Jazz

Unhinged and musically extravagant, The Langan Band have become famous for performing an invigorating yet tight and precisely executed show. With a sense of abandonment for spontaneity and surprise, they always keep their audience on their toes.

The band formed shortly after John Langan won the prestigious Danny Kyle Award for new artists at Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow for his audacious, fresh and engaging rendition of a traditional song. It’s this rare and potent ability Langan has with singing to captivate and have audiences believe songs, that is the core of their shows.

Their material draws from all that they’ve been exposed to and enjoyed, from a whole range of music and live experiences. Progressive folk, jazz influences and world music combine to create a modern and exhilarating sound very much rooted in modern traditions. It’s hard to pigeonhole but is for certain brilliant musicianship, with catchy tunes and beautiful lyrics.

Magnolia Rd are a group from Melbourne’s South East exploring everything from alternative blues/jazz to psychedelic punk rock.
They're always sure to provide a dazzling collection of neat tunes and grooves. With the musical influence of the band covering all era's back to the early 1930's to present day, their writing and performance aims to encapsulate a variety of different styles and timings, catering for a vast range of listening ears.

To date, if you wanted to learn about DOMi & JD BECK—the internet’s most hyped jazz duo—you had to visit their website, click a rat playing saxophone, and read a story about a 12-year-old physicist (DOMi Louna) and a 6-year-old sheep investigator (JD Beck). Let’s fix that. “My philosophy of life is don’t take shit too seriously,” says DOMi Louna, born Domitille Degalle. And that’s fair. But the vibrant world she and her collaborator have given us demands exploration. Their long-awaited debut album—which will be released by Anderson .Paak’s new label APESHIT in partnership with the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records—is an attempt to bottle their goofy, very virtuosic magic. Their music finds both humor and greatness in harmonic complexity and rhythmic shiftiness, abruptly adopting and ditching tempos, toying with time signatures, and sneaking extra beats into bridges. The collaboration began under silly circumstances. DOMi Louna was a teen protegé at Berklee by way of the Paris Conservatory; JD, three years her junior, had gigged since grade school around his hometown, Dallas—first in producer Jah-Born’s band where he duetted with MPC beatmakers and DJs spinning Dilla. In 2018, they were both invited to join an ensemble performing at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) trade show and played in a room full of blaring instrumental demos, surrounded by a chaotic din. They bonded over gauche keyboard effects and mom jokes, and a more audible jam that night sparked interest in working more. Along the ride, DOMi & JD BECK have sat in with Herbie Hancock and backed Thundercat, Ariana Grande, Mac DeMarco, Eric André, and more. They also co-wrote “Skate” on .Paak’s GRAMMY-winning album with Bruno Mars as Silk Sonic.

Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace by multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings is, in a sense, a debut album. And yet, the album also serves as a reintroduction to the artist, a levitating, stunning work chock full of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his life and career. And perhaps, most importantly, it represents the spirit of exploration that the artist is most tapped into these days.

London-born, Hutchings spent much of his childhood in Barbados. Beginning at age nine, he studied the clarinet, playing in calypso bands while studying classical repertoire, often practicing over hip hop beats by artists such as Nas, as well as to the music native to Barbados. He imparted that at the time, “The idea of being a particular ‘type’ of musician who limited themselves by genre was totally alien to me and my peers, it was just about playing with skill and dedication, and whether music moved me or left me cold.”

Consequently, after studying clarinet at Guildhall School of Music from 2004-2008, he collaborated on a kaleidoscopic range of projects: recording and/or touring with Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, Soweto Kinch, Floating Points and Courtney Pine amongst many other bands, as well as being a part of the London Improvisers Orchestra. He’s also composed pieces for the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Ligeti Quartet, and performed the Copland Clarinet Concerto with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Britten Sinfonietta as well as the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra.

Over the course of the past decade, the lion’s share of his touring and recorded work has been with three bands: Sons of Kemet, The Comet is Coming and Shabaka and the Ancestors. “In these formations,” he shared, “I’ve been able to display a fundamental approach to creative practice in different contexts spanning Afro-Caribbean fusion, London dance music club culture and the rich South African jazz tradition – all within the freedom afforded by the legacy of the American ‘jazz’ tradition.” That approach reflects a mantra he absorbed early in his life.

“My primary school teacher told me ‘the music isn’t hard, just practice it mechanically then relax and let your soul shine through’. This is an adage which I’ve kept throughout my life of learning how the musics and instruments of different cultures relate to my personal vision of sound.”

His musical exploration includes employing a variety of flutes, including the ancient Japanese Shakuhachi, which he started playing in 2020 during the pandemic. “Since then, it has slowly changed the scope of my musical inner landscape and drawn me towards a multitude of other instruments in the flute family,” he explained. “As more flutes have been added to my arsenal including Mayan Teotihuacan drone flutes, Brazilian Pifanos, Native American flutes and South American Quenas, I’ve started to appreciate the underlying principles that cause these instruments to resonate most fully and use this understanding to form a concept allowing me to freely move between instruments.”

On New Year’s Day 2023, in the wake of the release of his 2022 debut EP, Afrikan Culture (which notably featured the artist primarily on flutes), Shabaka announced that beginning in 2024 he’d take a hiatus from playing the saxophone publicly. He clarified in July 2023 on his Instagram page his intention to cease playing with bands in which the saxophone was his primary instrument (including The Comet Is Coming, Sons of Kemet and Shabaka and the Ancestors).

For the flute-forward album Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace, Hutchings tapped into a remarkable cadre of players, including percussionist Carlos Niño and bassist Esperanza Spalding. Vocalists including Saul Williams and Lianne La Havas contributed to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become” and “Kiss Me Before I Forget”, respectively. Floating Points, with whom Shabaka shared a stage with for their performance of Promises at the Hollywood Bowl, provided additional production on the track “I’ll Do Whatever You Want”.

“I invited a bunch of musicians I’ve met and admired over the past few years of touring throughout the United States to collaborate and everyone said yes, which I constantly find breathtaking,” he disclosed. His aim was to gather the musicians at Rudy Van Gelder’s historic studios, which he says “informed the sound of so many seminal jazz albums that have shaped my musical aptitude. We played with no headphones or separation in the room so we could capture the atmosphere of simply playing together in the space without a technological intermediary. After recording hours of inspired interactions, I set to work producing an album from the material.”

When asked about the meaning of the song’s titles, he explained that his previous album’s song titles can be read as poems, respectively. “The narrative aspect of my albums is always intentional,” he explained. “Around the release of the Shabaka and the Ancestors album We Are Sent Here by History, I coined the term ‘sonic poems’ to express how I’m intending the listener to relate to the words associated with the sounds contained on the disc. Each title on this disc was extracted from a longer poem written specifically for the album which only achieved its full meaning in the presence of the music.”

He further relayed that “How the listener interprets the words in relation to the sounds is personal and it’s this subjective unravelling of complex ideas that’s an integral part of the journey I intend to take the listener on. This idea permeated sons of Sons of Kemet’s Black to the Future album whereby each track title reads as a poem. Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace follows in this tradition of titles as symbolising a narrative which is necessarily subjective and expansive in relation to the listener’s experience with the heard music.”