I’m very happy to have four more band outings before the year is up. Twice in London and then twice in the fatherland on our December mini-tour. First up is Chelsea’s 606 Club on Monday 24th October. Next the EFG London Jazz Festival is happening once again and my band is playing at the Take Five stage hosted by Serious at the Purcell Room on Saturday 19th November at 3 pm, along with fellow Take Fivers Marcus Joseph, Charlotte Keefe, Doom Cannon, Nishla Smith and Midori Jaeger. And finally… Jazz Club Ferrara hosted by 7 Virtual Jazz Club (16th) and Auditorium Mons. G. Di Donna in Andria, Puglia (17th) in our December Italian tour. All of the above feature my wonderful pals James Davison, Matthew Herd, Sam Rapley, Liam Dunachie & Scott Chapman.

Also at the London Jazz Festival is a special concert I am organising and co-directing with Bridget O’Donnell called Songs for the Earth. It is a fusion of folk, jazz and classical music, inspired by our need to connect with nature and the outdoors, with a programme made up of my arrangements of nature-inspired folk music performed by myself and a string quartet of some of London’s finest players around. The concert is happening at Omnibus Theatre in Clapham and will be on Sunday 20th November at 7:30 pm.

It has been wonderful to be back to playing and touring full time after spending so much time at home over the pandemic working on recordings. Last Autumn was quite overwhelming at times, and right now it is good to have a healthy balance of working form home on commissions (for NW Live Arts later this year and also the Norfolk & Norwich Festival) and arrangements (for a project with Sinfonia Cymru in April), whilst also playing lots of jazz in London and preparing for more travels in the coming months.

My band has had a quiet start to the year but we have 4 shows coming up in the next two months (one in Poole and the rest in London). See the Gigs page for more details, but they are at The Lighthouse in Poole (25th February), Omnibus in Clapham (6th March), the Music in Pinner Series (12th March) and the 606 Club in Chelsea (6th April). As ever I’m bringing new music to the set list each time while we’re still largely playing music from our most recent album Dream Circus. Also next month my mum and I are finally doing our Music We Love tour in Italy, having originally meant to perform at most of those venues two years ago. We’re doing 6 concerts across the country 20th-28th March, again see the Gigs page for more details if you’re in Italy then.

One of the recording projects I was involved in at the end of last year was an EP for the new exclusive all-digital label October House Records, with music I’d written over recent years and performed by the Hill Quartet and clarinettist Ben Mellefont. This record, called Road Songs, came out at the end of January this year and you can preview, stream and download it now.

Two years ago we finished 3 days at The Village Studio in Copenhagen recording my most recent album for Edition Records Dream Circus. What an enjoyable few days those were, and I’m so happy with what we produced and how that experience has shaped the vibe of the band so much since then, both musically and personally. Obviously a lot has happened since then, but I’m happy to finally be able to do a proper London album launch next month, assuming of course we don’t have any new surprises in the meantime. So please SAVE THE DATE – it’s at Pizza Express Soho (Dean Street) on Wednesday 27th October and tickets are now available.

In other news it has been the most enjoyable and musically fulfilling summer ever, with concerts up and down the whole country including with the Manchester Collective at the BBC Proms, with Alice Zawadzki at Britten Pears Arts, Sam Lee at Saffron Hall and my own band at NQ Jazz. Life is definitely better for musicians without lockdowns so praying there isn’t another one. Coming up in the next few months, apart from my own band’s album launch I’ll be zooming up and down the UK (and also around Finland) with Sam Lee and his band, playing at Jazz Point in Ibiza with Alice Zawadzki, another tour with the Manchester Collective, and many more exciting things which you can find on my gigs page.

Finally, earlier this summer an album some dear friends of mine and I have spent the last two years making called Amerikua has been released. Our band is called Puentes and the album is a collection of South American songs inspired by the Amazon rainforest. I co-produced, engineered and mixed this album, as well as putting down some bass and vocal harmonies.

Assuming they don’t get postponed again, I am very excited to be performing with my band 3 times in the coming summer months. Like most others in the musical world we live in I’ve got used to waiting patiently for things to start up again and not get too excited about anything in the future as so many hopes and dreams of life returning to normal have been crushed. The first is on Saturday 26th June at the Fermata Festival in Earl’s Court (London). After that it’s the 3-times-postponed Up Close And Musical festival on Saturday 14th August (the original date for this was supposed to be well over a year ago and so we’re really hoping this can finally happen) which is also in London (near Farringdon) and then NQ Jazz in Manchester on Monday 30th August.

In other news I also have some concerts coming up with my mum Viktoria Mullova, with a new swing trio featuring Lizzie Ball and Nick Fitch, with the Manchester Collective at the BBC Proms, and my dear friends and musical collaborators for many years – the wonderful Sam Lee and Alice Zawadzki. This is of course assuming nothing gets cancelled in the next couple of months – this is the first time I’ve dared updated my website all year as I wanted to wait until it felt reasonably likely things would go ahead as planned. Feel free to head to my Gigs page for more info.

Well this year really didn’t go as anyone thought it would at all. The music world is one of many that has suffered a huge amount by being able to do barely any of the planned concerts and festivals, and I so hope that we will all be able to perform again like we used to before this year. In the meantime however it’s amazing how many recordings got to be made in place of the usual touring, and I’ve been lucky to have made a lot of progress in a new branch of music-making for me which has been engineering and producing. One of the highlights from this year was recording with my dear friend for many years now, the brilliant singer-songwriter Nessi Gomes. We recorded two covers that Nessi released this year as singles, a song in Portuguese called Novo Amanhecer (A New Dawn) and one in Hebrew called Hine Ani (As You Will). With the help of some new recording gear and many hours on Logic I am proud to have helped create these two singles which have already been so well-received.

And then more generally I am so happy that my third album as a bandleader Dream Circus was released on Edition Records in June this year, despite the entire album tour getting cancelled. It has had many shining reviews which you can read in the reviews section below. Also the album my mum and I recorded Music We Love was recorded right at the start of the year and came out in September. And finally I am still so proud of the 5-track EP The Light That Shines which Patchwork Jazz Orchestra recorded in total isolation during the first national lockdown in the spring. So despite almost all of our gigs being cancelled we have all managed to still create and release music, and I am so grateful for that.

During this year of few live performances but enough recording projects to make up for it, my mum Viktoria and I are really happy to announce that our duo album Music We Love is being released later this month on Friday 25th September on Onyx Classics. The album contains a broad selection of music from many different cultures that we’ve arranged for violin and bass, and we recorded it in back in January when life felt very different, in the very capable hands of Robin Hawkins (Compton Audio) who recorded and mixed the album. Also thanks to the wonderful Aga Tomaszek (whose work is everywhere on this website) for the wonderful photo of us used in the artwork.

We’re so looking forward to being able to share this album with you all. Earlier this week a single from the album “Spring Fly” (the theme from an Estonian cartoon) has been released as a sneak preview on Spotify. Have a listen!

In the meantime I’m very happy that my own album Dream Circus is still getting such praise in reviews all over Europe. See the post below for some highlights, and do have a listen to the album if you haven’t yet. At the moment (fingers crossed – nothing seems to be certain these days) my band is due to perform our first actual real concert to an audience since January on Friday 2nd October at the Two Moors Festival in Somerset. Come along if you’re nearby, or else watch this space as very slowly the music scene starts to rebuild itself…

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed the album so far. Click on the links below to read the full review…

“Dream Circus is a poetic, romantic and rhythmic work… Edition Records once again demonstrates beautiful European diversity in the world of jazz today… Yet another ‘Indispensable’ rating that the editors of Bayou Blue Radio and Paris-Move will attribute to ‘Dream Circus’ for the quality of composition and performance, and the cinematic atmosphere intervening at times with welcome writing tricks…”
Thierry Docmac, Paris-Move (FRANCE) ★★★★★

“My album of the year so far. Cleverly written and played, but also beautiful, musical and although “classically” inflected in places, definitely jazz: distinctly modern but with mainstream and lyrical roots. This third outing by London-based double bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado confirms a new and substantial British ensemble composing voice, joining the tradition of Kenny Wheeler, Mike Gibbs and Issie Barratt.”
Chris Kilsby, Bebop Spoken Here (UK)

“The writing, the playing and the recording are of such high quality that once you’ve put the record on, you need a very good reason to take it off. This is modern jazz with a powerful imagination and a sense of variety that never compromises its integrity. It’s a music with roots in hard bop but a strong commitment to melody.”
Richard Williams, Blue Moment (UK)

“This studio recording has the soul and spontaneity of a live performance – the musicians seem to play with total freedom. But that apparent freedom is in fact the composer’s trademark and living proof of his creative mastery… The warm expressivity of Misha’s melodic bass is a perfect match for the sparkling brass instruments, crowned by a pianist whose agile hands could be acrobats in a dizzying trapeze act.”
Jean-Michel Schlosser, Couleurs Jazz (FRANCE)

“The band of former fellow students, with whom he is now presenting his third album, has been in existence for four years – a sextet that often sounds larger due to the skilled use of three wind instruments.”
Berthold Klostermann, Fono Forum (GERMANY) ★★★★★ (music) / ★★★★ ½ (sound)

“Wallow [yourselves] in the harmony of the solos of trumpeter James Davison, alto saxophonist Matthew Herd, tenor saxophonist Sam Rapley or pianist and Hammond organist Liam Dunachie, the immensely imaginative interplay of Misha Mullov-Abbado, Dunachie and the enjoyable drummer Scott Chapman’s rhythm section with the horn section and enjoy the Dream Circus a second, third, fourth or fifth time.”
Werner Stiefele, Rondo Magazine (GERMANY) ★★★★

“The new generation of British jazz is storming into the spotlight… [Mullov-Abbado] has an elegant and agile style… His music has the hymn urgency that characterized McCoy Tuner’s records in the 1970s… The three wind instruments melt together again and again to form their own sound in an impressive way. Although Mullov-Abbado – who wrote all the material himself – enjoys complex rhythms, his music never gets hectic.”
Rolf Thomas, Jazzthing Magazine (GERMANY)

“Definitely one of the most important messengers in the new great British jazz generation. With music that brings along the best of the acoustic 60s language and moves it into our time in a very life-affirming way – with plenty of dynamism and personality, Misha Mullov-Abbado confirms that he can become one of the truly great within this genre in the future.”
Tor Hammerø, Nettavisen (NORWAY)

“Last week I found Misha Mullov-Abbado to be our “album of the week” at NDR Jazz, played music from “Dream Circus” every night on my programme. The response from our listeners was overwhelming – it might have set the record for the year so far!”
Ralf Dorschel, Album Of The Week on NDR Jazz (GERMANY)

“Misha Mullov-Abbado’s compositions are full of surprises and alternating between lively and melancholic. The sparkling joy that the 6-piece radiate is contagious… Sprawling solos create a cool jazz atmosphere, framed by majestic themes…”
Jan Paersch, Kulturnews (GERMANY)

“Certainly one of the most talented bassists to have emerged on the UK jazz scene in many years Misha Mullov-Abbado’s ‘Dream Circus’ is his most convincing and enjoyable album so far”
Stephen Graham, Marlbank (UK)

“Third album by double bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado whose compositions still remain anchored in the tradition but are also just sufficiently surrounded by a touch of modernism and inventiveness that keep it exciting.”
Georges Tonla Briquet, Jazz Halo (BElGIUM)

“Fans of top quality cutting edge playing, and of generally uplifting high quality musical creativity will find much to delight them here.”
Eddie Myer, Jazz Views & Sussex Jazz Magazine (UK)

“Absolutely brim-full of musical and personal vivacity. His albums seem to me to have become increasingly refreshing, new and exciting with just the right measure of ‘cheekiness’. Brilliant.”
Martin David Powell, BCB Radio Bradford, Jazz Scene (UK)

“The sextet’s music is saturated with an exciting mixture of expressiveness and impression… The musicians did not disappoint. We are in for a treat with free jazz breakdowns and a captivating ride straight ahead with solo eruptions. That’s what I call a masterpiece, gentlemen!”
Jan Hocek, His Voice (CZECHIA)

“Mullov-Abbado’s manifesto to having earned a place among the field of extraordinarily creative bassists in contemporary Jazz.”
Michael Ambrosino, 33third.org (UK) Best Jazz Albums 2020

“For all its exhilarating improv breakouts, this is contemporary jazz with a very firm hand on its tiller, but it’s beautifully done.”
John Fordham, Jazzwise (UK) ★★★★

“Multi-influenced yet stylistically coherent, accessible but never merely obvious, this is an inviting and rewarding album.”
Steve Harris, Hi-Fi News (UK)

“The tunes themselves are excellent, but are lifted up another notch by inventive scoring for the ensembles.”
Barry Witherden, BBC Music Magazine (UK)

“As superb as his previous album Cross Platform-Interchange is, the new one is maybe even better.”
Ron Schepper, Textura (CANADA)

Thanks to all that have enjoyed the two singles from Dream Circus – “The Infamous Grouse” and “Little Vision”. The full album will be out on Friday 12th June (just over two weeks away for those of you who, like me, have no idea where we are in the year anymore). If you haven’t yet you can pre-order the album HERE, and in the meantime the two singles are out now on Spotify and Apple Music.

In other news when the whole world pressed pause about 2 months ago those of us in the Patchwork Jazz Orchestra decided to make a lockdown E.P. recording all our parts from home. We released the E.P. last week and it sounds fantastic! It includes a mixture of older compositions and arrangements and some newer pieces that have made it into our pad since our first album release but before the lockdown. The whole album was mixed by the incredible John Prestage, who did such an amazing job considering we each had our own individual mic setup. You can listen to and download the album HERE, and in the meantime here is a video of my now-ancient composition “New Ansonia” that I made last week. The same song was the title track of my own debut album five years ago and I am very happy to have finally had the song’s original big band version recorded after writing it almost seven years ago…

In these most strange and unexpected times I am pleased to announce that in the midst of all the cancellations and postponements of live performances around the world my third album as a bassist and a bandleader “Dream Circus” will be released on Friday 12th June on Edition Records.

The album contains nine compositions that I wrote over the last three years which were recorded at The Village studio in Copenhagen last September. It was recorded and mixed by August Wanngren, produced by renowned bassist and fellow Edition Records band leader Jasper Høiby, and features my usual partners-in-crime from over the years, the incredible James Davison, Matthew Herd, Sam Rapley, Liam Dunachie and Scott Chapman.

I am so excited for you all to hear this album. You can now pre-order the album via the bandcamp page, where you can also preview one of the tracks “The Infamous Grouse”.