UK 2026 best of so far
Dave Holland, photo: Edition on Bandcamp
All round Win
“I was much too far out all my life” – Stevie Smith
Stone. Classic.
It’s the beautiful Kenny Wheeler themed Vital Spark featuring Norma Winstone and some stirring choral arrangments that tops my list. In the 10 selected all these albums are studio affairs.
Like Winstone a collaborator of Wheeler’s down the years, Dave Holland was, in his case, on the classic Gnu High (ECM, 1976) with Wheeler, Keith Jarrett and Jack De Johnette (who sadly died last year). Winstone collaborated with Kenny and her former husband John Taylor in the hugely influential wordlessly experimental vocals-piano-trumpet trio, Azimuth. Her influence is vast, just recently in 3 small and random examples I came across these singers of very different backgrounds from a new generation of international musicians influenced by her in various ways: Irish singer Laoise Leahy; German singer Aitzi Cofre-Real and the Swede, Rebecka Edlund.
Read a review of Vital Spark below at no 1 in the list. Vital Spark contains beautiful choral arrangements that help give it, and bear with the thought because I’ll explain it, a certain distinctive Englishness. I think of John Clare a bit.
What is song's eternity?
Come and see.
Melodies of earth and sky,
Here they be.
- John Clare
Wheeler’s sound taps that essential melancholia and a certain dreamy pastoralism you get sometimes in English church choral music and classical music more generally and of course the poetry.
Vital Spark has some great poetry contained within its settings ingeniously sewn together and reshaped to suit a jazz cosmos both for feeling and idiom while not messing with the words. William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Stevie Smith. There’s a unity and feeling there that time cannot erase made sense of wrapped in rhythm.
More broadly returning to the choral theme “inevitably” chums I’m thinking Sir John Rutter a bit, one of English choral music’s greatest names who turned 80 last year – making a considerable leap, yes, to do this (if other genre averse, look away now). But the remarkable Pete Churchill’s settings when listening send me hopefully not too outrageously to binge on Rutter – ‘Blake’s Lullaby‘ most.
Churchill’s wife Nikki Iles is ideal in the John Taylor-ian mould on the album and Mark Lockheart I heard recently live (not at all haggling the Coltranian and Hartman-esque feeling more caressing it with “Marvellous” Marvin Muoneké). I don’t think I have ever heard the Loose Tubes and Polar Bear eminence better on record. His soprano sax intro on the Stevie setting is, without fear of hyperbole, perfect.
The full list
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9
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4
3
2
1
Elsewhere
As you’ll notice and it isn’t always thus most of the list emanates from England with the London scene strongly represented. Hardly a surprise, eh. It’s the biggest population of the home countries and the home of most jazzers.
- Top Welsh – Joe Webb’s Neath Beat
Top from Scotland Colin Steele’s Stramash II
Top from Northern Ireland – the Zak Irvine EP Before Dusk and Dawn
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