New music
John L Walters
The 10-day London Jazz Festival, now in its 19th year, is a diverse and international festival that embraces the unapologetically commercial Jazz Voice, the outer reaches of (free) free improv and even Abram Wilson’s Jazz for Toddlers. Despite a line-up that’s both starry and distinguished there was no single name that might encapsulate the festival’s rainbow palette. You can get a taste of its breadth from the three giants competing for our attention on the final night: Brazilian pioneer Hermeto Pascoal, guitarist Bill Frisell and free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. I rationed myself to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Dateline July 14th, 2357, New Oxford Excavation, UK Sector 71. Uncovered a remarkable haul of artefacts from the early 21st century. Most pristine among these is a sonic data disc, theoretically a devotional item related to the contemporaneous female fertility symbol known as Rihanna. The disc was discovered intact in a transparent plastic case accompanied by a 120 x 120mm stapled booklet. It appears the disc’s primary purpose was related to sexual arousal. Photographic images within the booklet, both black-and-white and colour, offer up Rihanna in a multiplicity of sexual availability – Read more ...
Tim Cumming
I’m stood in the dusk in front of the tomb of Sheikh Hamid al-Nil as the sun sets on Khartoum, reddening in the exhaust-filled air as it deflates over a receding jumble of low-rise blocks spreading down the banks of the Nile and out towards Tuti Island, where the waters of the Blue and White Nile meet. This is no quaint, picturesque view, though you do feel you're in some ancient theatre of humanity when you land in Khartoum.The voice of a Koranic singer billows and froths from the PA and speakers studded around the conical cream-and-green tower of the mosque, and a crowd of several Read more ...
marcus.odair
It’s nine days into the 10-day London Jazz Festival, and highlights so far include the double bill of saxophonists Steve Williamson and Steve Coleman, and the UK’s own Empirical supporting veterans Archie Shepp and Joachim Kuhn (the former a mellowed African-American firebrand, the latter a German pianist with all the wild intensity of Klaus Kinski in a Beethoven biopic). Contemporary crooner Gregory Porter, who played the "Jazz on 3" launch at Ronnie Scott’s, didn't do much for me, but it seems already to have been written that he is THE FUTURE OF JAZZ and it might just come to pass.The room Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Chart music has always been largely about sex, but for me The Saturdays marked a tipping point in pop's pornification when they covered Depeche Mode's “Just Can't Get Enough” in 2009 and turned an innocent electro classic into a gushing paean to insatiable lust. The video has notched up over five million hits, presumably more to do with the strumpets in suspenders than a frankly unexpected cameo from Muffin the Mule.Still, my Meldrewish moans have hardly held them back and the Anglo-Irish quintet’s new album finds them getting a little bit experimental. Calm down, don't expect them to be Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Los Angeles, raised by his mother in Bakersfield, and now living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, Gregory Porter's resonant baritone is one of music's wonders. Porter's Grammy-nominated debut album, Water, has earned him praise from critics and fellow artists alike. Released in the UK in April this year to coincide with his appearance on Later... With Jools Holland, Water leapt to Number One in both the UK's iTunes and Amazon charts.Porter's amazing vocal abilities have seen him described by no less a jazz luminary than Wynton Marsalis as “a fantastic young singer”. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What the hell is wrong with Bob Dylan? As the Sage of Minnesota rolls back into London with Mark Knopfler in tow, I took a detour round YouTube to see what they've been up to on their recent European dates. Of course, we've all grown used to Dylan's habit of mashing his lyrics to a formless pulp and turning what used to be tunes into a sequence of hiccups and barking noises, but the time does seem to be approaching when medical professionals will have to be ordered in to escort him from the microphone. I was especially appalled by some clips somebody had taken of Mystery Bob at the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Kate Bush has always steered a dangerous course between pure genius and mannerist excess. Her latest album, a hymn to snow and the icy element’s soft and crystalline associations, is no different. There are moments when she teeters on the edge of self-parody and cliché and others when she makes music that dazzles as much as it moves. She is a unique British artist, existing in a creative bubble well outside the mainstream yet never marginal or beyond the reach of popular taste.She is uniquely British, too, or more exactly English, resonating with a strain of our island’s culture that Read more ...
peter.quinn
There aren't too many pianists who excite jazz aficionados and hip-hop fans in equal measure. But then no other artist has been inspired equally by hip-hop beats on the one hand and Thelonious Monk on the other. And while it appears increasingly that jazz artists are refusing to be straitjacketed by genre convention, US pianist Robert Glasper is perhaps the prime example of this blurring at the edges.Glasper's previous Blue Note album, Double Booked (2009), celebrated this creative duality by featuring his acoustic trio in the first half and the electric Robert Glasper Experiment in the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well, wheezes. From the borrowed title alone, it’s obvious where Admiral Back are coming from: classic Sixties-leaning rock. It's not all scuzz and psych though in the house of Black. “Madman’s Blues” drifts by in a haze and “Crystallised” begs for lighters in the air and a swaying audience.Not to be confused with the Chicago rock/metal outfit Admiral of Read more ...
david.cheal
This show was memorable almost as much for the audience as it was for the music. The Roundhouse was perhaps two-thirds full for a show that The Low Anthem’s singer Ben Knox Miller said was “the biggest gig of their career” (adding: “And I’ve never called it a ‘career’ before”), but those who were there had clearly come to see the band rather than catch up on gossip, because the audience’s attention was absolute, their silence total; I can scarcely recall a gig where the crowd’s concentration was so complete.The objects of their attention were a band from Providence, Rhode Island who have been Read more ...
peter.quinn
Funkier than a James Brown bridge, the mighty Soul Rebels Brass Band swung back into town last night and flattened all before them. Possessing that rare combination of serious chops, impeccable stagecraft and down-home soul, they confirmed their position as one of the most explosive live acts on the scene. From the very opening bars of Stevie Wonder's “Living for the City”, taken from their current Rounder album Unlock Your Mind, the Soul Rebels had the entire QEH off their seats.The continuous set featured the reggae-fied uplift of the title track, the dazzling call-and-response interplay Read more ...