We have three pairs of tickets available for Jazzwise readers to hear the remarkable Storms/Nocturnes at the Purcell Room in London on 12 March.

The sax/piano/vibes trio – Tim Garland, Geoffrey Keezer and Joe Locke – has developed a strong following over the years and their return to London for this Southbank Centre concert is eagerly anticipated.

To win a pair of tickets simply answer the following question: Where was Joe Locke born? Was it

A Palo Alto, California

B Chertsey, Surrey

C Sydney, Australia

Email your answer to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with the subject line "Storms Nocturnes – Jazzwise". The closing date is 7 March. The first three correct names out of the hat will each win a pair of tickets. Good luck.

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The Manchester jazz renaissance continued last night at Ronnie Scott’s with the launch of Big Ideas by the main motivators of the city’s new jazz scene Beats & Pieces Big Band. With a recent strong showing by fellow Mancunian Stuart McCallum at Jez Nelson’s Jazz in the Round last month the scene has successfully exported itself to London venues and Beats & Pieces, who returned to Ronnie’s after a much talked about appearance last year in the Frith Street club during the Brit-Jazz fest, are clearly the motor that drives the current scene.

What is remarkable about the band led by Ben Cottrell is the original sounding charts that keep jazz at its heart but has the scope to incorporate experimental rock, notably their take on Radiohead. Big bands in recent years have never been the most cutting edge of outfits bogged down by boring swing rehashes, dodgy band tuxes, and clapped out charts that most young jazzers run a mile from. Beats & Pieces who were fairly unknown outside Manchester until they won a competition in the German city of Burghausen have managed to inject a vim and vigour to the big band construct, and they can truly claim to be a successor to Loose Tubes, although their style has less of the shambling anarchy and inspirations of Django Bates and co about it. But it does share the same spirit of adventurousness, although essentially B&P is less of a free jazz unit than an oversize prog jazz behemoth with the odd customised nod to the likes of Quincy Jones and even Stan Kenton. The band also manages to tap obliquely into its northern hinterland with recalibrated nods to brass band music along the way.

There are lots of great idiosyncratic players tucked away in the band and last night saxophonist Ben Watte, drummer Finlay Panter, and trumpeter Nick Walters stood out while the writing (‘Bake’ in particular) had an ingenious way of cross fertilizing rhythms and gaining traction across reeds and horns. There were some lovely flugelhorn passages and plenty of variety throughout. Cottrell did well to keep his cool to settle the full house when there were problems with both the bridge of the bass and snare drum at the beginning. No one was remotely fazed and you couldn’t help come away with the thought that big is most definitely back.

– Stephen Graham

Beats & Pieces play the Gateshead Jazz Festival on 24 March and the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple on 28 March

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Singer Claire Martin is to release her latest album Too Much in Love to Care on 30 April, her label Linn records has just confirmed. Martin appears on the release with the great US pianist Kenny Barron and an all-American band of bassist Peter Washington, drummer Kenny Washington and saxophonist/flautist Steve Wilson. Martin appeared with the Washingtons on her 1997 album Make This City Ours.

Too Much in Love to Care follows on from the Brighton-based classic jazz singer’s duo album Witchcraft with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, which concentrated extensively on the Cy Coleman songbook. Too Much in Love to Care places itself completely in Great American Songbook territory a terrain Martin has become firmly identified with after brief forays into more singer/songwriter-derived material on earlier albums such as Perfect Alibi when she covered the likes of Phoebe Snow and Julia Fordham.

Martin, who also co-presents BBC radio 3’s Jazz Line-Up weekly Sunday night magazine show, was awarded an OBE last year for services to music. She has an extensive discography dating back to the beginning of the 1990s and her debut album The Waiting Game. Influenced by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter early on and later Shirley Horn, Martin has a fan base both here in the UK and in the US following successful stints at venues including Jazz at Lincoln Center and the famed Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel where Jamie Cullum made his US debut and which currently faces closure. Cullum himself says of Martin: "Claire is unbeatable and sets the standard for all us singers."

Martin’s new album was recorded at Avatar in New York. The 13 tracks are: ‘Too Much In Love To Care’, ‘Embraceable You’, ‘Weaver of Dreams’, ‘Crazy He Calls Me’, ’You Turned The Tables On Me’, ’How Long Has This Been Going On?’, ‘Lazy Afternoon’, ‘Time After Time’, ‘A Time For Love’, ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, ‘I’m Glad There Is You’, ‘Wonder Why’, and ‘Too Late Now’.

Martin works with Kenny Barron for the first time on this album. Now 68, the multi-Grammy nominated Barron originally from Philadelphia began his career with Mel Melvin’s orchestra in the 1950s before becoming heavily associated with James Moody in the 60s following Barron’s earlier move to New York. He toured with Lalo Schifrin’s quintet for four years in the 1960s, and saw out the decade with Freddie Hubbard before working with Yusuf Lateef and Ron Carter in the 70s. The 1980s saw Barron co-lead the band Sphere with Monk’s former close playing associate saxophonist Charlie Rouse, and Barron has more than 30 albums to his own name as a leader. Night and the City with Charlie Haden, for instance, released in the 1990s, made an impact internationally as did later album The Traveler and Barron’s many compositions, including notably ‘Phantoms’ (from The Traveler), which Eddie Henderson performed to effect at Pizza Express Jazz Club last autumn, have become latter-day standards.

Ahead of the album’s release Martin appears in a fundraiser on 30 March for Brighton & Hove Women Against the Cuts at Sallis Benney Theatre in Brighton accompanied by guitarist Jim Mullen. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee is to introduce the event. Other upcoming gigs include Buxton Opera House, Buxton (25 February) in duo with Sir Richard Rodney Bennett; guesting with the Steve Grossman / Damon Brown Quintet at Pizza Express Jazz Club, London (27-28 February); Maltings, Farnham (15 March) again with Richard Rodney Bennett; and in duo with Bennett at Town Hall, Chipping Norton (18 March).

– Stephen Graham

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Nothing if not prolific and following quickly on from last year’s superlative solo Live In Marciac set Brad Mehldau returns in March with his latest album Ode, his label Nonesuch has confirmed.

A trio studio album, the first since Day is Done, when drummer Jeff Ballard first joined Mehldau and bassist Larry Grenadier for their initial outing on record released seven years ago, Ode features none of Mehldau’s trademark alt. rock covers but instead concentrates on the pianist’s original compositions.

The album is a portrait of real and fictional characters, ‘odes’ to their personalities seen through Mehldau’s distinctive compositional lens. Eleven tracks in all, the album recorded in 2008 and 2011 opens with ‘M.B’, for Michael Brecker, whose final album Pilgrimage Mehldau appeared on, and continues with the elegiac title track following built on quietly enveloping tremolos.

‘26’ takes the energy levels up a notch followed by ‘Dream Sketch’ which has a real stamp of quality about it, punctuated as it is by tersely dissonant “wrong notes” punched out intuitively as the tension is ratcheted upwards. ‘Bee Blues’ is the bebop-type interlude Mehldau fans will be familiar with at concerts, the kind of inconsequential loosener that makes what comes afterwards that more vital.

‘Twiggy’ draws to mind Highway Rider in its narrative urgency with Ballard coming to the fore on leathery percussion while ‘Kurt Vibe’ gives Grenadier the chance to establish the mood, and Mehldau sounds as if he’s in mid-thought rather than halfway into a habitually intense piece of soul-searching. Oh, in case you were wondering, the Kurt is as in guitar supremo Rosenwinkel not his grungeness, Kurt Cobain.

‘Stan The Man’ opens with a Leonard Bernstein-type set up, before launching into furious bebop, while the heart of the album can possibly be found on the ‘outlaw’ homage to Easy Rider’s George Hanson on ‘Wyatt’s Eulogy for George Hanson.’

‘Aquaman’ and the nine minute-long ‘Days of Dilbert Delaney’ complete the album, which as a whole firmly shifts our focus back on to Mehldau the composer, and the potency of his formidable trio.

– Stephen Graham

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