The EFG London Jazz Festival turns 30 this year, and is celebrating with its biggest ever line-up: 2,000 artists in over 70 venues across the capital. Artists of international renown, and pending stardom. Singers and musicians who swing and groove, scat and soothe. Icons. Visionaries. Grammy-winners. Boundary-leaping experimentalists. Elders who’ve sessioned with departed greats. Musicians who remind us of the roots of jazz - in the blues of New Orleans, in West African music and culture – and of jazz’s role as protest music.
Here are such disparate genres as Afrobeat, drum’n’bass and Turkish psychedelia, their inclusion underlining the ability of jazz to absorb and adapt. Jazz has never been dead; it just changes shape, and moves forward.
