jazz – SCOOPE

Growing into Community with Cross The Tracks

photo credit Ellie Koepke

“Londoners aren’t unfriendly; they’re just cold” — overheard while wandering between the food stalls and the main stage at Cross The Tracks 2026. Beneath the heatwave, the comment floated through Brockwell Park half jokingly, half truthfully, as festival goers searched for shade and shared drinks under London’s unexpectedly bright sun.

But it was not only the warmth that defined the thousands gathered at Brixton’s historical music mecca. There was a noticeable shift this year. We are used to the platter of rising stars and established names that Cross The Tracks brings together year after year. Yet somehow, this edition felt more intentional and more communal. Maybe it was in the way people lingered between sets, or how strangers struck up conversations while sitting cross legged on the grass. For a festival devoted to a grassroots, home grown, genre focused experience, the day carried an especially meaningful tone. While this may seem like the minimum standard for music events, it often feels as if London’s well for joy is running low.

Speaking to local festival goers, particularly within the non pop realms of jazz, funk, and soul, you would not struggle to hear a critical remark about the city’s lack of people led, enjoyable, and most importantly affordable spaces.

The Big Smoke labels itself as a city in constant motion. Ripe with opportunity and hustle, it can feel as if anything is possible in London. But what happens when the people behind that hustle are increasingly overworked, lacking the spaces needed to unwind, connect and share? Throughout the day, there was a clear appreciation for simply having somewhere to slow down together for a moment. With that in mind, those who go the extra mile to retain a sense of pleasure and normalcy through dedicated community models of music deserve recognition accordingly. The Cross The Tracks atmosphere signals a hopeful shift in the UK festival landscape.

This year’s line up featured a red carpet of London’s finest: Little Simz, Joy Crookes, and Kokoroko among them. And while the wider sonic world is often pushed toward the faster, synthetic blips of virality, Cross The Tracks’ choice to stay rooted in genre specialisation feels refreshing.

Their focus on historically Black origin music is another strength in the festival’s identity. Rather than chasing mass appeal, the organisers leaned into homage, roots, and heritage. Music that moves the spirit. Music that connects.

Beyond their curation of genre fusion — from Afroswing to electronic jazz — the festival caters to what feels like a Crowd That Cares. Artists spanned taste and time. This was a playground for all ages; from eight to eighty, everyone found something to take from the sonic buffet. Heritage pioneers and creative disruptors of the youth kept the audience diverse and the energy familial. The addition of panel talks, workshops, and boutique traders added a thoughtful touch.

Across the wider ecosystem, it often feels as if we are on the edge of a cultural shift. Headlines about AI music and shrinking attention spans feel constant. Yet festivals like Cross The Tracks remind us that there is still a deep appetite for intentional artistry, live connection, and spaces that encourage growth rather than instant gratification.

That is what lingered most after the final set. Beyond the music itself, Cross The Tracks felt like a reminder that community still exists. Sometimes it begins with something as simple as showing up: to a local gig, a shared conversation, or a space where people can gather, even if only for a day.

Where London’s Soul Keeps Breaking Open

A quiet look at the cultural fault lines shaping Cross The Tracks 2026

There is something about London in late May that feels like a held breath. The city moves with a slower confidence, as if it knows the season is about to open in ways that are not loud but deeply felt. You sense it in the small things. The way people linger outside longer. The way music drifts out of open windows. The way rhythm becomes a kind of shared language again.

Across the city, a quiet shift has been taking place. Soul, jazz, alt R and B, and the many voices of the diaspora have moved from the margins into the cultural bloodstream. These sounds are not trends. They are continuities. They carry memory, community, and a kind of emotional clarity that feels rare in a landscape dominated by scale and spectacle.

Cross The Tracks sits right inside that movement. It is not a festival that tries to impress. It gathers. It listens. It brings together artists who shape the present without needing to announce it. Little Simz at the center. Joy Crookes, Obongjayar, KOKOROKO, and Mereba weaving their own worlds. The heritage of UK garage and grime held by Wookie, El B, and Fabio and Grooverider. Community partners who treat culture as something lived rather than programmed.

This is the space where SCOOPE pays attention. Not to the noise, but to the intention behind it. To the way music can open a city and make it feel human again.

Later this season, we will return to this ground in London. For now, we stay with the movement that makes it possible.

Miles Davis and the Paris Sessions That Opened a New Era

A return to the soundtrack that still echoes through modern jazz

To mark the centenary of Miles Davis, Decca Records France releases new deluxe vinyl and CD editions of the landmark soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Recorded in Paris in December 1957, the score remains one of the most influential jazz soundtracks ever made and one of the few created entirely through live improvisation as the musicians watched the film unfold.

The reissue programme, available on May 22, appears in three formats. A 180 gram vinyl LP with the original liner notes by Boris Vian. An expanded set of three ten inch vinyl records that includes all session takes and an essay by Franck Bergerot. And a limited two CD edition with a sixty page hardcover book featuring new notes by Ashley Kahn and Franck Bergerot.

First released in 1958, the recording quickly became a cult object. Few film scores have shaped the atmosphere and reputation of a film so decisively. Nearly seventy years later, beyond the mythology of its creation, the music still stands as one of Davis’s most striking works. Tense, nocturnal and stripped to its emotional core.

The story behind the session is now part of jazz folklore. While performing at Club Saint Germain in late 1957, Davis was approached by Louis Malle, who was dissatisfied with the music planned for his debut feature. After a private screening, Davis agreed. On December 4 he entered the studio with Barney Wilen, René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke, four musicians rooted in the Paris scene. Preparation was minimal. A few harmonic sketches, a brief explanation of the plot and projected loops of key scenes. The musicians improvised directly to the images and created a sound world built on atmosphere rather than composition.

What the official history often leaves unsaid is the cultural moment surrounding it. Paris offered Davis a freedom he rarely experienced in the United States, where racism shaped both daily life and the reception of Black musicians. In France he found a different kind of recognition, artistic and personal, and a relationship with actress Juliette Gréco that anchored him in the creative circles of the city. That sense of space is audible in the music. Open, brooding and radically intuitive.

The film itself moves in the world of French noir, with its empty streets, moral shadows and slow burning tension. Davis’s improvised score deepens that atmosphere. His trumpet lines echo the quiet danger and drifting solitude that define the genre. It is not classic American noir, but a Parisian evolution of it, and the soundtrack has become one of the clearest examples of how jazz can shape the emotional language of cinema.

Long before Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain or his later work with Marcus Miller, Davis was already expanding the vocabulary of modern music and redefining what a film score could be.

The soundtrack was first issued on a ten inch LP by Fontana and awarded the Grand Prix du Disque. In the United States it appeared on Columbia’s Jazz Track and received a Grammy nomination in 1960. The new editions revisit the complete sessions from December 4 and 5, 1957, presented across 180 gram vinyl, three ten inch vinyl records and a limited two CD set with archival photography and newly commissioned essays.

About Miles Davis
Miles Davis (1926–1991) fundamentally reshaped modern music across five decades of relentless reinvention. From pioneering bebop and cool jazz to defining hard bop, modal improvisation, and electric fusion, Davis treated each genre breakthrough as a starting point rather than a destination. His discography reads like a timeline of jazz’s evolution with dozens of albums that continue to define both the essence and the outer limits of improvised music. His accolades include eight Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, eleven recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame, induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and stars on both the Hollywood and St. Louis Walks of Fame. Beyond music, Davis established himself as a style icon (#1 on GQ’s Most Stylish Musicians of All Time), visual artist (paintings exhibited across four continents), and symbol of artistic independence. In 2012, the U.S. Postal Service honored his legacy with a commemorative stamp, cementing his status as an American cultural monument.

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