world music
peter.quinn
Camden’s Jazz Cafe reverberated to the sounds of a 50-year-old spiritual jazz classic last night, as saxist and MC Soweto Kinch and his quintet paid fulsome homage to NEA Jazz Master Pharoah Sanders’ consciousness-expanding album, Karma.Recorded in New York City over two days in February 1969, the album line-up was one of Sanders' finest, including vocalist and lyricist Leon Thomas, pianist Lonnie Liston Smith and bassist Richard Davis, who had performed on a similarly genre-defying masterpiece, Astral Weeks, the year before. The seismic collision of jazz and world music heard in Karma is Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Milton Nascimento is 76. Physically, he is quite frail; he had to be helped carefully onto the stage and then up into a high stool for this London concert by a couple of band members. But that arrival and rather ungainly progress were, as one might expect, given a welcome befitting this hero of the Brazilian musical world. The completely full Barbican Hall was willing him on.This was one of those nights where the non-Brazilian listener is definitely missing out. One can feel the palpable sense of connection, the sheer warmth and adulation from the besotted audience. People are joining in more Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A hushed expectation filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Friday night in advance of the return on stage of the legendary Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (now rebranded as The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices), who graced Kate Bush’s 1989 classic The Sensual World with their astonishing style of throat singing, combining drones, quarter tones and complex rhythms, harmonies combining in marvellous permutations, seemingly colliding into each other from different planes. It’s an otherworldly vocal sound, and very earthy at the same time, impressionistic and fantastical, the chosen lead vocalists Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
We return, after only a week away, with Part 2 of Volume 49. Starting out with an amazing comeback from Adrian Sherwood’s Pay It All Back compilation series as Vinyl of the Month, this edition takes in everything from Prince to death metal to ambient classical. From reissues to spanking new fare, all life on vinyl is here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Pay It All Back Volume 7 (On U Sound)To ancient music warriors who recall prehistory, before ’88 and acid house, one of only places in Britain where electronics splurged into brain-frying psychedelic dance music was On U Sound. Their Pay It Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.The audience is an age-spanning mix: aficionados of his Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 LPs from the Sixties and Seventies as well as fans of the recent Timeless and Encanto albums, on which he’s reinterpreted his songs with musicians like the Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, Fergie and John Legend. Mendes has Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The last thing many were expecting from Rokia Traoré’s opening appearance at this year’s Brighton Festival was an Afro-psychedelic head-fry, yet she and her four-piece band prove thoroughly capable of swirling our minds right off out of it. When she returns at the end of the concert and announces she’s going to play one last song. A voice shouts out, “Make it a long one!” Happily, it is. The final number, “Köté Don”, is a culmination of the evening’s ethos, dragging listeners away once more into precisely estimated - yet elastic - patterns of rockin’, revolving minimalism.Dating back 16 Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
“I think we need to get rid of labels, certainly World Music,” insists Soumik Datta, who is both composer and musician, and has lived in the UK since the age of 11. “It is possible to be a musician in the Indian tradition, as well as an electronic musician, as well as a contemporary musician... When it’s convenient, the music industry warps things to make them fit, but otherwise all the pigeonholing and the taxonomies are really unhelpful to a lot of artists out there.”Datta plays the sarod. This 19-string instrument has a tremendous range and provides enough complex rhythms and glissando Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
How do we want our fleeting, precious, close-up glimpses of the royals to be? Do we want the mystique, the aura, glamour and transcendence? Or would we rather be reassured that they are, in their way, just like us? No performer could have given more energy and dedication to a show than Bebel Gilberto did last night at Union Chapel; I was just wishing that she could have worked slightly harder at the former than the latter.Take the final section from her encore, surely her uncle Chico Buarque's tune "Samba e Amor". There she was, lying down on the stage as if she was on the gym mat at an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Oumou Sangaré is not a woman to be trifled with – tales of people who have crossed her and lived to regret it abound: one story (of many) has her personally hiring a bulldozer in a land dispute and getting a recalcitrant local official sacked. She looked super-glamorous at Earth in a white dress and blue nails, and her backing singers looked and sounded ravishing in vertiginous heels and 70s hairdos.The Dalston venue is becoming a great addition to London’s music venues – a little run-down with wooden seating but with a warm atmosphere and excellent sound centring on Oumou’s extraordinary Read more ...
mark.kidel
The inaugural Aga Khan Music Awards, a three-day event held last weekend in Lisbon, celebrated nearly 20 years of wide-ranging work dedicated to the preservation of ancient and threatened cultures, an impressive programme of educational initiatives, and the encouragement of musical exchange and experiment in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.These awards are far removed from the world of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Grammys, MOBOs or other well-spun and marketed events: the notion of excellence, which lies at the heart of the Aga Khan Music Initiative, is connected to ideas and practices Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Having long been immersed in folk and world music and acoustically-oriented singer-songwriters, it’s a surprise to be given a CD of music by someone who’s never crossed your radar, especially when the artist concerned turns out to have sold some 14 million albums, though mostly in Europe and North America. It’s probably the case that Loreena McKennitt’s considerable following owes to word-of-mouth, for the music-loving friend who gifted me her 1994 album The Mask and The Mirror had been put on to her by a friend in Europe. Instantly hooked, I explored further, giving her live 2006 CD/DVD set Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Great music is often born of “what if”s. What if we played Beach Boys-style songs lo-fi, loud, at high velocity? What if we played indie guitar with a hint of Congolese rumba? What if we added a string section to late-Sixties pop-rock? What if we tried to play disco even though we can’t play our instruments at all? That sort of thing. Que Vola’s debut album wonders what would happen if you combined John Coltrane-flavoured serious jazz with stark Afro-Cuban tribal percussion. It turns out to be a welcome experiment.“Que Vola” loosely translates as “What’s up”, a usual greeting in Cuba and Read more ...