SwanNek

While guitar bands still seem to dominate things, there’s a lot to get excited about elsewhere at the moment, not least the North East’s thriving jazz scene, which has gifted us the excellent SwanNek, Describing themselves as an ‘eight piece jazz/neo-soul collective’, they formed in 2020 around keyboard player Findlay Hewitson and with a few years gigging and recording under their various belts (including an acclaimed Hoochie Coochie residency), they’re now a remarkable live act, as likely to foreground a cellist or flautist as a guitar, as happy playing a BBC Proms show as a gig in Ouseburn, and vocalist Mollie Birmingham is building up quite a following. (Lee Fisher)