Reviews
Tim Cumming
Kassé Mady Diabaté is one of the great singers of West Africa, a member of Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra and, more recently, the Afrocubism all-star line-up. His latest album Kiriké (Horse’s Saddle) on the Parisian No Format label is a beautiful return to his acoustic, traditional roots as a singer, produced by French cellist Vincent Segal and featuring kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, Lansiné Kouyaté on balafon and Makan Tounkara on ngoni, conjuring up the spirits and messages of centuries-old Bambara songs of the ancient Manding Empire. This music runs deep. The kora of the south, the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Paying homage to the legendary imprint that brought us 'The Finest In Jazz Since 1939', this concert on the penultimate evening of the EFG London Jazz Festival really did have everything, including the unlikely sight of master pianist Robert Glasper pirouetting across the Royal Festival Hall stage. The first half saw Glasper in duo with fellow NYC-based Houstonian, pianist Jason Moran, in an extraordinary, hour-long set that referenced jazz past, present and future.Performing on two Steinway grand pianos, nestled together on a dramatically lit stage, the duo's free, rhapsodic intro Read more ...
Sarah Kent
There is nothing erotic or titillating about The Institute of Sexology, an exhibition the Wellcome Collection plans to keep open for a year. Those expecting a display of fertility symbols, fetish objects, kinky clothing or sex aids down the ages will be deeply disappointed. Just about enough objects and images are included to keep you interested, but the bulk of the show is not dedicated to sexual practices but to the 19th- and 20th-century doctors, anthropologists and psychologists who spent their lives studying sexual behaviour. And therein lies the problem. The exhibition format makes Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Hassell / Brian Eno: Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible MusicsIts opening is exotic. The music shimmers like heat haze and incorporates a sing-song instrument which might be a treated trumpet, or a high-register bass guitar reverberating like water on distant rocks and pattering percussion. “Chemistry”, the opening track on Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics, melded the ambient to serialism and what became both electronica and world music.Possible Musics is a stunningly beautiful album. Its reissue on album and CD brings an opportunity to Read more ...
David Nice
A great creative partnership like the one between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars can endure the occasional wobble. In his peerless autobiography Hallelujah Junction Adams is frank about the information overload in Sellars’ premiere production of the millennial opera-oratorio woven around the birth of Christ, El Niño. His semi-staging of its companion piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary seen at the Barbican last year was, on the other hand, so pure, focused and perfect within Sellars’ usual semaphoring bounds, that I feared the full works might unleash excess again. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An Off Broadway play that largely passed without notice in 2002 is now a movie poised to suffer the same fate, notwithstanding the fact that this starry three-hander marks the film directing debut of the prolific American dramatist Israel Horovitz, at the age of 75. So it's no surprise that the older generation gets championed in a script (adapted by Horovitz from his stage play) that finds Maggie Smith playing a nonagenarian who, she tells us, is too old for subtlety. In which case, someone should have bitten the bullet and told Horovitz that his film is a talky, contrived and a highly Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
If you were to wander in off the streets and catch this band randomly you would be amazed to find such accomplished musicians. But this wasn’t any old gig, it was one of the masters of jazz, Tomasz Stanko. It should have been one of the highlights of the EFG London Jazz Festival and expectations were running high.Stanko is known for his lyrical trumpet playing, reminiscent of mid-period Miles Davis, and has been a towering figure in Polish jazz. For the uninitiated, Poland has been one the centres of jazz since the 1950s. “Jazz was freedom for us, the opposite of communism”, as Stanko pointed Read more ...
Matthew Wright
John McLaughlin made history at the Royal Festival Hall 25 years ago when he recorded a superb album featuring Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu. Last night’s performance with his fusion quartet 4th Dimension was not epochal in quite that way. The repertoire and style was largely familiar, much of it released on the band’s album earlier this year, the pieces in many cases reworked from earlier McLaughlin material. But it was remarkable for the excellence and of the ensemble playing. The sensitivity and sheer quality of interaction within the band embodied the interest in loving spirituality Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It’s been ten years since Bellowhead forged their riotous, rigorous pogo-folk, tooled up and fuelled up for closing festivals and getting the crowd to its feet, and they’ve won as many ‘best live act’ gongs as they’ve released records. Now signed to Island, and with their fifth album Revival in tow, the 11-strong troupe are a good way through a tour that lasts to the end of November, and proved to be in peak condition. Landing at Shepherds Bush, where they recorded a fine live DVD back in 2009, singer Jon Boden remains a great attention-grabbing, crowd-focusing, red-jacketed frontman, Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow Pages and a prolific composer of much else besides. But why this piece? There’s a bit of a connection with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, that iconic Beatles single, and his piece Tahiti was released on CD and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit Ensemble 10/10.The new Concerto for Orchestra was a single- Read more ...
Simon Munk
When is more too much? Far Cry 4 continues to expand the freedom enshrined in the freeroaming, first-person shooter series, but this time takes things perhaps too far, diluting the games' core appeal.The Far Cry games have always delicately struck a balance between handing the player a huge amount of freedom, and guiding them gently. The series was perhaps the first to really understand how to on one hand structure missions so you could approach them any way you wanted to, or just mess about in the world, and on the other ensure that the things the players encountered largely tied into the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Much of the recent programming of the Royal Court has flaunted a preference for gimmicky gestures rather than the hard work involved in developing new playwrights. So after its staging of book adaptations, fictional documentaries and monotonous lectures here comes the latest gimmick: a play with a cast of a dozen eight-year-olds. Given that the story of the play is about an uprising of primary-school kids, is this a) literalism gone mad; b) an interesting and challenging idea; or c) an innovative approach to casting?Okay, children, are you now all sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Once Read more ...