16 October 2025Dublin label makes two more albums by guitarist Louis Stewart available again
The relaunched Livia Records continues to reactivate the great Irish guitarist Louis Stewart's back catalogue with two releases.
Due on 14th November, Alone Together features Stewart with flute virtuoso Brian Dunning in a set of ten duets from 1979. Alongside familiar tunes including There Will Never Be Another You, Chick Corea's Windows and Joe Henderson's Inner Urge tracks include Definitely Doctored, co-written by Stewart and Dunning and showing their wit and accomplishment.
The second release is the reactivated Tunes, from 2013, which features Stewart with his great friend, pianist Jim Doherty, who discovered a teenage Stewart in 1960 and set him on course to become Ireland's first world class jazz musician. They recorded Doherty's Spondance in 1986, which Livia reissued earlier this year, and by 2013 they were so comfortable in each other's company that Tunes might be considered a series of intimate conversations based on some of their favourite standards.
15 October 2025Recipients of the Parliamentary Jazz Awards announced
Vocalist Zoe McFarlane, guitarist Rob Luft and saxophonist John Surman are among the recipients of the 2025 Parliamentary Jazz Awards.
Organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Jazz Group (APPJG) and supported by the Musicians Union and UK Music, the awards are designed to celebrate and recognise the vibrancy, diversity, breadth and talent of the jazz scene throughout the United Kingdom.
The full list of recipients is as follows:
Jazz Vocalist of the Year - Zara McFarlane
Jazz Album of the Year - John Surman, Words Unspoken
Jazz Ensemble of the Year - The Banger Factory
Jazz Newcomer of the Year - Donovan Haffner
Jazz Venue of the Year - Digbeth Jazz
Jazz Media Award - 'Round Midnight with Soweto Kinch
Jazz Education Award - Doncaster Youth Jazz Orchestra
The Martin Hummel Endeavour Award - Olivia Cuttill
Services to Jazz Award - Marianne Windham
Special APPJG Award - Chris Philips
09 October 2025New harp duo showcases three harp styles
The Meeting of Friends, the first recording by a new harp partnership, is released on Tuesday 7th October.
Leading Scottish harper Karen Marshalsay met Cheshire-based composer/harpist Lauren Scott through online harp ceilidhs during lockdown designed to keep harp players from across the world in touch with each other and playing together to rase their spirits in a difficult time. What started as a means for harpists to meet online and play during Lockdown quickly became a way to support each other during Covid times through the joy of shared music.
Their friendship has continued and they recorded together for the first time a few weeks ago.
Composed by Lauren during the summer of 2024, The Meeting of Friends features Karen playing the wire-strung clarsach from the Gaelic tradition and the distinctive-toned bray harp of the lowlands together with Lauren playing the modern lever harp, creating an intriguing blend of sounds and musical styles.
It was recorded by Rob Buckland in Cheshire just before both players released new solo CDs, with Lauren’s Night Lotus coming out on 29th August and Karen’s Eadarainn a’ Chruit : Between Us the Harp following on 5th September.
“We had a great time recording the music,” says Karen. “It’s had some early radio plays. The response has been really encouraging and we’re hoping to work together again soon when our respective schedules allow.”
04 October 2025Tommy Smith and Gwilym Simcock release concert recording
Saxophonist Tommy Smith and pianist Gwilym Simcock release their first recording together, Eternal Light on Friday 3 October 2025 exclusively via Bandcamp.
A live album recorded direct to 2-track at The Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 11 September 2025, Eternal Light captures Smith and Simcock in concert at Scotland’s flagship jazz venue. It features seven original compositions – two new works by Simcock, Weathered and Old Husbands’ Tale, alongside five of Smith’s recent compositions: Eternal Light, Land Between the Rivers, Body or Soul, Harlequin, and El Niño.
The music highlights the deep rapport between two of Europe’s most distinctive voices in contemporary jazz, weaving lyrical interplay, improvisational risk, and a profound sense of storytelling.
Smith has enjoyed an international career spanning collaborations with Gary Burton, Chick Corea, John Scofield, and Arild Andersen. Simcock, one of the most versatile pianists of his generation, has built an international reputation through collaborations with Pat Metheny, Bill Bruford, and the Impossible Gentlemen. Their duo partnership has been described as “a conversation that can go anywhere — from whisper to roar, from abstraction to melody” and Eternal Light reflects the pair’s commitment to risk-taking and reinvention, presenting a body of work that is both grounded and exploratory.
“The duo is the most intimate and exposed of formats,” says Smith. “There is nowhere to hide, although the solo saxophone is even more transparent, but that is also where the beauty lies. The saxophone and piano have such complementary voices. The piano offers harmony, rhythm, and colour, while the saxophone can be a pure line, like a singer.”
Smith and Simcock met while performing with different groups at festivals and it was Smith’s long-time duo partner, the late Brian Kellock who suggested that Smith and Simcock would work well together.
“It felt natural right from the start,” says Smith. “It was as if we were already speaking the same musical language. Over time, we discovered that we share a similar appetite for risk and lyricism, and the duo developed organically. It has become one of the most rewarding partnerships of my career.”
The album is being supported by concerts at Watermill Jazz in Dorking on Tuesday 14th October and the Concorde Club in Eastleigh, near Southampton, on Wednesday 15th October.
01 October 2025Saxophonist Bancroft releases first album from Standards Trio
Saxophonist Phil Bancroft releases the first album by his Standards Trio, No Need For Silence, on his Myriad Streams platform on Friday 24th October.
A celebration of music from the Black American jazz tradition, the album reflects the inspiration Bancroft felt setting out as a teenaged musician on hearing his primary influences, saxophonists John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter.
Here were players who communicated with an overwhelming beauty and intoxicating power. More than this, however, they had a uniqueness of expression. It wasn’t just saxophonists who moved the young Bancroft. Pianists Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, bassists Charles Mingus and Jimmy Garrison and vocalists Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as characters who shaped jazz from Louis Armstrong through Charlie Parker and on to David Murray and beyond, drove Bancroft’s desire also to find his own voice.
“As a white European from a privileged background, I had no idea of the life experiences that fed into those who nurtured and sustained the Black American jazz tradition,” says Bancroft. “I listened to these musicians with a sense of awe but I also took inspiration from European jazz, Celtic music, Indian classical music, African traditions, Western classical music and a host of other sources across musicology, science, philosophy and literature.”
For years, although he continued to listen to it, Bancroft studiously avoided playing the repertoire that had triggered his interest in jazz, preferring to concentrate on music shaped by his own experience. Then, a few years ago, he felt ready. Gathering together long-time partners, bassist Mario Caribe and twin brother, Tom Bancroft, he formed a trio he felt both comfortable with and suitably challenged by.
“It seemed that the time was right to start playing gigs where we celebrated this music,” he says. “It’s not just about the melodies and chord changes. It is about rhythm, it is about feel, about technical and spiritual aspects of improvisation. It’s also about honesty and creating form and meaning in the moment.”
The performances on this album aren’t built from a process of imitation or simulation, Bancroft stresses. As a group the trio are trying to honour the process of finding one’s voice, of being a true improviser, allowing meaning to emerge in music that is within a tradition, but which is fresh, vital and authentic.
“Others will decide if we have succeeded in this,” he says.