Jeremy Sassoon @ Pizza Express, Dean Street, Soho - April 25

Jeremy Sassoon (vocals, piano); Harry Greene (guitar, saxophone); Chris Rabbit (bass); Pat Illingworth (drums)

There are nights at Dean Street where the room settles before the music even has a chance to. Low light, that gentle clink of glasses, conversations tapering off not because they’re told to, but because something in the air says it’s time.

This was one of those nights.

 

Jeremy Sassoon walked on and, almost immediately, it stopped feeling like an album launch. No grand statement, no sense of occasion being forced. Just a man, a piano, and a band in a room that seemed ready to listen. He joked that the previous night had been the rehearsal and this was the real one, but what unfolded didn’t feel rehearsed at all. It felt lived in.

 

That’s where Sassoon sits best.

 

Not performance in the showy sense… something quieter than that. A conversation. A sharing of stories that don’t belong to him on paper, but somehow sound like they do by the time he’s finished with them.

 

Older and Wiser is built on that idea. Nine songs, none of them his own, yet all connected by something deeper than authorship. Each one a life stage. A moment. A question we’ve all either asked or avoided asking.

 

He opens with Frenchman Street Blues, and straight away you’re not in Soho anymore. You’re somewhere warmer, looser — specifically Frenchman Street in New Orleans tucked just beyond the tourist pull of Bourbon Street, where the real heartbeat of the city lives. Small bars, music spilling out onto the street, that sense that anything can happen if you stay long enough. Even a song written for a funeral carries a strange sense of light there. Not grief, not really. More an acceptance. A celebration, even. It sets the tone without announcing it.

 

Then Stop This Train quietly shifts things inward. Time, ageing, that creeping realisation that everything keeps moving whether you’re ready to or not. There’s no drama in how he delivers it, no attempt to heighten the emotion. He just lets it sit there, and in doing so, it lands harder. You could feel the room recognise it — and underneath it all, that lovely brushed snare just whispering away, sketching out the gentle, insistent rhythm of a train running beneath the song, carrying everything forward whether you’re ready or not.

 

That’s the thing with Sassoon. He doesn’t push meaning at you. He trusts the song to do the work.And when it really lands, it lands properly.

The Things We’ve Handed Down was that moment. You could feel it happen. Conversations stopped. Glasses paused mid-air. That familiar hum of a busy room just… disappeared. A song about a child not yet born, about inheritance, about what we pass on without even knowing we have it to give. It could easily tip into sentimentality. It doesn’t. It just sits there, honest and exposed.

 

The silence afterwards said more than the applause.

 

He talks a lot through the set, but never too much. Just enough to open the door into each song. Stories about New Orleans, about hearing a track in a shopping centre and needing to know what it was, about a chance moment leading to Desert Island Discs. None of it feels rehearsed, It all feeds into the same idea — these songs matter because of the lives inside them.

 

And that’s why something like At Seventeen works. It shouldn’t, on paper. A male voice carrying a deeply personal female narrative. But he doesn’t try to reshape it or stamp himself over it. He just tells it. Carefully. Respectfully. And in doing that, it finds a different kind of truth.

 

The band get it. They have to.

 

Chris Rabbitt on bass, Pat Illingworth on drums, Harry Greene on guitar — there’s a looseness there, but it’s not casual. It’s the kind of playing that knows when to step in and when to leave space alone. Harry Greene in particular on guitar and saxophone, nothing overplayed, nothing wasted. Just colour where it’s needed.

 

There are moments where the set lifts, of course. A reharmonised Let It Be that feels warmer, more gospel than you expect. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight sitting perfectly in that late-night space. And then Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, which comes with a story that could easily overshadow the song itself — licensing battles, months of back and forth, even Mike Oldfield himself giving approval for 22 seconds of Tubular Bells, which Sassoon has woven into the heart of this song — a hit for The Animals and Nina Simone — but when that piano section builds, when it starts to move somewhere unexpected, you understand why he held onto it. It earns its place.

 

By the time you reach the closing stretch, the shape of the album becomes clearer.

 

This isn’t just a collection of songs. It’s a line drawn through a life.

And it ends exactly where it should.

Old and Wise doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is. A reflection. A letting go. Sassoon frames it through his past in medicine, through conversations about how we leave, what we say, what we don’t. It could be heavy. It isn’t. It’s calm. Almost peaceful. The kind of ending that doesn’t demand attention but stays with you anyway.

 

I only write about music I connect with. And in a genre as wide as jazz, that’s not always easy.

 

This connects.

 

Not because it tries to impress. Not because it pushes boundaries or demands to be heard. But because it understands something simple and often overlooked.

 

This album is a must for every collection, it asks questions and then answers them!

 

There’s often this quiet pressure around artists… that sense they need to justify themselves by writing their own material. As if authorship is the only real marker of authenticity.

 

But listening to Sassoon, you start to question that.

 

Because when you have this kind of feel for a song — when you can step inside someone else’s words and make them sound like they’ve been waiting for your voice all along — why would you need to write your own just to prove a point?

 

That’s the shift here.

 

By choosing these songs, by placing them in this order, by letting each one breathe exactly when it needs to, Sassoon doesn’t just perform them… he reshapes them. Gently, without fuss, but with absolute intent.

 

The narrative changes.

 

Songs you thought you knew start to feel different. Not reworked for the sake of it, not dressed up to impress — just… seen from another angle. Lived in a little longer.

 

And somehow, through that, they feel new again.

 

Not because they’ve been changed.

 

But because they’ve been understood.

 

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with a song… is just tell it properly. Glenn Wright

See also ALBUM REVIEW