movies) and we carefully constructed a tune to which I set about writing lyrics after having read Nick Schenk's script. I tend to keep a running to do list in my diary and one particular one, back in October, reads amusingly: Call Pete, Pick up dry cleaning, pay congestion charge fine, write thank you letter to Auntie A, write Clint song.If ever a moment in my career totally came out of an unforced alignment of the stars – then this is it . The song is finished and works beautifully in the movie. The movie "Gran Torino" is yet another film in a long line of Clint Eastwood masterpieces. I am totally honoured to be involved in it. And yes, I did write that thank you letter and pick up the dry cleaning.Our Advent Cullumdar, which started life in the imagination of my manager Marc Connor has been born and is alive and kicking. I am genuinely surprised at the prizes we managed to amass! We evidently know some pretty cool and generous people. It has been designed beautifully by our friend at www.rexbox.co.uk. It is a fascinating and crazy idea. I hope some of you win something; as my career in competition entering has thus far only reached the dizzying heights of winning a Five Star 7" single from GWR radio station back in the late 80s. My alias "Semprini Caruthers-Smedlyson" will hopefully win that Formula One day……I am going to post my 10 favourite records of the year list as soon as I take off my headphones.The fun is going to start again pretty soon. Just trying not to drop the ball.
With love,
Jcx

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I've just returned from Paris with a few new gems from my favourite record store "Oldies but Goodies". The above Jimmy Smith classic has been in my Organ Jazz section on CD for many years, but here it is now on original vinyl. Is there a greater album cover in existence?



Most of Georgie Fame's recordings aren't even available on CD. When will someone re-release these classics??! All you sample heads out there should get your chops into the first 8 bar drum break of "Music Head" and you'll probably have the basis of a hit on your hands.



Blossom Dearie. The ultimate repertoire chooser. Quirky funny and swinging and again another artist whose back catalogue has been painfully neglected on CD. This is what dusty vinyl stores are for I guess. This album features a great band - Ron Carter and Toots Thielmans among them. Hearing Blossom sing makes my cheeks hurt from smiling.



Live at Shelly's Manne Hole with his early american trio Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Most people know "My Back Pages" from this record but OH how happy I was to see this rare bit of vinyl stuffed way back in a crate! Simple pleasures make my world go around. Now, curtains closed, glass full, phone off and.............listening..........

jc

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It feels incredibly strange to wake up on a gig morning and not have those usual reflexes to draw upon. I've been out of the game of regular "gigging" for over a year now for some self-imposed re-grouping and to give myself space to work on the new record. Tonight however I accepted an offer from Mr. Clint Eastwood to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival now in to its 51st year as one of the great Jazz Festivals of the world. I toyed with the idea of saying no, on the grounds of not feeling quite back in "Live-Jamie" mode, but then I realised what a bad idea it would be to turn down Clint Eastwood. I've seen all kinds of punks do that, and it didn't end well for them.

I am glad I came. Any festival where you meet Herbie Hancock at the hotel bar is fine by me. I never suffered from full-on stage fright, but this afternoon, the concept of playing a proper show fills me with the kind of nervous energy that I haven't felt for a while. I guess that can only be a good thing.

So here is the rundown of the day: Gig at 2:30pm - 75 mins, a rumoured collaboration with Kurt Elling on his gig sometime in the early evening, an onstage interview with Mr Clint Eastwood at 5pm, watch concerts back to back from jazz legends Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, knock back a few bottles of that funny Belgian ale with Thelonious Monk on the label, eat some kind of fast food concoction, brandy at hotel bar, sleep.

Do you feel lucky punk?

jc

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This article was originally published in the Guardian, 5 Sep 2008

The Esbjörn Svensson Trio

Being a jazz lover is a hard way to make friends. I had always been acutely aware of this and had always kept my jazz obsession fairly quiet through school. This was not a huge problem because I was largely into most of the pop, rock and electronic music of the day as well, thus rescuing myself from the fate of total outcast. The jazz thing was devoured behind the door of my bedroom and the privacy of headphones.

When I first arrived in my antiseptic halls of residence at Reading University I was already deeply into jazz music and had brought with me hundreds of records and CDs. I set up my cash converters hi-fi and proceeded to put on my first record. Somewhere in the midst of a Wayne Shorter tenor saxophone solo on a Miles Davis tune "Stuff", my new next door neighbour, Bob, who was pounding out The Chemical Brothers "Surrender" from his Matsui micro hi-fi, came through the door and exclaimed - "What the fuck is this racket?" As I said: not an easy way to make friends.

A year later I discovered the music of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio quite by chance with no great fanfare, much the way I discovered most music in those quaint pre-itunes days. I would wander around record stores, both independent and chain, fondling new and old releases and sometimes ask to listen. EST's "Good Morning Susie Soho" was squashed deep in the New Releases section. Us jazz lovers are used to the terrible artwork of the more recent releases, but this one looked a little different. It had some kind of mutated, disembodied artery on the front in a muted green, looking much more like a Radiohead album. I picked it up on a whim - a piano trio from Sweden - I had no expectations.

"Good Morning Susie Soho" was in turn more experimental and more traditional than I expected it to be. It was indeed the traditional setup of piano, acoustic bass and drums, albeit with a whisper of electronics and effects. I admit it was the beats that got me first. I hadn't heard a piano trio, only inches away from more traditional jazz, sound so much a product of the past ten years. Broken drum and bass grooves, electronic four to the floor inflections, funky and almost danceable punctuated by beautiful vignettes of tightly composed ballads. They have managed, within a tight framework of the traditional, to do something genuinely new and modern. Floating effortlessly over this landscape was the inventive and melodic improvising of Esbjörn Svensson himself sounding like shards of a broken mirror reflecting the light like a demonic disco ball.

Even Bob became a fan. His ears pricked up to the broken beats of the tune "The Wraith", he copied it, played it on loop endlessly and began to ask me what else he might like in my collection of alien CDs.

A Swedish piano trio isn't the most likely of things to set the world of jazz on fire, let alone that of popular music - but EST did just that. The Scandinavian jazz scene has long been a haven for both the greats of the jazz world finding tolerance, acceptance and funding on these cooler shores and for its new talent created right there. Esbjörn Svensson had met drummer Magnus Öström at school and had already started playing music together at school. After Svensson completed his studies at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm he joined up again with Magnus and completed the lineup with bass player Dan Berglund. The concept of the "band" has a different resonance in jazz as, apart from a few exceptions, members are regularly rotated and changed - keeping the improvising and the focus fresh. EST's lineup remained unchanged for its entire career, forging an identity as a three man assault and abbreviating its name to become an entity rather than a focus on one soloist.

They made an impact on the small but vibrant Scandinavian jazz scene almost immediately with the albums "When Everyone Has Gone" and their unique take on the music of Thelonius Monk "EST plays Monk". It was the latter that I bought in the weeks after, having always loved the angular tunes of Thelonius Monk, the mad, goat-eed genius in a fez. For me this is one of the freshest takes on Monk's music I have heard. Take the slow shuffle funk of the opener "I Mean You" where the band render this curious tune into a clubber's lullaby, Esbjörn's piano dancing over it like a soulful Keith Jarrett.

The world began to take notice with albums "From Gagarin's Point of View" and of course "Good Morning Susie Soho" (the album cover was now Bob's screen saver). It was soon after these records that EST began to play outside of the constraints of jazz festivals and clubs and shoehorn themselves into rock venues throughout Europe and eventually the United States much like Miles Davis did in the early 70s. Their music in turn began to explore rockier rhythms and sounds. Esbjörn employed a small arsenal of guitar effects pedals through his piano, mainly using subtle delay and distortion, whilst bassist Dan Berglund used his bow and a similar array of pedals to help augment his already commanding sound. Drummer, Magnus Öström relied purely on his virtuoso command of the skins in front of him, appropriating at once the rhythmic complexity of both Tony Williams and Aphex Twin. All the while, they never lost the true essence of the jazz piano trio and its spirit of group improvisation.

They travelled with their own soundman and lighting engineer, unheard of in the world of jazz, and brought their distinctive, trippy, genre busting sound and visuals to music venues and festivals all over the world. In Sweden, their music entered the pop charts and their videos were shown on MTV. They were the first European act to appear on the front cover of prestigious (and notably snooty) American jazz magazine "Downbeat". Subsequent albums "Strange Place For Snow", "Tuesday Wonderland" and "Viaticum" topped jazz charts the world over and brought concert audiences of many thousands to their feet.

I was lucky to see the band play five times since I had become a fan in 2000. I was playing at a friend's small festival deep in the Bavarian countryside after I had left university. Quite by chance I had seen in a local newspaper that EST were to be giving a concert at the Schloss-Elmau venue in southern Bavaria. Here was my first chance to see them play. I drove a hundred miles or so to the foot of the Wetterstein Mountains.

It was the first time I could truly remember seeing a show that satisfied both ends of the musical spectrum. I was used to going to rock and electronic concerts and being swept up in the sweaty mass of the groove and intensity of the sound. I was used to going to Jazz concerts and having my head cracked open with the possibilities and intricacies of the improvisation. Here was something that had both. The music cascaded over me in torrents. They were not particularly demonstrative performers themselves, but the music created a certain tension that built and built throughout the entire show and left me in speechless, trembling pieces. I nervously went up to the band afterwards and pressed a CD of mine into their hands. I mumbled a slew of unintelligible hyperbole and left grinning.

Not only did they remember me (and the CD) at subsequent shows I saw them at, but they came to a show of mine in Stockholm. Esbjörn himself was full of encouragement and praise for what I was doing. At the BBC Jazz Awards in 2003 I sat and had a drink with him and had an all too brief insight into what a genuinely lovely man he was, warm, funny, humble and open.

EST's final album is another leap forward for them. Whereas their albums up until this point relied on tightly composed melodies and structures, "Leucocyte" is a bold, fully improvised set, recorded in just two days in a studio in Australia. It is a hint of how far EST were pushing themselves into further, more exploratory territories.

I was asked to provide a quote in support of their new album "Leucocyte" a few months ago. I surmised: "This group has become one sound, one genius mutant human being with six hands, three brains and one musical sensibility". I was touched that they would ask for my input. In June 2008, the news came that Esbjörn Svensson had died in a scuba diving accident off the coast of Stockholm. He was 44 years old, married and the father of two sons.

I was truly devastated, as both a music lover and a human being. One mourns the loss of any good person whose life is cruelly cut short. But here the loss is even greater as we must say farewell to a maverick of music in the 21st century, a virtuoso who can also rock the shit out of the piano and one part of a band that put a rocket up the arse of jazz when it really needed it. Make space in your music collection for their music - trust me, it's a good way to make friends.

Jamie Cullum

2008

Well here I am chipping away at a new album in the sunshine skirted by unfamiliar surroundings. I've spent most of my recording life thus far enveloped by the safety blanket of my home; a mere 10 minutes or so from where I could drink a beer on a familiar sofa and listen to mixes on a stereo I have been listening to records on since I was a teenager. Sometimes you need to take away those anchors to produce something that feels like you have truly moved forward. With the world of music in its current state, wounded, ubiquitous, bulging with bands and new acts, exciting and bewildering – all I feel like doing is getting on with making a record that feels like a true challenge to my abilities. Suffice to say I listen at the end of each day to the noises created, driving in the rented car and burst with excitement as I hear the music which sounds at once part of me and outside of me. Excuse me for sounding overly portentous but that feeling of creating always gets me very high.

I read today that the death toll of the Burmese cyclone has risen above 22,000 with another 41,000 people still missing. It is an unimaginable level of devastation in a beautiful country already blighted by a million problems. I will be donating to the British Red Cross who were on the ground soon after the storm hit.

http://www.redcross.org.uk

Much love to you all.

Jc

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