2024: The best bits
I like street musicians, as long as they’re not using amplification or pre-recorded assistance. Some of them live on in my head. A clarinetist in a tiny garden near Taksim Square in Istanbul in 1968. A singer and an accordionist paying tribute to Carlos Gardel outside a Rosario shopping mall in 1994. A fluently boppish alto saxophonist outside a hamburger joint in downtown Atlanta that same year. An elderly quartet in a park in Sofia 25 years ago.
The accordionist pictured above has a regular pitch outside the British Museum in Bloomsbury. He’s from Romania. One day this autumn I heard him while on my way from a quick lunch at Caffè Tropea, the Italian restaurant inside the park in Russell Square. Probably my favourite un-fancy eating place in London, it’s been run for 40-odd years by a family with roots in Calabria. Immigrants, eh?
On this day the accordionist was playing Nino Rota’s theme from The Godfather. While I was listening, a young woman walked past, stopped, took a small camera out of her bag, and crouched down to take his photograph with a swift economy of movement that suggested she knew what she was doing. I took a single frame with my iPhone and it records one of the year’s happier moments.
NEW ALBUMS
1 Michael Shrieve: Drums of Compassion (7D Media)
2 Meshell Ndegeocello: No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (Blue Note)
3 Wadada Leo Smith / Amina Claudine Myers: Central Park (Red Hook)
4 Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown (Domino)
5 Bill Frisell: Orchestras (Blue Note)
6 Alice Zawadski / Fred Thomas / Misha Mullova-Abbado: Za Górami (ECM)
7 Ohad Talmor: Back to the Land (Intakt)
8 Manu Chao: Viva Tu (Radio Bemba)
9 Silkroad Ensemble w/ Rhiannon Giddens: American Railroad (Nonesuch)
10 Giovanni Guidi: A New Day (ECM)
11 Pat Thomas: The Solar Model of Ibn Al-Shatir (Otoroku)
12 The Smile: Wall of Eyes (XL)
13 Mike Westbrook: Band of Bands (Westbrook Music)
14 Daniel Sommer / Arve Henriksen / Johannes Lundberg: Sounds & Sequences (April)
15 The Henrys: Secular Hymns & Border Songs (bandcamp)
16 Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: Woodland (Acony)
17 Lady Blackbird: Slang Spirituals (BMG)
18 Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace (Impulse)
19 Johnny Blue Skies (Sturgill Simpson): Passage du Desir (High Top Mountain)
20 Kit Downes: Dr Snap (Bimhuis)
REISSUE / ARCHIVE
1 Miles Davis Quintet: Miles in France 1963 & 1964 (Sony Legacy)
2 Art Tatum: Jewels in the Treasure Box (Resonance)
3 Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert (Impulse)
4 Charlie Parker: Bird in Kansas City (Verve)
5 Anne Briggs: Anne Briggs (Topic)
6 Peter Hammill: Incoherence (Esoteric)
7 Bob Dylan and the Band: The 1974 Live Recordings (Sony Legacy)
8 The History of Les Cousins (Cherry Red)
9 Vanilla Fudge: Where Is My Mind? (Esoteric)
10 The Waterboys: 1985 De Luxe Edition (Chrysalis)
SUI GENERIS
Evan Parker: The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc. (False Walls)
LIVE PERFORMANCE
1 Manu Chao (Brixton Academy, September)
2 Bob Dylan (Royal Albert Hall, November)
3 Steve Lehman / Orchestre National de Jazz (Vortex, June)
4 The Necks (Cafe Oto, April)
5 Django Bates (Vortex, January)
6 Sylvie Courvoisier’s Poppy Seeds (JazzFest Berlin, November)
7 Bruce Springsteen (Wembley Stadium, July)
8 Marilyn Crispell (JazzFest Berlin, November)
9 Bill Frisell Trio (St George’s, Bristol, May)
10 Alexander Hawkins / Marco Colonna (Vortex, October)
MUSIC BOOKS
1 Joe Boyd: And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber)
2 Brad Mehldau: Formation: Building a Personal Canon Vol. 1 (Equinox)
3 Neneh Cherry: A Thousand Threads (Vintage)
4 David Toop: Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr John’s Gris-gris (Strange Attractor Press)
5 Philip Freeman: In the Brewing Luminous (Wolke)
FICTION
Samantha Harvey: Orbital (Vintage)
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Al Pacino: Sonny Boy (Century)
NON-FICTION
Ekow Eshun: The Strangers (Faber & Faber)
FILMS
1 La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)
2 About Dry Grasses (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
3 Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)
DOCUMENTARIES
1 Dahomey (dir. Mati Diop)
2 Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (dir. Johan Grimonprez)
3 Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (dir. Thom Zimny)
RADIO
Composer of the Week: Bud Powell (BBC Radio 3/BBC Sounds)
PODCAST
Kate Lamble’s Grenfell: Building a Disaster (BBC Sounds)
THEATRE
Carwyn by Owen Thomas (London Welsh RFC, October)
EXHIBITIONS
1 Pauline Boty (Gazelli Art House)
2 Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (Tate Modern)
3 John Singer Sargent: Sargent & Fashion (Tate Britain)
4 Gerhard Richter (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
5 Beyond the Bassline (British Library)
thebluemoment.com 
Hi Richard
it would be great if you would link to the things you recommend. Hyperlinks …
cheers
Kieran
Thanks as always, Richard, for sharing with us the work of your superbly attuned sensory organs. I’ll do my best to catch up with your recommendations!
Andrew Blake
How I wish I’d been at that Manu Chao gig! As it is, Pat Metheny and Still Woozy, my first gigs of the decade, were both utterly marvelous in their own unique way. Rob Steen
The Meshell album has been widely praised, but to be honest, I’ve felt exhausted after being harangued constantly for an hour. It felt like I was in a march somewhere rather than listening to music. I tried a few times with no lessening of exhaustion. I admire the musicianship and the thoughts presented, but this was not a pleasurable experience – I deleted it from my Tidal list.
Merry Christmas Richard! And thank you for a year of wonderful postings. Looking forward to more in 2025. All power to your perception and descriptive abilities.
Thanks for all you wrote in 2024!
Live : Evan Parker , Abbazia di Rosazzo , Friuli. Exhibition : Ugo Mulas , Palazzo Reale , Milano . Book : Pariah Genius , by Iain Sinclair . Album : Water Damage – In E.
Unaware of the Tatum & Bird releases can’t wait to hear those, Bud’s COTW was outstanding. The Wadada/Myers album is my pick. Good to see Evan has got his own category!
Unaware of the Tatum & Bird releases can’t wait to hear those, Bud’s COTW was outstanding. The Wadada/Myers album is my pick. Good to see Evan has got his own category!
Many thanks for your recommendations during the year, Richard. Great to see the Bud Powell ‘Composer of the Week’ series on BBC Radio 3 highlighted in your 2024 ‘best bits’ – it was superb. Also very pleased to see Alice Zawadzki, Fred Thomas and Misha Mullov-Abbado and their ‘Za Gorami’ in your list of the year’s best albums. And I will certainly look out for the accordionist on my next visit to the British Museum. Best wishes for Christmas and 2025. Graham.
Thank you for everthing you post along the year and now this summary of all. I must admit I didn’t pay enough attention to the Michael Shrieve album back in May. But listening to it now, it deserves every second of playtime. We really need time of comoassion in these dark hours.
Season’s greetings.
Plenty of sustenance there, Richard !
Thanks again for your superb and thought-provoking contributions throughout 2024 and the best to you for 2025.
I’m a grateful follower of this blog, which is always well-written and interesting. Sometimes I get a new angle on someone/something I already knew of, and sometimes I learn of someone/something entirely new to me.
Thank you, Richard. Enjoy the festive season and keep on keepin’ on!
Hello Richard, Thank you for a wonderful year, full of ideas and new music for me to search out. I have used your photograph of the accordionist as my screen saver. Terrific. Have a peaceful holiday and a great New Year bill smith [Hornby Island] – Canada
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My radio shows can be heard at: https://hornbyradio.com/dj/jazz-gems-with-bill-smith
Yes, I too thank you for a year of reports and thoughts read here.
Sturgill!!! Surprised to see it recommended here, but that was a great album – gloriously out of step with anything else in 2024. Got Joe Boyd’s book for Christmas – ready to dig in. Love your blog. Happy new year