jazz
david.cheal
It’s my habit as a music critic to take notes at shows such as this: nothing extensive, just words and phrases jotted down to jog the memory when it comes to writing the thing up afterwards. Looking back at my scraps of paper for this, the London leg of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s UK tour, I can see only a handful of scrawled words: “war”, “party”, and, er, “dum dum da dum dum dum”. I think I was having too much fun to bother with writing much down. It was that kind of night.The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble are a bunch of eight brothers, joined on tour by a drummer, who play – well, Read more ...
howard.male
Fool’s Gold’s debut album brims over with the enthusiasm of a band who have discovered - primarily through African music - that there’s another way to play the electric guitar other than to just form workman-like bar-chords, stamp down hard on the distortion pedal, and then hit those six strings as hard as you can. And fortunately for them, there’s a young audience clearly thrilled to have this discovery passed onto them. By the end of their set at the jam-packed Bar Fly, there’s actually a substantial number of the audience pogo-ing! I never thought I’d see that occurring to music that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite his "interesting" haircut and fondness for the undeleted expletive, violinist Nigel Kennedy is a man of exceptional taste and discernment. While recording his new jazz album Shhh! at Rockfield studios, he took time out to hail theartsdesk and greet the 'desk's Adam Sweeting.This is a hectic year for Kennedy. He's currently playing a programme of J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington on a German tour with his newly-formed Orchestra of Life, comprising young musicians from Kennedy's adoptive home, Poland, and at the end of May he hosts a weekend of Polish music (and other activities) on London's Read more ...
howard.male
“I can’t fucking hear yer!” are not the welcoming words one expects to hear from a world music favourite, it has to be said. But the audience at Dingwalls don’t look like the usual world music crowd either. This Brooklyn trio have clearly crossed over into the more lucrative club global category, and their hyperactive light show is further evidence of this. But good luck to them, because they are certainly the best of the bunch at doing this whole funky, jazzy, ragga, reggae thing, as well as being far more interesting than the more pantomime-like Gogol Bordello (of which Tamir Muskat used to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week’s birthdays of musicians include a couple of disturbed geniuses, Billie Holiday and Joe Meek, underrated rock’n‘roller Carl Perkins, country legend Merle Haggard, as well as Doris Day, Pharrell Williams and bluesman Muddy Waters, whose mojo is working overtime. Videos below.9 April 1932: Carl Perkins was never the most famous rock’n’roller, but among aficionados is one of the best. Shot on a fuzzy Canadian TV show from 1956. 7 April 1915: Billie Holiday, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, sings “My Man”, about an abusive relationship that was all too Read more ...
Anonymous
Like Hugh Masekela, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim first emerged as a member of The Jazz Epistles - that seminal, if short-lived, group who at the start of the 1960s were the first to offer a South African take on modern jazz. Both under the stage name Dollar Brand and, following his conversion to Islam, as Abdullah Ibrahim, it's an instinct he's been honing ever since. As early influences such as Ellington and Monk have gradually become less tangible, he has emerged as one of the most distinctive artistic voices of his generation.In his old age, however, Ibrahim seems to have re-embraced Ellington Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week's musicians birthdays include the genius/lecherous mediocrity (according to taste) Serge Gainsbourg, singing a duet with Brigitte Bardot, classic early 60s footage of Marvin Gaye, vibraphone maestro Red Norvo, Herb Alpert in a rodeo video doing “Casino Royale”, and Astrud Gilberto from Ipanema. Composer birthdays of the week are Franz Joseph Haydn and William Walton. Videos below.2 April 1928: French maverick Serge Gainsbourg, here singing a duet with Brigitte Bardot of “Bonnie and Clyde”. 2 April 1939: Marvin Gaye, with an early TV appearance singing the sublime “ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Next month a concert celebrating the unique career of Humphrey Lyttelton, the great jazzer, broadcaster and quizmaster, will take place at HMV Apollo in Hammersmith, west London. The show, which takes place on 25 April, has been constructed about Lyttelton’s twin talents: blowing a trumpet and giving people silly things to do. All proceeds will go to a new charity known as the Humph Trust. Its aim will be to help develop the careers of young jazz musicians. To give the Humph Trust’s efforts a focus, the Royal Academy of Music is introducing an annual gong known as the Humphrey Lyttelton Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I was promised a night of free jazz. This was more a threat than a promise, having spent some of the worst nights of my life listening to the stuff - the strange thing about this most liberating sounding form is how everyone sounds more or less the same. Anyway, this wasn’t a night of wibbly-wobbly squeaky-gate music, but a fully realised, if sometimes chilly, vision. It was spontaneous architecture and interesting structures and lyricism. It was original without being self-conscious about it.You can tell a lot about a jazzer by what they call the tunes. With no vocals there’s a lot of scope Read more ...
howard.male
On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even be a musician, and live music was banned from most public places in black areas. There were also no cinemas, bars, hotels, shopping centres or electricity and death was an everyday fact of life. Yet only fifteen miles away, white Johannesburg’s skyscrapers glistened; an affront to the asbestos roofed, poverty-steeped insult to human dignity that was Read more ...
peter.quinn
The cliché which gets trotted out most often when describing Jan Garbarek's saxophone playing is his supposedly "icy" tone (Google “Garbarek” and “icy” and you'll see what I mean). As Garbarek's long-standing bassist Eberhard Weber amusingly points out in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, “I challenge the ladies and gentlemen of the press to think what they would write if Jan Garbarek wasn't Norwegian but Greek and his name was Garabekoulos! Then his music would immediately turn into the smouldering, sun-drenched sound of the scorching South.” Fair point, Eberhard.Hearing the latest Read more ...
joe.muggs
The dominant look among all ages of the sell-out audience at the Barbican Hall last night was distinctly “smart-Bohemian”, with plenty of thick-rimmed specs, duffle coats and subtly outré hairdos visible as they took their seats and gave one another knowing nods on spotting the “Fruit Tree” motif in the stage décor. For Nick Drake, the fragile Cambridge-born singer-songwriter who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 aged 26, is perhaps the perfect cult artist: utterly singular, too intense and serious to be appreciated in his short lifetime, but increasingly influential on the Read more ...