I should probably confess right now that I’m not a jazz fan. Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of free-form prog-rock noodling and I melt every time Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert pops up on my playlist (perhaps because it’s in one of my favourite films) but as soon as I hear proper jazz-jazz — you know, scat singing, a muted trumpet or, God forbid, that awful ‘Americano’ song from the OG Ripley film — it’s a hard no.
Why? It could be the worthy intellectualism, all that IYKYK cliquishness; it could also be because, as they say in Spinal Tap, ‘Jazz is just a series of mistakes without the, “Oops.”’ I appreciate it comes in many forms and will have massively influenced much of the music I do enjoy, but drums are for bashing, not stroking with brushes.
That said, London is currently in the grip of a jazzurgence and London five-piece Ezra Collective, the first jazz act to win the Mercury Prize, could eventually bring me round. Elsewhere, we look back on April’s astrological chaos as a particularly challenging retrograde finally passes (it can’t just have been us!); Eighties superstar Molly Ringwald, who plays one of the Swans in the new Feud series, talks Truman Capote, The Breakfast Club and Kanye; with the three-way movie Challengers steaming up big screens, Emily Phillips deciphers the new rules of throupling (the scheduling alone sounds exhausting); and read St Vincent on Vodka Red Bulls, Dishoom and Jack the Ripper in My London. PS My anti-jazz stand might well be trauma from playing the trombone at school.
