New music
marcus.odair
It's now over 20 years since saxophonist Jason Yarde emerged, aged just 16, with pioneering London collective The Jazz Warriors. Since then he has played with big hitters like McCoy Tyner, Hugh Masekela and Roy Ayers, as well as a younger generation including Gwilym Simcock and Soweto Kinch. Yet he's more than an in-demand sideman, having also established himself as a composer and arranger in his own right through work for the LSO and BBC Concert Orchestra.
Both sides of that personality were evident at Chelsea’s sober 606 Club for this London Jazz Festival show, Yarde’s first appearance at Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For me there is a trinity of black musicians, visionaries who reshaped music in the last half-century: James Brown, Miles Davis and Fela Kuti. And just as it’s hard to imagine a biographical musical of James Brown or Miles Davis coming off - because which mere actor is ever going to have their charisma, attitude or moves - likewise it seemed a stretch to imagine Fela! being much more than sophisticated karaoke. Karaoke with a message and some groovy dancing, no doubt. But somehow this production pulled off the impossible. Near as dammit anyway.One immediate plus of the show, transferring from Read more ...
marcus.odair
They began with a whimper, rather than a bang. Bronx bassist William Parker was still tuning up when Zhenya Strigalev, Russian by birth but a regular performer at this south London restaurant and vodka bar, summoned the first quiet squeak from his alto saxophone. Parker’s playing became gradually more deliberate, but it was hard to say exactly at what point the London Jazz Festival gig had officially begun until Parker’s co-leader, the Louisiana-via-Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, finally picked up his mallets.For those who continue to insist that avant-garde artists from Cecil Taylor to Jackson Read more ...
peter.quinn
A member of Miles Davis's legendary second quintet (“arguably Miles's best ever group” according to the Penguin Jazz Guide); a composer of standards (“Watermelon Man”, “Dolphin Dance”, “Maiden Voyage”, “Cantaloupe Island”) and soundtracks (Antonioni's Blow-Up, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight); winner of over 10 Grammy Awards, the first for his 1983 hit single “Rockit”, the most recent for his magnificent 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album River: The Joni Letters (one of only two jazz recordings to win the coveted Album of the Year award, the other being Getz/Gilberto over 40 years ago). Read more ...
david.cheal
Then there was the succession of guest artists, among them Neneh Cherry, De La Soul and Mark E Smith (who looked as if he had just nipped across the road from a session in the pub), who passed across the stage. Oh, and the endlessly inventive Jamie Hewlett animations that poured across the video screen.It was bewildering, and brilliant. Although Gorillaz were created by Albarn and Hewlett in 1998, it took seven years for them to make the transition from being a “virtual” band of animated comic-book characters to a proper stage ensemble, with their sensational 2005 residency at the Manchester Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Brad Mehldau is a cool cat. An intellectual one, introverted to the point of semi-autism, precise and clear. A strong mystique based on critic-proof good taste and hardly talking to anyone, least of all many music journalists (I’ve tried). At least that’s what I used to think before last night’s extraordinary show. He still looks a bit of a nerd, hunched over his piano and pale as a baby polar bear locked in the attic for too long, but this was a warm, enveloping trip of a gig. The 21st century is the century the nerds took over - Gates, Zuckerberg, Mehldau. The jocks, the lookers, the sexy Read more ...
peter.quinn
And we're off. Marking the official start of the London Jazz Festival, “Jazz Voice: Celebrating a Century of Song” provided a superbly paced and brilliantly conceived curtain-raiser. Hosted by Scottish actor Dougray Scott and presenting vocalists from both sides of the Atlantic, this paean to the art of song featured Guy Barker's consummate, high-spec arrangements lovingly performed by his hand-picked orchestra.From the engulfing beauty of Gretchen Parlato's “Butterfly” and China Moses's touchingly intimate “Walk on By” - the gorgeous, suspended ending of the latter was just one of many heart Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a moment during Hjaltalín’s encore when bolero rhythms take over and you wonder if the Reykjavik septet have invented a new musical hybrid: a Ravel-driven makeover of Seventies-slanted soul. As singer Sigrídur Thorlacius lets rip on the thrillingly anthemic “Feels Like Sugar”, it’s clear that Hjaltalín aren’t bothered with current musical templates. They take from the unlikeliest sources, smoosh them together and end up sounding like no one else. After all, this is a band with a stand-up bassoon player. At home, they topped the charts covering a song by Icelandic disco star and Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.British folk has two distinct but interconnected strands, reflecting perhaps the (oft-forgotten) fact that we are an island people: a rootsy and sometimes purist obsession with homegrown tunes Read more ...
graeme.thomson
So, did they play all the singles? Well no, not all of them, given that they’ve released 26 of the buggers in the past year alone, frisbeeing one out every fortnight in the sort of kamikaze experiment contemplated by only the truly inspired or the slightly desperate. Ash, on the evidence of last night's gig, might just be a bit of both.In one respect this immensely likeable band provide a window into the future. Having kicked around since the mid-1990s with no little success, after being dropped by Warner Brothers in 2008 they decided to go it alone. Setting up their own label and website, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grime music, following its emergence from (mostly) East London clubs and pirate radio stations in the very early 2000s, was archetypical music of urban disaffection. Although it produced characters like the rambunctious Jammer and the oddly melancholic Trim among its legions of young rappers, its fundamental mode is of straight-up combat and threat – of gunplay and postcode rivalries, of “slewing” (killing), “murking” (killing) and “duppying” (go on, have a guess) rivals, of fury at unspecified “haters” – and the jagged rhythms and harsh tones of the music tended to back this up.So as the Read more ...
howard.male
I’d not been to the Bloomsbury Ballroom before, but over the past five years or so the likes of Amy Winehouse and Martha Reeves have played this plush Art Deco space. Somewhat disconcertingly, apart from the stage, the rest of the hall was in virtual darkness which suited Dub Colossus perfectly: this intriguing collective of British and Ethiopian musicians are purveyors of intense, atmospheric dance music who actually benefited from this dramatic lack of lighting which made the stage appear to glow like a coal furnace.Since releasing their groundbreaking debut album, A Town Called Addis, in Read more ...