Guardian Music — Kings Place, LondonColin Towns, the one-time rock pianist and TV and film composer, paints big musical canvases, full of colliding characters who sound like relatives of Stravinsky, Zappa, the Beatles, Miles Davis or Kurt Weill. He usually unleashes ... more info

Guardian Music — (Provocateur)European jazz composers and bandleaders have been in awe of Colin Towns since he downsized his movie-scoring career in the early 1990s and launched a scintillating jazz orchestra – feted young Manchester band Beats & Pieces are the lat... more info

Guardian Music — (Naim)Get the Blessing trumpeter Pete Judge says this new album finds the exuberant Portishead-powered quartet "less afraid to be itself than it used to be". With its thundering rock-bass grooves and scorching early Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry horn so... more info

Guardian Music — (F-ire) Yuriy Galkin is a young UK-based Russian bassist and composer influenced by the early Miles Davis and Gil Evans collaborations, Kenny Wheeler, Dave Holland and 20th-century classical composing. He won the Dankworth Composition prize in 2010 f... more info

Guardian Music — Ronnie Scott's, LondonBeats & Pieces, the inspired four-year-old big band, was formed from a core of Manchester music students under the wing of young composer/arranger Ben Cottrell. On its current tour's stopover at Ronnie Scott's it proved that las... more info

L.A. Times - Pop & Hiss — When folk singer Karen Dalton died in 1993 at age 55, she left behind two classic but unknown records made in the late 1960s and early ’70s and featuring session players who’d done time with Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, among others. more info

Guardian Music — 'The album was created with no talking. It's telepathy – Wobble and me just have that'Jah Wobble, bassIf it weren't for John [Lydon] I wouldn't have started playing bass. I knocked around with him in 1976. One day, he said: "I'm going to be in a ba... more info

Stopcryingyourheartout.com — Noel Gallagher: not the staid three-chord classicist some perhaps thought, it turns out. Created in tandem with his High Flying Birds solo album, the man they call The Chief has a second record under his own name out this year and it'll sound (litera... more info

Guardian Music — (Jazz Village)Pianist Ahmad Jamal (a man even Miles Davis credited as a big influence) is now 81 – and he remains a genius at the art of motivic improvising, repeating a catchy theme (so listeners don't lose the plot) while transforming it with fre... more info

Guardian Music — A veteran music writer tells how he reconnected with the soundtrack of his life after suffering sudden hearing lossWhat is the opposite of music? Before reading Nick Coleman's affecting memoir, my temptation might have been to suggest unthinkingly th... more info