Interviews
Jasper Rees
Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world premiere at Theatre 503, a tiny pub stage in south London. But the unanimity of the reviews, combined with the timely arrival of a black man in the White House, propelled the two-hander into the West End where it played to standing ovations from notably multiracial audiences. In a year which saw the premiere of Enron by Lucy Prebble and Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, it won the coveted Best New Play award Read more ...
David Kettle
One of two Danish Thomases at the head of BBC bands (compatriot Thomas Søndergård is at the helm of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales), Thomas Dausgaard joins the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor this season.Dausgaard follows in the rather illustrious footsteps of Donald Runnicles (who becomes the Orchestra's conductor emeritus), and joins a high-flying team of Ilan Volkov as principal guest and composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher as artist-in-association.Runnicles has left, as they say, big shoes to fill. But Dausgaard is out to make his mark with a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Helaine Blumenfeld was living in Paris in the 1960s when she received an invitation from the Russian-born sculptor Ossip Zadkine to attend one of his salons. Zadkine had emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the century, evolving a style influenced first by Cubism and then African art. His most celebrated sculpture The Destroyed City (Rotterdam) had drawn comparisons with Picasso’s Guernica, while his social circle had included Henry Miller, Picasso, Brancusi and Modigliani. So when he invited the then unknown Blumenfeld over after seeing her sculptures in the atelier where he had been Read more ...
Ralph Moore
theartsdesk meets Christine McVie on a sunny Friday afternoon in September; the Warner Brothers boardroom (with generous hospitality spread) is suitably palatial. We’re the first media interview of the day, so she’s bright and attentive. McVie was always the member of Fleetwood Mac who you’d want to adopt: the most approachably human member of a band constantly at war with itself. Readily admitting that she’s the “peacekeeper” in the band, the singer/songwriter behind such Mac classics as “Everywhere” and “You Make Loving Fun” is as sweet and serene as you’d hope she would be.She’s here to Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If you’re expecting family drama, the opening of Captain Fantastic will surprise. We’re following a hunter, greased-up so he’s invisible in the woods, stalking a deer. There’s an edginess to the scene, the atmosphere primal as the animal is killed. Other disguised forms emerge from the trees, and a ritual of smeared blood ensues – nature, red in tooth and claw.It feels a long way from civilisation; it transpires that we have been witnessing a rite of passage for eldest son Bodevan as he turns 18, orchestrated by his father Ben (Viggo Mortensen, bearded, back in The Road mode, on excellent Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The best and most confident debut since ‘Anarchy in the UK,’” said weekly music paper Sounds of the debut single by Ultravox! “Dangerous Rhythm” had been released in February 1977. “Cosmic reggae," declared Record Mirror. Melody Maker identified a “rare quality and haunting presence”. The NME said the song was a “reggae abstraction” and “mesmeric”. Ultravox! – the attention-grabbing exclamation mark was ditched in early 1978 – were off to a good start.Soon, though, the wind direction changed. Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel said they were session musicians put together by Island Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous. But the reason for that anonymity is that he's a long, long way from the usual neatly-coiffed 20-something house producer you usually see in “breakthrough Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Cinema has waited a long time for a film about Miles Davis. It hasn’t been for want of trying by Don Cheadle, who stars in, directs, produces and takes a co-writing credit on Miles Ahead. Despite the support of Davis’s son, daughter, nephew and first wife Frances Taylor, the film was trapped in a pipeline for aeons. While he waited, Cheadle had plenty of time to turn himself into a trumpeter good enough to perform onstage in the film’s coda with Davis collaborators Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter.The wait was so long that it easily outstrips Davis’s five-year fallow period in the 1970s when Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Conductor, arranger and composer Jules Buckley is a notable champion of non-classical orchestral music. He has pioneered orchestral arrangements with singer-songwriters such as Laura Mvula, Anna Calvi and Caro Emerald. Even more boldly, he has established orchestral collaborations with numerous artists from rock and electronic music, including the Arctic Monkeys, Professor Green, Basement Jaxx, and electronic improviser Beardyman.As co-founder in 2004 of the Heritage Orchestra, Jules Buckley quickly attracted the support of Gilles Peterson, and in the past decade his career has rapidly Read more ...
peter.quinn
Copenhagen-born bassist Jasper Høiby moved to London in 2000 to attend the Royal Academy of Music. In 2005 he created the trio Phronesis which has toured extensively in Europe and North America and won awards for Jazz Album of the Year in Jazzwise and MOJO for its 2010 album, Alive, as well as a London Jazz Award for its "Pitch Black" performance at Brecon Jazz festival in 2012.Høiby has performed and recorded with a number of artists including Mark Guiliana, Django Bates, Shai Maestro, Julian Joseph, Kurt Elling, Tom Arthurs, Mark Lockheart, Liam Noble, Julia Biel, Marius Neset, Kairos 4tet Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singin’ in the Rain made much of those people in the movies whose work you don’t know you know. Set at the dawn of the talkies, it told of a star of the silent screen with the voice of a foghorn who relied on the angelic pipes of a trained singer parked behind a curtain. Such was the real-life story of Marni Nixon, who has died at the age of 86. You knew her soprano voice intimately. You just didn’t know her name. It was Nixon who sang for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Nixon who sang for Deborah Kerr in The King and I. Those top notes of Marilyn Monroe’s in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and has been for the past 42 years, ever since Garrison Keillor first reported on the town's goings-on in his weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor's purring baritone is the gentle voice of non-coastal America, and it is picked up by 700 local public radio stations by four million listeners. But at 72, and after a health scare, Keillor is stepping down. So anyone who wants to get a regular fix from Lake Wobegon will need to go back to the books.Keillor's first fame as a writer was as a regular contributor to William Shawn's The New Yorker Read more ...