Expectations can be dangerous when it comes to live music, but sometimes managing them is easier said than done. Go and see a band like Jaga Jazzist, a genre-crossing collective of Norwegian multi-instrumentalists who skyrocketed to fame in 2002 when the BBC named A Livingroom Hush jazz album of the year, and you expect it to be big. Especially when it’s the group’s 20th anniversary tour and you arrive at Union Chapel to find the queue stretching around the block.As we filed in, I was in rock gig mode, prepared to leave with mild tinnitus, a few new bruises and a stupid grin plastered Read more ...

 Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1) – Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966–1985America’s music could be jazz, gospel, blues or rock ’n’ roll. Or all of them. Each has black roots. Then there’s the white-rooted country, which also informed rock ’n’ roll. Taking the simplistic line has its problems and doesn’t allow for blurred boundaries, nuance and the fact that history is never neat, but it is clear that all these musical forms generally and initially proliferated amongst communities that are not native to the American continent. What about the music of native North Read more ...

Russian prisoner Gavriil is telling his psychiatrist a story about a strange and frightening dragon who demands a female sacrifice from the local townsfolk every year. When Gavriil gets to the end of his hot-breathed tale, his doctor drily remarks: "Almost hard to believe that Stalin had a problem with it." The time is 1978 and we are in the USSR, a place where fiction is censored, writers are frequently imprisoned and real life is even more fantastical than fiction. Silent Prisoner is director-turned-writer Eve Leigh's first full-length play, and it is a subtle and slippery beast. The Read more ...

There is an odd moment about halfway through Lily Allen’s set. Clad in a shaggy white mini dress akin to a Puli dog’s coat, she announces the next song will divide the audience into those that love it and those that hate it. Her sweet voice then wraps itself around the soundtrack to last year’s John Lewis seasonal TV ad, her version of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know”. I fall into the latter of her categories but I look around and a smattering of middle-aged heterosexual couples, who’d previously looked somewhat incongruous here, have grasped their partners and are doing gentle slow dances. Read more ...

Last night Latin jazzers J-Sonics confirmed their reputation as one of the most compelling proponents of the delicate art of fusion with a deeply grooving, deeply addictive performance of their propulsive repertoire. Their two Brazilian-flavoured sets were characterised by supple instrumental interplay, including from the singer Grace Rodson, a regular performer with the Roberto Pla Ensemble, whose taut, rippling vocalising rhythms and sumptuous tone were as crucial within the band’s instrumental textures as her solos, which smouldered, then burst into hot Latin fire.   When it Read more ...

In an operatic world in which the director is an increasingly despotic king, it’s good to be reminded that, sometimes, not staging an opera is the most radical reading of all. No elaborate set or concept dominated David Edwards’s one-off Pelléas et Mélisande at the Royal Festival Hall last night. There were just suggestions, allusions, echoes. And a cast – what a cast – that came close to perfection.Or course Pelléas isn’t just any old opera. Debussy’s “unusual” music-drama breaks all the rules, unfolding in a sequence of dramatic fragments, the orchestra offering the guiding string through Read more ...

David Hockney was continually rejuvenated by his transatlantic commuting. The painter, printmaker, draughtsman, photographer, and stage designer, was also a writer producing theories of seeing, and was fascinated by digital technology. Randall Wright's narration is set out in a series of short chapters in a montage-cum-collage of photographs, earlier films both amateur and professional, home video and recent interviews with the inhabitants of Hockney’s world today and in the past. We see a lot of septuagenarians and octogenarians, as well as film clips and photographs Read more ...

Before Minecraft there was LittleBigPlanet. This series lets you jump around cute homespun platform levels, then go in and edit them and create your own. The latest adds all sorts of new editing tools, but still fails to communicate simply enough with its audience.First, you jump around the platform levels of LittleBigPlanet 3. The game, as with previous versions in the series, sees scrappy levels seemingly constructed out of stickers, cardboard and glue, with your homespun hero "Sackboy" a kind of knitted child's teddy. With voiceover by Stephen Fry and one of the main characters handled by Read more ...

Dan Jones has turned up to narrate the dramatised story of the Plantagenets in history lite mode, perhaps aimed at capturing a young audience. In Plantagenet country, as shown on TV, we witness a medieval version of soap opera family sagas where all hinges on an overbearing father, a conniving queen, murder, and general mayhem. The tale, we were informed, was shocking, brutal, more astonishing than any fiction, and this ruling family, from its inception with Henry II of Anjou, became the greatest English dynasty of all time. (Tell that to the Hanoverians.)Who knows what marketing guru decided Read more ...

It has become a staunch tradition that Kasabian gigs end with their fourth single, 2004’s “L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever)”. By the time they reach it, a good chunk of the Brighton Centre’s capacity crowd, encouraged by guitarist Serge Pizzorno, have clambered on the shoulders of an associate.The song was introduced by a funkin’ stab at a cover of “Praise You”, dedicated to its creator, local hero Fatboy Slim. Then the cavernous hall lights up, everyone suddenly visible as auditorium darkness is banished. “Ah, come on, we got our backs to the wall,” sings Tom Meighan, as if it were a call to arms Read more ...

Until recently, The National were a band for the knowing connoisseur, best known for their wry wit and tasteful guitar sheen. They seemed too niche for the O2 Arena, where they played their biggest ever UK headline last night. But that big tent of consumerism has now claimed them, and before an appreciative but rather lukewarm audience, somehow they seemed a little more ordinary and mainstream.It felt like a night of two halves, in which – rather like one of the band’s songs, famous for their late crescendos – the second half picked up significantly, culminating in a funky, brass-driven Read more ...

Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.An accompanying drawing shows a woman in a bobble hat standing in front of a church whose onion domes are the same shape as her headgear. The drawing is black and white, but the domes of many Russian churches, including Saint Read more ...