Southbank Centre
peter.quinn
Melodically rich, harmonically daring, rhythmically subtle, pianist Gwilym Simcock's quartet piece, “Longing To Be”, which kicked off last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall gig was one of the most jaw-dropping performances I've heard at this year's London Jazz Festival. Opening with an expansive, über-romantic solo from the pianist in free time, the piece unfolded quite beautifully with the layered introduction of Yuri Goloubev's bowed bass, James Maddren's understated percussion and Klaus Gesing's haunting soprano sax.Both bassist and drummer are members of Simcock's trio that features on his new Read more ...
Anonymous
Slender limbs, intense eyes, and dressed entirely in black: if it wasn’t for the straightened blonde hair, Carla Bley could pass for a jazz Patti Smith. She is also, of course, one of the genre’s most acclaimed composer-arrangers, and her return to London is much anticipated. Before she plays a note, the septuagenarian Californian walks awkwardly, defiantly, to a microphone at the front of the stage.“We’re going to play something very simple,” she announces, before heading to the piano and picking out a melody: "Three Blind Mice". “You’ll hear all this in this next piece,” she continues, Read more ...
Anonymous
There’s something of a Polish theme to the London Jazz Festival 2009, part of the “Polska! year” celebration of that nation’s art and culture. Trumpeter Tomasz Stańko is by some margin the strand’s biggest name. The man who once explained the mournful, meditative tone of his (and his country’s) music in terms of the “melancholy light” he’d known since birth took to the stage in appropriately sombre attire: suit, shirt and hat alike in any colour as long as it was black.Much of the playing was similarly noirish, in keeping with both the moody shadows of Stańko’s current publicity shots and the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It was a weird experience to get home from last night’s performance by Shobana Jeyasingh’s dance company to find Nick Griffin on TV defending his view of “indigenous” Britons. There’s a vigorous stratum of British contemporary dance that could come only from today’s fecund mixing of London and the East, and it’s the faultline where the two layers don’t fuse that makes much of this work tougher and more intriguing in intention than the more “indigenous”, in Griffinese.Jeyasingh, with her Indian childhood and classical Bharata Natyam dance training, her 30 years living in London, and a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Go on, admit it. You’ve done it too. Someone is talking in your vicinity and you’ve turned round to give them evils. It’s a manoeuvre I’ve been perfecting for years. The classic rebuke is in the speedy twist of the neck, a withering glance in the perpetrator’s general direction (but not, crucially, into their eyeballs: too confrontational) followed by the slow, affronted turn back to face the front. For one night only, the gesture says, you are singlehandedly ruining my life. I didn't pay more than I can afford to listen to you whisper through Beethoven/Shakespeare/”The Great Gig in the Sky Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk.com presents The Seckerson Tapes, a series of live and uncut audio interviews from acclaimed broadcaster Edward Seckerson. We start with Jamie Bernstein - Leonard Bernstein's eldest daughter - who has been in London launching the year-long Bernstein Project at the South Bank. Seckerson, a long-standing Bernstein devotee and disciple, sat down for a frank and open discussion about exactly who her "dad" was.This is the uncut interview.
Ismene Brown
A modern choreographer has arrived when he gets to run two companies in parallel, the institution that appoints him director, and - as a sort of personal couture line - his own group. Wayne McGregor does it with the Royal Ballet and his Random Dance, now it’s Rafael Bonachela who took on Sydney Dance Company at the end of last year, while retaining his own Bonachela Dance Company at the South Bank Centre. Going by last night, I don't think living a bi-hemispheric existence is aiding his powers to entertain.Bonachela's talent is slim - nice, but slim. A decade ago it was interesting to see him Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Folk singers travel well. And it’s often as ex-pats that they best appreciate their own culture. Martin Simpson, born in Scunthorpe, lived the life of a professional English folkie for 15 years before relocating to America. Although working the clubs as a bluesman he never lost his keen ear for his own roots music.But success in Simpson's adopted home eventually gave way to homesickness, and his homecoming album, Prodigal Son, was released in 2007. If folk singers travel well, folk audiences often look more at home, at home. Folk is, after all, about people. And when folk fans Read more ...