African music
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the first theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2023 and it’s another whopper, over 8000 words and a range of musical styles that defies genre or categorization, from the most cutting edge sounds to boxsets of golden vintage pop. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHJimmy Edgar Liquids Heaven (Innovative Leisure)Detroit technoid art maverick Jimmy Edgar’s latest indulges in pure, welcome electronic ear-fritzing, a place where R&B has it out with Aphex Twin or Sam Gellaitry’s most twisted constructions, and, most entertainingly, more than half an ear on pop. Edgar's latest album is mostly a series of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the final theartsdesk on Vinyl of 2022 which is topped off by two Vinyl of the Months, one there for seasonal jollies and the other for musical adventurousness. As ever, the rest runs the gamut from reissues of albums from decades ago to the most contemporary, cutting edge music around. Dive in!CHRISTMAS VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious The Muppet Christmas Carol (Walt Disney)Is there a more Christmassy object than a picture disc of the soundtrack to The Muppet Christmas Carol? There may be but this will do us very well. Coincidentally, theartsdesk on Vinyl’s festive film-show this year Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s Friday night and I’ve finally arrived at 43-year-old French music festival institution Trans Musicales. Due to some dreadful nonsense, it’s taken a 12-hour train journey, two baguettes, one short Stephen King novel, six large beers, a tumbler of Bourbon, and one shuttlebus to place me at the Parc Expo, a series of giant airport hangars that house the majority of musical activity (although there’s a smattering of earlier events in Rennes itself).The music runs from 9.00 pm-ish through to shortly before dawn and Trans Musicales is renowned for ensuring that the nearly 60,000 attendees are Read more ...
Mert Dilek
As bio-musicals continue to have their heyday, it makes sense for the Young Vic to throw its hat in the ring and champion a work about the hugely influential Nelson Mandela. But this new musical about the South African anti-apartheid activist and statesman is such a baffling hodgepodge that it actually risks being a disservice to Mandela’s legacy.Mandela covers the period in the eponymous figure’s life from his militant activities and subsequent imprisonment in the early 1960s to his release from prison in 1990. Perhaps because the piece is chiefly focused on Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Read more ...
mark.kidel
Justin Adams has been exploring music that produces trance or near-trance states for a number of years. Along with being Robert Plant’s lead guitarist for a long while, he has followed his own path, seeking out what he had dubbed the secret heart of rock’n’roll.For a while he played with the Gambian horsehair fiddle virtuoso Juldeh Camara, creating a heady musical brew designed to blow the most guarded minds. More recently, he has worked with the Italian percussion and violin player Mauro Durante, combining blues licks – as he did with Juldeh – with the whirlwind of rhythm and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa dies off-screen of an undisclosed disease, suffering “in silence” notes sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), actor and role as one at the end. Lost after one, uniquely iconic full-length film, recasting and digital resurrection was rejected by shocked writer-director Ryan Coogler, even as he ripped his sequel script up.Mourning is intermittent in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, with a ghost-wind whistling over a Marvel Studios emblem given over to Boseman. The strength of Coogler’s initial Afrofuturist vision is shown by T’Challa’s funeral, led by white-robed women Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.Far from it: even in just the three days I was there the culture on offer in venues across Oslo felt more like a trip into a giddy sci-fi vision than the worthy anthropologist’s guide to other Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“For life to exist, we need rhythm” announces Ian Parmel on the opening track of rising UK jazz saxophonist Xhosa Cole’s sophomore album. This is a view that Xhosa has taken to heart – for while his debut album was awash with echoes of John Coltrane’s classic hard bop sounds, Ibeji comprises a collection of saxophone and percussion collaborations with seven separate drummers, which explore West African beats and musical flavours through a jazz lens.“Andy’s Shuffle” features Jason Brown’s jumpy beats twisting and turning around Cole’s riffing, Adriano Adewale brings a hip-swinging groove to “ Read more ...
mark.kidel
A tall African man stands alone in a pool of light. He has a cello and an immensely versatile voice. In a matter seconds, he holds the audience enchanted. He inhabits the stage as if it were by a campfire in the bush.The Bouffes du Nord, the Paris base for Peter Brook’s ritual-rich theatre for many years, the beautifully worn shell of a former music hall, with decaying walls in different tones of orange and red, has seen so many extraordinary performances. I, for one, will never forget Brook’s fulgurant Hamlet with Adrian Lester in the title role, and Isabelle Huppert, raw and present in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
South-African cellist Abel Selaocoe is about to begin his third major concert in London in under a year. As the support artist for kora player Ballake Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal at the Roundhouse in January, he received a lengthy ovation for his 30 minute set, having demonstrated an uncanny ability to play the audience as dexterously as he plays his cello.A few months later, he appeared with the Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre, performing some of the pieces that make up his debut album on Warner Classics, Where is Home, alongside works by Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Star Feminine Band are from Benin, all of them under 18, the youngest only 12. They hail from a village in the north of their small country tucked between Togo and Nigeria. Their pop-inflected mix of high life, Congolese rhumba and other trans-African styles is as ebullient as it comes, and probably very infectious on the dance floor.Their second album features once again guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion. It’s mostly up-tempo, and as with so much African music, as well as in the musics of the African diaspora, the fun of the dance is inseparable from messages about how to live Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month’s reviews take in everything from New York new wave pop to apocalyptic electro to kitsch exotica. There are no genre boundaries at theartsdesk on Vinyl, just a constant desire to play music loud, whether new or reissues, then share what it felt like. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHCongotronics International Where’s the One (Crammed Discs)Crammed Discs is a label that understands how music can connect different cultures and sounds. They put their money where their mouth is when they conjoined crossover African percussion-led outfits Konono No.1 and Kasai Allstars with exploratory indie Read more ...