Fourteen years after his death, Miles Davis lingers around jazz - a word he came to despise - like an unrepentant ghost. His legacy on record is rich, eventful and compelling, an over-view of the music of his times, from bebop through to the fusion of the 1970s and 1980s. But now that that period is over, Davis is as historical in his way as Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington.

After seeing Martin Scorsese's grand seven-film series The Blues, you feel as if you've attended a symposium on an all but vanished music. Scorsese and the six other directors who made the films may have set out with the idea of celebrating a vivid and eternal form, but what they came back with was a tattered requiem enacted by old, old men.

In Marc Levin's Godfathers and Sons, centred around [...]

Some of the audio descriptions on the sleeves of ancient long-playing records make charming reading in the digital age. Decca's "FFSS" (full frequency stereophonic sound) or Mercury's "electronic groove depth control" dazzled the first hi-fi nuts of the 1950s, even if the boomy radiograms of the day didn't always do them justice. In fact, Decca's engineers really were second to none. Next time you're in your local charity shop, see [...]

Too late - you've missed him. Ken Vandermark, the leading light of the new jazz from Chicago, was here for a few dates in November, culminating in an appearance at the London Jazz Festival with his group Schooldays. The brush-topped saxophonist might not have the pulling power of a media phenom such as Jamie Cullum, but he is quietly - or, rather, extremely noisily - making a lot of provocative [...]

For what seemed like decades, jazz singers had to play out their performing lives in a curious kind of ghetto. Caught in a limbo between art music and popular song, they rarely pleased everybody. The core jazz audience respected Billie and Ella, but they tended to be distractions before the main event of Miles or Bird. The pop audience knew Ella, and sort of recognised Billie as a shadowy mistress [...]

Does it matter what records sound like? The question is not quite as dumb as it seems. It came to mind while auditioning Steely Dan's recently released Everything Must Go. Time was when Steely Dan made the hippest, coolest rock albums on earth, but that was 30 years ago. Today, reduced to the kernel of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen and a gangland of the world's most expensive session musicians, [...]

''Reunited", sang Peaches and Herb, "and it feels so good." Music's happy reunions, however, are more like patched-up marriages of convenience. Most groups have a natural lifespan of a record or two, and the notorious "difficult third album" has been the undoing of many. But pension funds being what they are, recent times have seen unprecedented numbers of old bandmates getting back in touch and giving it another go. There's [...]

We are living through extraordinary times for the music business. One of the great success stories of the 20th century is turning unpleasantly sour in the 21st. In the hundred years or so since Nipper first listened to His Master's Voice, things have arguably never looked as bleak as they are now for what we used to call the major labels - an obsolete term in the era of silver [...]

It was brave of Elton John to use an image of his balding, Seventies self for the cover of Greatest Hits 1970-2002, and interesting that many of the images in the accompanying booklet date from the same period. Vanity demands that most ageing rockers prefer a regular and ruthless updating of their bodywork, especially in the fronting of any kind of retrospective. But it's typical of a man whose formidable [...]

Artists are meant to bare their heart and soul to us, but the problem with doing it over, say, a six-album deal is that turning on the emotional taps can leave the tank a little empty after the first few goes. This is especially so with singer-songwriters, who often do best by taking no more than a turn or two on the stage. Such performers can build a cult following [...]