New music
graeme.thomson
Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in Lisbon, where she fell in love with fado (it translates as “fate”), the starkly melancholic strain of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.But as this Arena film illustrated, these days Eno is as likely to be involved in art installations, software development, the study of mathematical systems or debates on the value of global governance as Read more ...
joe.muggs
Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was Read more ...
sue.steward
I’m no folky but I fell for the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle the moment I first heard their album Dancer with Bruised Knees, and it’s remained a companion ever since. It never struck me that their songs and the eclectic backing music was "folk", as it was often categorised; the tag presumably arose from Kate’s accordion and banjo playing, their acoustic guitars and, of course, the French-Canadian chansons they sang at home as children - and thankfully introduced to the rest of us.But regardless of definitions, when Kate sat at the piano and Anna played guitar, or they swapped places and Read more ...
howard.male
I used to argue that there was no such thing as a World Music style, in the sense that, say, indie music or trad jazz are fairly sonically delineated. But now I’m not so sure. Over the past decade or so, most cosmopolitan cities in the world have probably produced at least one band with a line-up that invariably includes an accordion player, a double bassist (rather than a bass guitarist), a violinist (just the one), maybe a horn player or two, and a multi-lingual vocalist.These earnest, impassioned groups of musicians will generally endeavour to create a new, exciting sound from their joint Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Neil Campbell is a one-man subculture. In 30 years of music-making in various configurations of improvised rock, psychedelia and electronics, he has released hundreds of hours of recordings, mainly in micro-editions of home-produced cassette, CD or mp3, and collaborated endlessly with a global network of musicians that have fallen through the cracks of genre or stylistic allegiance. Since separating from Leeds-based guitar drone group Vibracathedral Orchestra in 2006, he has mainly concentrated on his activities as Astral Social Club, under which name he performed a relatively rare live set Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays. This week Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, in a fascinating 1997 documentary made by John Peel, master drummer Gene Krupa, singer Long John Baldry on a TV special hosted by the Beatles, producer Jerry Wexler talking about working with Bob Dylan, smooth operator Sade whose first album of new material in ten years is due to be released next month and a brief farewell to producer Willie Mitchell.15 January 1941: Don Van Vliet, or Captain Beefheart, retired from music in the early 1980s to pursue painting. This 1997 documentary is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong. Whence it is but a small step to Ian Dury. In sex&drugs&rock Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The singer Lhasa de Sela passed away from breast cancer in her Montreal home on 1 January just before midnight, at the age of 37. Since this news emerged my email box has had numerous messages about this tragic loss, including from theartsdesk critic Robert Sandall who wrote about her “extraordinary talent, amazing life… a total original, a real artist”, and adds a note below this article. Howard Male said, “The Living Road is one of the truly great albums in any genre, in my opinion.” While never forming a conventional career, her three albums La Llorona, The Living Road and the self-titled Read more ...
peter.quinn
If times are hard for pop and classical music, for jazz – magazines going to the wall, broadsheet column inches telescoped to the point of near-oblivion, major labels ditching their jazz division – things were just that little bit harder. But a new year, a new decade, and all such introspective thoughts had to be temporarily put on hold for this one-night-only mini-festival of British jazz at Ronnie Scott's. High-class improv, haunting ballads, powerfully emotive solos. And that was just the opening act.Presented by Jez Nelson from a packed club, and kicking off with the Kenny Wheeler Quintet Read more ...
theartsdesk
theartsdesk's critics look back fondly on their favourites of 2009. An eclectic selection full of eccentricities, our favourite music from the past year varies from the pop strangeness of Lady Gaga and Muse to "world-mariachi" from Tom Russell, West African grooviness from Oumou Sangare, electronica from Tim Exile, jazz from Branford Marsalis, Brazilian seduction from Céu as well as a couple of old warhorses on top form: Tom Waits and Neil Young. We've made it easier for you to purchase our recommendations: all you need to do is click on the link at the end of each review.2009: a selection Read more ...