News Atlas

Branford Marsalis Quartet and Dianne Reeves: Dedicated to You review – eloquent Coltrane tribute

(Blue Note)This elegant contemporary reinvention of 1963 album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman pairs Marsalis’s post-bop sax with Reeves’ agile vocals, to time-stopping effectIn the early 1960s, the Impulse! label tried to steer its star saxophonist John Coltrane away from increasingly uncompromising and experimental music that it feared might be scaring its customers. Label boss Bob Thiele suggested a more palatable all-ballads album with a little-known African American supper-club singer called Johnny Hartman, whose warm, Bing Crosby-like baritone but bracing absence of schmaltz had already impressed Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Coltrane and Hartman hit it off perfectly, and the 1963 album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, was an unexpected mini masterpiece of restraint, flawless timbral expressiveness, and mutual understanding.Invited by Blue Note Records in Coltrane’s centenary

John FordhamJazzMusic

GuardianOct 8Preview

Troye Sivan: She’s the Best review – a strange, singular pop star who deserves to be multiplatinum

(Interscope)Adored by the A-list and filling arenas, but without huge smash hits, the Australian singer treads his own distinctive path through pop via shoegaze, Balearic and the SmithsA few years back, the New York Times reported on the phenomenon of the “middle-class pop star”. The feature bluntly explained that this signified “a pop star who isn’t that popular”, for whom the word signified not commercial dominance, but “a sound, an aesthetic, an attitude”. It isn’t an entirely new phenomenon: you may recall a game late 00s attempt to differentiate critically acclaimed but commercially underground pop artists – Alphabeat, Frankmusik and the Clik Clik among them – from the massed ranks of chart-topping TV talent show graduates by grouping them together under the generic banner of “wonky pop”. But the arrival of social media clearly changed things dramatically, enabling artists who seldo

Alexis PetridisTroye SivanMusic