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Laura Jurd
Performing regularly throughout the UK and Europe, she leads the 2017 Mercury-nominated band Dinosaur who have performed at North Sea, Montreal and Molde International Jazz festivals to name a few. A highly active composer, Laura's is equally at home writing for contemporary chamber groups and orchestras as she is writing for jazz ensembles and improvising musicians. Frequently creating works that present musical ingredients from outside the world of jazz music, within the realms of a jazz band, she has by been commissioned by the likes of the BBC Proms and the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, Ligeti Quartet and the Northern Sinfonia.
A passionate educator, Laura is also a professor of composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance; jazz trumpet teacher at Goldsmiths University; co-leads the Trinity Laban Jazz Orchestra and works regularly with the National Youth Jazz Collective.
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Corrie Dick: Sun Swells
by Geannine Reid
Corrie Dick is a multi-instrumentalist who has recorded on drums, piano, vocals, synth, guitar, and trumpet. As a composer, Dick is known for his dynamism, his melodic slant, and his playfully subversive melding of genres. Presenting his sonically inventive drumming, which has a rhythmic epicenter of a new era of innovative British jazz, is Dick's release Sun Swells . The album's theme is to create a folk-rock-jazz with rock instrumentation and color by Rob Luft on guitar and Tom McCredie ...
read moreMoss Freed / Union Division: Micromotives
by John Sharpe
A question any composer for improvisers must face is whether they can create something more worthwhile than what they might come up with if left to themselves. It can be a tough call. For some, such as Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra or Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet, the ultimate conclusion was no, while for others such as Anthony Braxton and Barry Guy the answer has been far less clear cut. British guitarist Moss Freed falls somewhere between the two ...
read moreLaura Jurd: The Big Friendly Album
by Chris May
The Big Friendly Album is what it is called and that is exactly what it is. London-based trumpeter/cornetist and composer Laura Jurd's fourth album under her own name is a big hearted, gorgeously lyrical, feel-good romp, which does not preclude cerebral engagement but which wears its complexities so lightly that one barely notices them. Jurd last came to the attention of All About Jazz during The Great Pause, with the release of the perfect little masterpiece To ...
read moreDinosaur: To The Earth
by Ian Patterson
One of the flag bearers of contemporary British jazz, Dinosaur's rise to more international renown accelerated with its signing to Edition Records, and the subsequent release of Together, As One (2016) and Wondertrail. (2018). Formerly known as the Laura Jurd Quartet, the band had already been going since 2010, releasing one album, Landing Ground (Chaos Collective, 2012) to general critical approval. Each album displays significant personality--the embrace of strings, or analogue keyboards--and Jurd's refusal to tread the same stylistic water. ...
read moreLaura Jurd: Getting Elemental
by Chris May
Whatever other delights come along during 2020 in the way of great jazz albums, it is a near certainty that among the joint number ones will be To The Earth (Edition) by Dinosaur. Formed as the Laura Jurd Quartet in 2010 by students at London's Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and still led by trumpeter and composer Jurd, the band's lineup has remained unchanged since its inception. It is completed by pianist and keyboard player Elliot Galvin, bassist ...
read moreDinosaur: To The Earth
by Chris May
Britain's Edition label has remained independent of London's post-2015 alternative jazz scene, whose aesthetic is formed in part by the emphases of identity politics and which now, in 2020, has gone overground with the signing of three bands led by movement auteur Shabaka Hutchings to Impulse! in the US. Edition, which was founded in 2008 by pianist Dave Stapleton and photographer Tim Dickeson, has preferred to pursue its own path. It has done so with magnificent style. (The label made ...
read moreBrilliant Corners 2020
by Ian Patterson
Brilliant Corners 2020 Various Venues jny:Belfast, N. Ireland February 27 to March 7, 2020 Maybe it's global warming, for just as the first bloom of spring in these strange times appears in February, so too, Brilliant Corners starts ever earlier. From its first, modest edition over three days in mid-March 2013, Belfast's only jazz festival has gradually fattened into a ten-day feast. But instead of reaching towards the warmer days of Spring, ...
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Rasmus Henriksen
composer / conductor
