Ezra Collective became the first British jazz band to make a splash at the Brits in 2025, winning Best Group and making headlines with their plea to save the nation’s youth clubs.

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Ebba Åsman’s smoky late-night jazz is adorned with crackles of electronica on this brief taster from the Swedish trombonist’s new album.

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Miles Davis’s quartet of albums recorded with his quintet in 1956 is regarded among the highlights of his stellar career. This comes from the final one, Steamin’.

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Abbey Lincoln was an actor, a civil rights activist and a jazz singer in the mould of her idol Billie Holiday.

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I’ve never been a jazz-funk fan and the vibraphone would be very low on my list of favourite instruments, ranking alongside the flute and just above the ukelele. But I’d have to make an exception for Roy Ayers.

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Skoota Warner is a multi-talented drummer turned rapper turned drummer again, harnessing hip-hop and southern-fried funk from New Orleans.

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The most extraordinary thing about this tune is the age of the man who made it. Marshall Allen, the sprightly old fellow you can see capering about in the video, celebrated his 100th birthday almost a year ago.

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I feel like everybody knows this song. But if you’re anything like me, you’re not sure how you know it. It certainly wasn’t from the time Nancy Wilson had her first hit with it back in 1964 because I was a tiny kid at the time.

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Billie Holiday’s song Easy Living has gone on to become a jazz standard. It was also the favourite song of one of the two central characters in the film of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian romance novel The Price Of Salt.

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When it comes to jazz and classical music, the examples I like best are when they incorporate subtle electronic undertones. That’s the case here with German composer Ralph Heidel, though that element is almost  subliminal on this track, Wake Up.

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