New music
Tim Cumming
This year’s edition of the Gnawa Festival in the medina of the beautiful coastal town of Essaouira featured two spectacular fusions – between Bessekou Kouyate with Hamid El Kasri on the closing Sunday night, and on Saturday night – in the early hours of Sunday morning, in fact, on the main stage at Moulay Hassan – bassist, band leader and Miles Davis alumni Marcus Miller with Mustapha Bakbou, forging a dense, deeply rhythmic fusion to match the pounding Atlantic ocean on one side, and the long, curving bay on the other (with its own late-night beach stage in the distance).Earlier in the day, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Sia Tolno was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone, had a violent father, was forced to leave the country due to the civil war and ended up in the harsh world of Conakry nightclubs. Life was no bed of roses, in other words. The inspiring thing about this album is how she now stands loud and proud in the tradition of powerful African women like Angelique Kidjo and Miriam Makeba. This, her fourth and most ambitious album is her take on Afro-beat. Her collaborator is Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s legendary drummer and co-architect of Afro-beat 40-plus years on from the original sound when Allen was the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: CSNY 1974Considering that their 1974 tour was the world’s first series of dates limited to outdoor stadia since the Beatles in 1966, it’s appropriate the long-gestating collection chronicling Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s mammoth jaunt is an all-encompassing three-CD box set which also includes a DVD and a hefty, copiously illustrated booklet with a definitive in-depth essay on the tour.Although previously bootlegged and not hard to find, the dates did not – curiously, since it was a landmark tour designed to rake in cash – spawn a live album Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you're not familiar with Jon Allen, here's a few facts: he possesses a fine gravelly voice, and nimble fingers. More than anything, though, Allen has an uncanny knack for penning a good tune. He learnt his craft while sequestered up in a woodland shack. Actually no, that’s Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The truth is Allen’s back-story is a little prosaic by today’s standards – he studied song-writing at a performing arts college in Liverpool. Still, what he lacks in romance he makes up for with sweat and perseverance. In keeping with its cover, Deep River, Allen's third LP, mainly flows at Read more ...
Matthew Wright
If, like Wynton Marsalis, you’re a gatekeeper of the jazz tradition, there’s little you’ll defend more staunchly than the Blue Note back catalogue. With the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, in London on a short tour, he presented a glossy and intriguing selection of Blue Note repertoire before an ecstatic audience in last night’s Barbican concert. Technically, this was a tour de force. Where the components of some big bands lose definition and melt into a raucous fudge, JALC boasted talon-sharp brass bite, regal articulation, and a deeply golden lustre. Marsalis’ traditionalism is well Read more ...
caspar.gomez
PrologueOn Thursday 26 June I arrive at a cloudy but warm Glastonbury Festival, set up camp, eat sausages, chase after DJ Richie Hawtin for an interview that never happens, then acclimatise, settle, let this hedonist Mecca do its work on me…Friday 27 JuneIt starts as spotting. Then it lets go. The sound of droplets pattering against the outer skin of the brown four-person tent becomes a regular tattoo. I lie within, waiting out the mind-fuzz of yesterday’s cider, whisky and chemicals, munching on a breakfast of Morrisons Cheese Savouries (which are, incidentally, addictive). I wonder if 2014 Read more ...
Matthew Wright
French band Pulcinella is little known over here, but the release of their third album Bestiole (meaning nothing more ribald than “tiny creatures”, apparently), coincides with a brief UK tour, and is looking like the beginnings of a breakthrough. A quartet of sax, accordion, percussion and bass, with an exotic array of guest instruments, they’re self-consciously experimental, but melodic and humorous with it. Their swirling sound-world of whimsical, gothic circus noir draws on jazz, tango and alt rock, but balances the mixture with feisty originality in independent territory in between.The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Admired by Brazilian musical royalty like Milton Nascimento and Caetano Veloso, Maria Gadú, at the age of 27, already has four platinum albums to her credit, not to mention a couple of Latin Grammys. Her music blends the urban chaotic modernity of her hometown São Paulo with the grassroots sounds of the North East and Rio. Born Mayra Correa Aygadoux in 1986 Gadú was something of a child prodigy, and began writing songs and recording them onto cassette at the age of 10. Remarkably enough one of them, "Shimbalaie", would eventually make it onto her debut album and become her first hit Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sia Furler is a fascinating phenomenon – after all, you don't really expect Australian sidepersons for midranking trip-hop acts to go on to be multi-trillionaire pop overlords, on the whole. But yes, the former Zero 7 singer has, via a quietly successful solo career, become one of the biggest songwriters on the planet. We're talking (deep breath) Christina Aguilera, Eminem, Flo Rida, Afrojack, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Lea Michele, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Kylie Minogue, Leona Lewis, Hilltop Hoods, Katy Perry, Kesha, Rita Ora, Britney Spears, Jessie J, Oh Land, Celine Dion, Maroon 5 and David Guetta Read more ...
Russ Coffey
First there was Hyde Park Calling, then it was Hard Rock Calling and now, re-located in Clapham, it’s just the Calling Festival (presumably the organisers thought Clapham Common Calling carried too many connotations). The venue may have changed but last weekend was, pretty much, business as usual - a couple of stages, watery beer and a two-day smorgasboard of pop and rock. This year, though, all the pop was on day two. Saturday was for real rock.The first day's early-afternoon acts were young guns, who played in the pouring rain to an intense rock-crowd. Midlands- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Saturday commuters sprinting for the 17.33 to Ardrossan find themselves dodging an obstacle course of swing-dancing young couples, soundtracked by a pensionable trad jazz band. A shifting crowd of about 100 pause in their journeys at Glasgow Central station to enjoy Penman’s Jazzmen, skilful Scottish veterans comfortable with each other and the demands of this century-old New Orleans music.Four days into 2014’s Glasgow Jazz Festival, its existence will have been news to many of the Glaswegians entertained by this enterprising street gig. More obviously momentous events are signposted around Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels as if the life-on-the-road song has become a rite of passage for those rock bands that manage to clock up enough years together, but after 20 years in the business Texan alt-country rockers Old 97’s probably have more of a claim to it than most. Clocking in at just under six minutes, “Longer Than You’ve Been Alive” is one of the best examples of the genre, regardless of its titular accuracy. It’s a meandering, tongue-in-cheek portrait of the rock star excesses, but also the tedium, that comes with life in a moderately successful touring band. As frontman Rhett Miller reminisces, most Read more ...