In 1976, Polydor Records was actively considering signing the Sex Pistols. The label’s Chris Parry checked them out live in Birmingham during August. In September, he had a prime spot behind the mixing desk at the 100 Club’s punk festival from which to consider British punk rock’s figureheads. However, the band’s manager Malcolm McLaren signed them to EMI.
new music reviews
Sebastian Scotney
It really is quite something to be admired, the sheer longevity and staying power of the Jools Holland franchise. The TV show Later...With Jools Holland, with the same core team running it, has just celebrated its 25th anniversary and put its 51st season to bed. That takes us all the way back to October 1992, just after the summer of John Bryan and Antonia de Sancha, of toes and Chelsea strips. Meanwhile, another part of the franchise, Jools' Annual Hootenanny, with a similar format has been running since New Year’s Eve 1993. Holland and his team have been building all this since his mid-thirties. He will turn 60 in January.
Two Royal Albert Hall shows, with the huge venue completely packed, of which I saw the first, marked roughly the half-way point of a 35-date British Isles tour, which will end just before Christmas. It is an album launch tour for As You See Me Now, Jools Holland’s album with his Rhythm and Blues Band and José Feliciano.
By the end the entire audience was completely energised
The TV shows have shaped a set of audience expectations over time, and the live show duly gets on with the task of fulfilling them as closely as possible. As Gary Burton once wrote, remembering what he had learnt as part of George Shearing’s band, “no matter what the artist thinks, most people really just want to hear what they already know.”
So the trademarks are all there: Jools Holland and a succession of guests, the double-breasted pinstripe suit, the familiar patter. There are opportunities to feature members of the band and to give solo spots to fine singers Beth Rowley and Louise Marshall.
Musically there is much to admire. The focus, the talk is all about boogie and boogieland, but I like the way the door is open to other styles; the full band in ska mode is an envigorating delight. I also found my ears constantly listening out for the wonderfully subtle interventions from Chris Holland on Hammond.
José Feliciano is 72, his voice is strong, but his progress on to and off the stage did seem difficult and ungainly. On the album he is at his best in Stevie Wonder’s "Treat Myself" from the 1995 album Conversation Piece, but that didn’t make it into the live show. His mini-set started and ended with his familiar covers, “California Dreamin’” and “Light My Fire”. There is also a new song "New Year", performed against a visual backdrop of Big Ben and fireworks. Thus are franchises subliminally and subtly reinforced.
Feliciano also sang “Let’s Find Each Other Tonight”. Like everything else, the Albert Hall crowd was gleefully lapping it up, while I was in my own world, quietly troubled by the versification of the couplet “If you need some Company/Come and take a chance on me”, in which the word company is set as an anapest rather than a dactyl. It is the tiniest thing, but the more I hear it, sorry, the more it grates.
Earlier, the support set had come from Mo Zowayed (pictured above), a young Bahraini folk-rock singer-songwriter who has lived for four years in British Columbia. He ploughs a similar furrow to Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs but his songs don’t – yet – stay in the mind in quite the same way.
The show built to a final blazing, burning soul set featuring Ruby Turner and the band in full cry on songs like "Let the Good Times Roll" and an original "Roll out of this Hole". By that time the entire audience was completely energised and on its feet.
- Jools Holland and José Feliciano play the Royal Albert Hall tonight, then touring the UK to December 22
- Read more New Music reviews on theartsdesk
Overleaf: watch Jools Holland and José Feliciano in "Let’s Find Each Other Tonight"
Kieron Tyler
“Precious to me” is a high-carat gold nugget. A guitar-pop song with cascading, lush Everly Brothers harmonies drawing on The Searchers’ version of “When You Walk in the Room”, its immediate tune instantly lodges itself in the head.
Javi Fedrick
For a band as big as Depeche Mode, in a venue as big the 21,000-capacity Manchester Arena, on a tour as big as their current Spirit tour, it almost doesn’t need saying that the pre-gig atmosphere is buzzing.
peter.quinn
As moments of transcendence go, Laura Mvula’s guest spot at Robert Glasper’s EFG London Jazz Festival show provided one of the year’s most transporting musical moments.
Powered by the huge harmonic slabs carved out by keyboardist Travis Sayles and the vast backbeat of bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer George “Spanky” McCurdy, Mvula’s delicately outerspacious “Bread” was recast as a 10-minute meditation. The mantra-like repetitions of the refrain "Lay the breadcrumb down so we can find our way", together with the uniquely affecting timbre of Mvula’s voice, succeeded in uniting and lifting up 2,000 souls in a warm, hymn-like embrace. It was a moment of emotional fellowship that no one who witnessed it is likely to forget.
Glasper’s generosity towards his band mates was evidenced right from the off
With so many different elements coming into play throughout the generously proportioned set – acoustic, electric, guest vocalists, a DJ supplying ghostly electronic washes and speech samples, plus a paean to the music of Stevie Wonder right at its centre – this felt more like a classic revue than a standard gig.
Glasper’s generosity towards his band mates was evidenced right from the off, with Glasper in the company of his Covered trio band mates, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid.
The trio first explored the circular, minimalist funk of Prince’s "Sign o' the Times", beginning with a pulsating, scene-setting drum solo from Reid. When the track proper kicked in, Archer dug deep into the familiar, gnomic bass riff, while Reid’s left hand performed small miracles of dexterity on hi-hat and ride cymbal. In the final musical clearing, Glasper’s brief duet with a sample of vocalist Erykah Badu (Mongo Santamaria's classic “Afro Blue” from Glasper’s 2012 album, Black Radio) was a nice turntablist touch.
The loops and layerings of Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” saw the trio further exploring the creative interconnections between hip hop and jazz, Glasper’s towering solo on Fender Rhodes hinting at the euphoric quality that’s never far from the surface of his music.
A quick stage reset, and we were back with Vula Malinga, LaDonna Harley Peters (two-thirds of LaSharVu) and Brendan Reilly, raising their voices in a euphonious take on Wonder’s “Overjoyed”. Vula then took centre stage for a powerhouse interpretation of “Superwoman”, bathed in a cavernous reverb and with the vocal line panning left and right across the Barbican, McCurdy supplying the monstrous backbeat.
Bilal then let his liquid phrasing loose on “Too High”, with a captivating solo from harmonica player Grégoire Maret and funky comping from guitarist Mike Severson, before detonating the incredible power of his falsetto on his self-penned “Levels”, which concluded with an impressively vast, pulsing wall of sound. (Pictured above: Robert Glasper and guests including Bilal. Photo by Emile Holba for the EFG London Jazz Festival.)
Prefaced by a breathtaking solo from Hodge, the first of Mvula’s two contributions was a relatively straight reading of “Visions”. Here, Glasper’s tintinnabulating work in the upper register of the grand piano in the outro suggested that the music was attempting to break away from the terrestrial sphere. But this was merely a taste of the engulfing beauty that was to follow.
- Read more New Music reviews on theartsdesk
- The EFG London Jazz Festival continues until Sunday 19 November
Overleaf: watch Robert Glasper play “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box”
Liz Thomson
The family that sings together stays together… At least that’s true in folk music. Think of Waterson- Carthy and Seeger-MacColl. And last night at Cecil Sharp House, citadel of British folk music, Peggy Seeger and her sons Calum and Neill stepped out for a family concert.
peter.quinn
If having several projects on the go is a necessity for most jazz musicians, the US drummer Mark Guiliana is more protean than most, with a musical CV that traverses jazz, rock and electronic music. Like the pianist Robert Glasper, Guiliana – voted Best Jazz Drummer in this year’s Modern Drummer Readers Poll – has been hugely influenced by electronic music and textures, as equally inspired by Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as by jazz drumming legends Tony Williams and Elvin Jones.
Across two perfectly paced sets in a packed Ronnie Scott’s, part of this year's EFG London Jazz Festival, we heard material from Guiliana’s latest album Jersey – featuring his entirely acoustic Jazz Quartet of tenor sax player Jason Rigby, pianist Fabian Almazan and bassist Chris Morrissey, all leaders in their own right – plus a trio of tracks from 2015’s Family First.
The album title references Guiliana’s roots – the northeastern US state rather than the Channel Islands, as he was quick to point out – where he was born and raised and now lives with his wife (vocalist Gretchen Parlato) and young son.
Co-written by Guiliana and Parlato, opener “inter-are” provided something of a blueprint for the evening’s stellar music-making. Highly charged, interlocking lines that slowly build in intensity, with Guiliana and Morrissey locked in from the get-go, Rigby’s striking, circuitous, modal-sounding melody suddenly coalescing from mere fragments, and then a solo from Almazan which took the music to entirely new harmonic places.
Placing first in the Rising Piano Star category in the 2014 Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll, Almazan’s singular rhythmic and harmonic conception, as well as an almost orchestral approach to texture, proved the perfect foil for the heat generated by Guiliana and Morrissey, whether providing virtuosic, darting single lines and huge, pulsing block chords in “From You”, or exploring the cavernous depths of the club’s Yamaha grand piano in “Big Rig Jones”, marked by crisply executed, hammered out repeated notes.
As was typical of Guiliana’s restraint, his first and only (impeccable) solo of the evening finally came in “Long Branch” towards the end of the second set, eliciting the evening’s warmest applause while simultaneously highlighting the quartet’s remarkable dynamic control – cutting in the blink of an eye from a textural whirlwind to an oceanic calm.
The evening’s sole cover was a beautiful, impressionistic reworking of David Bowie’s “Where Are We Now?” (from his penultimate album The Next Day), a touching ‘thank you’ from Guiliana for the life-changing experience of working with Bowie on Blackstar.
For the encore, the quartet dipped back in to Family First, the Guiliana-penned “One Month”, which proved to be a rhythmically charged standout. Listening to it unfold – its playfulness and objectivity, the block-like cutting between clearly differentiated material, the use of layering and the highly charged ostinatos which bookend the work – you wondered if the music of Igor Stravinsky might also be an important touchstone.
Combining the sophistication and simplicity he so admires in the playing of Miles Davis star Williams, Guiliana – unshowy yet absolutely compelling – always played exactly what the music required.
- More live reviews on theartsdesk
- The EFG London Jazz Festival continues until Sunday 19 November
Overleaf: watch the Mark Guiliana Jazz Quartet perform “Jersey”
Thomas H. Green
There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the floor”. A hail of tops bounces about the venue. Behind me a young woman, naked from the waist up, boogies like a headbanger.
Kesha’s freed-up party persona is contagious, the more so because her five-piece band, similarly clad in velveteen suits, with glittery cowboy ties, transform her older, electro-pop material into a Memphis-style rhythm'n'blues rock-out. They’re assisted by two male dancers/backing singers, one shaven-headed in glasses, the other a long-haired Adonis. This pair deliberately subvert the usual pop imagery by playing the coquette-ish role usually taken by female dancers, notably on opening number “Woman”, a horn-boosted feminist anthem on which the whole crowd shouts out the, “I’m a motherfucking woman!” chorus.
The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha
Of course, this sole British Kesha concert of 2017, amid a PR-announced “Kesha Takes Over the UK” campaign, is the European culmination of a comeback. Kesha has been through years of misery, resulting from a bitter, convoluted and well-documented legal conflict with the man who discovered her, Dr Luke. The songs on her recent album, Rainbow, deal with the subject, with her alleged abuse, exorcising it and finding empowerment in song. Perhaps more interestingly, in terms of her music, Rainbow is also about Kesha exploring new ways to express herself. Her work with The Flaming Lips, her country-rockin’ Yeast Infection outfit, and last year’s Kesha and the Creepies rock’n’roll tour all showed an artist keen to break free of the chart-pop straitjacket. Now she almost has, and the way the audience knows her new material seems to thrill her.
Indeed, when she brings her mum, the songwriter Pebe Sebert, on to help sing the strummed, Jonathan Richman-esque ballad “Godzilla”, one of Rainbow’s finest songs, and one her mother wrote, Kesha is so overcome with emotion she has to stop singing for a moment. Mostly, though, there are no such hiccups, as she shakes her waist-length pink hair extensions gleefully around, spits water – and later beer – over the audience, and hurls out towels she’s mopped her face with (“This is a big one – you can tear it into little pieces and share it”).
She’s given to very American emotional pleas, and proclamations of love for her fans. During “We R Who We R” she gives a speech about gender rights, saying there’s “no more room for hate and discrimination”. The crowd love her, very vocally. They’re mostly in their twenties and lathered in glitter, assisted by the handfuls of it Kesha and her band throw over them during the gig. They all yodel along with her jolly cowgirl stalker number “Hunt You Down” and sway, eyes closed during the new, kitsch-psychedelia number “Spaceship”, during which Kesha changes from her suit into a white, short-sleeved crochet-style dress and backwoods cowboy hat. On the final pre-encore song the whole Electric Brixton sings the self-empowerment anthem “Praying”, as if it were a hymn.
To finish the show, it’s time to go bananas as Kesha pulls her mega-hit “Tik Tok” out of the bag and the two dancers fire confetti over us. It’s one of the 21st century’s monster pop songs, a hedonist ultra-blast, and Kesha is sometimes almost inaudible beneath the crowd chorusing. She then ends with Rainbow album-opener “Bastards”, a big country-flavoured “fuck you” tune which explodes into a “Hey Jude” style “nah nah nah” vocal, accompanied by a tickertape cannon filling the air with flutter. “Don’t let the bastards get you down/Oh no, don’t let the assholes wear you out,” we all yell along. An apt close, to roaring applause. The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha. She seems like a woman who’s only just blooming into the artist she wants to be.
Overleaf: watch a caped Kesha perform "Learn to Let Go" at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2017
Kieron Tyler
Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.
Kieron Tyler
In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.