New music
Tim Cumming
Since releasing her first solo album in 2006 while still a member of the acclaimed Northumbrian group Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - who also garnered three Folk Award nominations for themselves this year – Oates has developed a unique repertoire of English balladry to which her clear, richly emotive voice is so suited.That repertoire largely comes not from books or records but from years of taking part in folk sessions in pubs, clubs and homes around Devon, where she has lived since 2000. The tragic, dark-hearted ballads that stud her three solo albums come directly from a remarkable Read more ...
peter.quinn
The cliché which gets trotted out most often when describing Jan Garbarek's saxophone playing is his supposedly "icy" tone (Google “Garbarek” and “icy” and you'll see what I mean). As Garbarek's long-standing bassist Eberhard Weber amusingly points out in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, “I challenge the ladies and gentlemen of the press to think what they would write if Jan Garbarek wasn't Norwegian but Greek and his name was Garabekoulos! Then his music would immediately turn into the smouldering, sun-drenched sound of the scorching South.” Fair point, Eberhard.Hearing the latest Read more ...
theartsdesk
January's most riveting CDs found by our critics includes those by Malian master-musicians Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, an Italian surrealist, an Algerian rocker, British Big Band jazz, Northern chamber folk and some sparky veterans releasing their best stuff for decades including Sade, Massive Attack and Peter Gabriel. The CD of the month is by Vinicio Capossela. Stinker: the over-rated Vampire Weekend. Reviewers this month are Howard Male, Thomas H Green, Peter Quinn, Robert Sandall, Graeme Thomson, Sue Steward, Peter Culshaw, Russ Coffey and Joe Muggs.CD of the Month
Vinicio Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week's birthdays include a trio of incandescent rock legends – Axl Rose musing about recording a triple album and sacking his drummer, Alice Cooper on corrupting the youth, and Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist of Spinal Tap, pushing the amp up to 11. There’s musicologist Alan Lomax on prison songs, a clip of a film melodrama with violinist Jascha Heifetz, a tour of the world with Bob Marley on Google Earth from Trenchtown to Addis Ababa, and Barrett Strong, who recorded the original, terrific version of "Money" on Motown in 1959. All together now: “Your lovin' gives me a thrill/ But your Read more ...
howard.male
Dr. Feelgood was the first band I ever saw live, and I can still remember that frisson of expectation queuing up outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange in 1975. I didn’t even know who they were or what they sounded like, I simply had some pals who were soon-to-be-punks who’d got wind of the fact that these Canvey Island ne’er-do-wells were the harbingers of something new, something borrowed, and something blue. But the blues were only the starting point for "Feelgood" as we, necessarily, truncated their name.By the summer of 1976, Feelgood had become the best live band in the land. But by the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Early yesterday evening on that bastion of biting cultural analysis The One Show, Andy McCluskey of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark was reflecting on how his band was inspired by German techno-wizards Kraftwerk. If OMD were the children of Florian Schneider und co, then Delphic, led by another singing bassist James Cook, must be the grandchildren.This fresh-faced Mancunian combo - a studio trio augmented when gigging by drummer Dan Hadley – has been tipped as one of the bands of the year, having come third in the recent BBC Sound of 2010 poll, won in 2008 by Adele and in 2009 by Little Read more ...
sue.steward
In another lifetime, I walked into the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town through a portal into a new world: the cavernous dancehall was packed, and the "audience" being choreographed by cross-rhythms of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian ancestry in an atmosphere created by a 17-year-old jazz funk DJ called Gilles Peterson. I was witnessing the dawn of the New Jazz Age.The mostly black dancers wore baggy suits, white shirts and braces like the 1930s jivers at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, the Forties mambo-niks at Manhattan’s legendary Palladium Ballroom, and hats like the Jamaican rude boys in (London) Soho Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nico Muhly didn't have to work much to puncture any atmosphere of classical recital formality at the Roundhouse: he only needed to be himself. Young, slightly dorky and very camp, wearing a black garment that blurred the boundaries between cardigan and bathrobe, and bantering lightly with the audience, the Vermont-born New York-based composer gave the impression that he couldn't take himself too seriously if he tried.His performance began with lightness of touch, too, with a recital of the solo piano piece “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass, for whom Muhly often conducts, arranges and plays piano. It Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The prefix “Christian” can invite mockery. The suffix “rock” usually makes it worse. And a Christian Rock band celebrating 25 years in yellow and black Spandex? Surely that has to be a spoof. But I have news for you: Eighties Californian glam metal band Stryper are real, back, and tonight they rocked.Stryper were formed in a world where the more macho a band the more they wore make-up, and where the intricacy of the guitar work was in direct proportion to the volume of hairspray. Stryper made no concessions to such conventions. Nor would they make any concessions to their religious beliefs. Read more ...
bruce.dessau
"So, we made it eventually." Having postponed this show two weeks ago due to the M1 doubling as a skating rink, Richard Hawley opened not with a song but an apology. It was hardly necessary. The sold-out Royal Festival Hall last night was prepared to forgive Sheffield's second-finest songsmith - after his chum Jarvis Cocker - almost anything.Making it eventually could also apply to Hawley's career. After two decades and little headway he finally hit paydirt with Coles Corner in 2005, bagging a Mercury Award nomination. If he trod a little water with 2007's self-conscious sequel Lady's Bridge Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week, the great Brazilian songwriter Tom Jobim, in a duet with Elis Regina, as well as teaching jazzer Gerry Mulligan bossa nova and in a version by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's also the birthday of songwriter Robert Wyatt, and trip-hop pioneer Tricky, who shares a birthday with Mozart.25 January 1927: Antonio Carlos Jobim, better known as Tom Jobim. First: a minute in 1950s paradise on the beach with Jobim, Joao Gilberto and Luiz Bonfa.
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Although you only get to see his hands in this next clip, he plays his "Águas de Março" (Waters of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The dominant look among all ages of the sell-out audience at the Barbican Hall last night was distinctly “smart-Bohemian”, with plenty of thick-rimmed specs, duffle coats and subtly outré hairdos visible as they took their seats and gave one another knowing nods on spotting the “Fruit Tree” motif in the stage décor. For Nick Drake, the fragile Cambridge-born singer-songwriter who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 aged 26, is perhaps the perfect cult artist: utterly singular, too intense and serious to be appreciated in his short lifetime, but increasingly influential on the Read more ...