Laura Jurd - new album and UK & European tour dates.
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Trumpeter & composer Laura Jurd will release her new album "Rites & Revelations" on October 19th 2025. She will be touring in the UK & Europe during November.
We have received the following press release;
LAURA JURD ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM
RITES & REVELATIONS
OUT OCTOBER 17 VIA NEW SOIL
VISIONARY TRUMPETER DELIVERS STRIKING BLEND OF JAZZ AND FOLK ON NEW ALBUM
EXTENSIVE UK & GERMAN TOUR DATES ANNOUNCED FOR NOVEMBER 2025
Artist: Laura Jurd
Album: Rites & Revelations
Label: New Soil
Formats: Digital, LP, CD
Release Date: October 17
Today, New Soil announces Rites & Revelations, a new album from visionary jazz trumpeter and composer Laura Jurd — of the Mercury-nominated group Dinosaur — out October 17, 2025.
Watch the live video for Offering filmed at The Bennett Centre in Frome here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jymMbr6tJ4
Lead single, ‘Offering’ is a brooding, cathartic work, drawing on jazz, folk and European Renaissance influences to build towards an expansive crescendo, an exposition of Jurd’s towering trumpet playing and ambitious compositional approach.
“When I wrote “Offering”, I knew that this was the home for this imagined thing I’d been nurturing,” Jurd explains. “It’s a statement of intent, perhaps one of the clearest I’ve made in my career. This album feels like a grounded return to something essential.”
Rites & Revelations represents a powerful return and creative re-emergence for Jurd, who had stepped away from regular performance and recording for several years to focus on her family. Written with patience and intention over 6 months following a move to Somerset, it concentrates a sense of yearning and pent-up artistic expression in what is a striking and personal album. As she says, “This album has distilled my identity and brought together things I love in a way that feels uniquely me.”
A coming together of her two musical worlds, jazz and folk, Rites & Revelations draws on the traditional instrumentation of Jurd’s English and Scottish heritage, alongside diverse European folk influences, lacing the 10-track album with deep modal harmonies and vibrant rhythmic turns that embrace both light and dark in moments of high drama and staggering beauty.
Making music with Mercury-nominated jazz quartet Dinosaur since 2010, alongside her keyboard-playing partner Elliot Galvin, Jurd has released a trio of acclaimed LPs under her own name, and here joins forces once more with Dinosaur drummer Corrie Dick and bassist Ruth Goller, who together form a muscular rhythm section on which the album’s solid foundations stand.
Jurd is also joined by folk musicians Ultan O’Brien and Ivor Novello award-winning composer Martin Green, whose innate understanding of the details and ornamentations of folk vernacular complement Jurd’s own background in jazz and classical music (writing for the likes of London Sinfonietta, National Youth Orchestra and the Ligeti Quartet). It is a blend heard perhaps most on the album’s one cover version, a soaring rendition of blues standard ‘St James Infirmary’, whose cacophonous, intuitive one-take recording Jurd calls a “big monstrous performance.”
Recorded mostly live with minimal overdubs, Rites & Revelations captures the raw energy of a band that found its collective voice through extensive rehearsals ahead of their Edinburgh Jazz Festival premiere in 2024. Revelling in the textural drones and cultural connotations of violin and accordion, Rites & Revelations, bristles with unique sound in which Jurd pushes her trumpet playing into earthy, drone-like realms.
“I want people to feel something primal, like how old folk tunes can reach something innate in us,” she explains. “That’s what makes me tick—music that stirs you deeply, emotionally, even physically. I love that timeless quality where it feels both ancient and alive.”
On second single, ‘You Again’, the lilting traditional influences come to the fore, deftly merging the ceilidh-like melody with intricate rhythmic sweeps, and finding a new vernacular between jazz and folk in the process. It is a track that will take you by the hand and swing you round and round until sunrise.
Serpentine melodies wind their way through the album’s third single ‘Step Up To The Altar’, whose modal vamp cuts across the heavier, drone-like sound of the accordion, encapsulating the themes of “empowerment, catharsis and release” that define this moment in Jurd’s creative journey and form the beating heart of the album.
With a tour planned for later in the year, performing the album live will allow Jurd to really explore the visceral potential of what she says is her loudest project to date. Rites & Revelations arrives as a statement of intent from one of the UK’s foremost jazz musicians, retrieved from the depths of her being and expressed in a voice singular to her own.
Personnel:
Laura Jurd - trumpet
Ultan O’Brien - violin & viola
Martin Green - accordion
Ruth Goller - electric bass
Corrie Dick - drums
Rites & Revelations Tracklist:
1. Offering
2. Step Up To The Altar
3. Praying Mantis
4.Lighter & Brighter
5. Life’
6. You Again?
7. St James Infirmary
8. Bide Your Time
9. What Are You Running Towards?
10. Back To Life
Tour dates:
01 November – Unitarian Church, CAMBRIDGE, UK
02 November – Turner Sims, SOUTHAMPTON, UK
03 November –Rook Lane Chapel , FROME, UK
04 November – St George’s, BRISTOL, UK
10 November – The Yard, MANCHESTER, UK
11 November – The Cumberland Arms, NEWCASTLE, UK
13 November – Firth Hall, SHEFFIELD, UK
14 November – MAC, BIRMINGHAM, UK
18 November – Unterfahrt, MUNICH, DE
20 November – Union Chapel, LONDON, UK
https://www.instagram.com/laurajurd/
https://www.facebook.com/laurajurdmusician