fri 29/03/2024

New Music Reviews

Youssou N'Dour: Voice of Africa, BBC Four

Mark Hudson

You either get Youssou N’Dour, or you don’t. For millions on his home turf, the Senegalese singer is a major cultural figure: the street urchin-turned-superstar who almost became president. For large numbers of Western fellow travellers he’s the sexiest, most charismatic figure to emerge from the whole world music phenomenon.

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Prom 62: A Celebration of Charlie Parker

Matthew Wright

Pianist, composer, and band leader Django Bates was so inspired by Charlie Parker as a teenager that he used to whistle his tunes on the train. This led not to abuse, but the acquaintance (at Brixton station) of saxophonist Steve Buckley. Returning to the Proms this week for the first time since his 1987 debut with Loose Tubes, Bates paid homage with a set of mainly Parker adaptations, performed by his trio, Beloved, in a new collaboration with the Swedish Norrbotten Big Band.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: Sly Stone

Kieron Tyler

 

Sly & the Family Stone Higher!Sly & the Family Stone: Higher!

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Sun Ra Arkestra, Café Oto

Serena Kutchinsky

Dalston was the place on Friday night, as the Sun Ra Arkestra put on a trademark display of Afro-jazz excellence in the intimate surrounds of Café Oto. Jazz pioneer Sun Ra might have been dead since 1993, but his influential big band is very much alive and capable of puffing their way through marathon sets.

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How To Be A World Music Star, BBC Four

Peter Culshaw

This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “you could put a choir of Bulgarian tractor drivers next to some hot shot guitar slinger from Guinea-Bissau".

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Prom 54: World Routes

Peter Culshaw

Why are the Malians always punching way above their weight in music? There may be some historical reasons. The French always were more welcoming to the culture of their empire than the Brits (and more used to foreign-language music), while Paris became a great centre of West African music, from where it was disseminated over Europe.

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Julia Holter, Cecil Sharp House

Kieron Tyler

Imagine an aural swoon of a song like a mermaid’s sigh preceding one which introduces Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals to free-jazz skronk. After that, Laurie Anderson pops along to take on the soft soul of the early Seventies Isley Brothers. An evening with Julia Holter encompasses all of that, yet knits it all together gracefully to make a whole like nothing else.

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Reissue CDs Weekly: R Stevie Moore, Foxy R&B, Looking Good, A Certain Ratio

Kieron Tyler

 

R Stevie Moore Personal AppealR Stevie Moore: Personal Appeal

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Crazy About One Direction, Channel 4

Kieron Tyler

Sandra, 14, has worked out what it will be like if she marries One Direction’s Harry Styles. “His morning voice would be amazing,” she says, thinking forward to when the first thing she hears each day is the croak with which he greets the morning and her. Pop groups with fans are nothing new, and with them come ranks of the obsessive.

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Prom 40: 6 Music Prom, The Stranglers, Laura Marling, London Sinfonietta

Peter Culshaw

“That was a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” said the guy in the row behind. Yes, but then the said canine repast can also no doubt be nutritious and delicious, for dogs anyway. The most dogs-breakfasty (in the bad sense) moment was right at the end, when the Stranglers played their greatest song “Golden Brown”, their immortal chanson to a girl and heroin.

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