improvisation
The Crown Jewels, Garrick Theatre review - star laden comedy fails to sparkleFriday, 28 July 2023
At first, it’s hard to believe that the true story of Colonel Blood’s audacious attempt to steal The Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 has not provided the basis for a play before. After two hours of Simon Nye’s pedestrian telling of the... Read more... |
Album: Aksak Maboul - Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)Thursday, 02 March 2023
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to... Read more... |
Orpheus, Opera North review - cross-cultural opera in actionSaturday, 15 October 2022
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2022 reviews: Kiri Pritchard-McLean / Lou Sanders / SnortThursday, 11 August 2022
Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Wearing a heavily sequinned leotard - she thought this was how we’d all dress after “living in trackies during lockdown” - Kiri Pritchard-McLean wants to address some very serious subjects, such as... Read more... |
Album: Cécile McLorin Salvant - Ghost SongSaturday, 26 February 2022
When 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner Cécile McLorin Salvant previewed some of the material from her forthcoming album to an enraptured audience at Cadogan Hall as part of last year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, you sensed that... Read more... |
Jazz Voice, EFG London Jazz Festival review - from intimate delicacy to stunning virtuositySunday, 14 November 2021
A celebration of that most extraordinary instrument, the human voice, this year’s edition of Jazz Voice – which gladly welcomed back a live audience and a full-strength EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra – ranged from music of intimate delicacy to... Read more... |
Bill Frisell's Harmony, Cadogan Hall review – superb AmericanaWednesday, 16 October 2019
“Bill Frisell is all about sound and melody and enhancing whatever context he is in.” That quote, which defines both the American guitarist’s gentle and benign nature and his huge level of musicianship, is from Emma Franz, who recently directed and... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2019 reviews: Deer Woman / Pathetic Fallacy / Blind DateFriday, 09 August 2019
Deer Woman CanadaHub ★★★ You can feel the fury emanating from the stage in Tara Beagan’s incendiary solo play. Fury at the thousands of Indigenous Canadian women and girls who have gone missing in recent decades, abducted... Read more... |
Treatise Project, Goldsmiths review - potent symbols reveal rich music potentialSaturday, 22 June 2019
Treatise by Cornelius Cardew is the defining work of the graphic notation movement. The score, completed in 1967, is made up of 193 landscape pages, each with two empty musical staves running along the bottom, with an array of graphic designs above... Read more... |
Soweto Kinch, Jazz Cafe review - instant karma in CamdenWednesday, 19 June 2019
Camden’s Jazz Cafe reverberated to the sounds of a 50-year-old spiritual jazz classic last night, as saxist and MC Soweto Kinch and his quintet paid fulsome homage to NEA Jazz Master Pharoah Sanders’ consciousness-expanding album, Karma.Recorded in... Read more... |
Claire Martin, Ronnie Scott’s - swinging hard in SohoSaturday, 18 May 2019
While some vocalists build an entire career on a 'one-timbre-fits-all' approach, one of Claire Martin's greatest strengths is the way in which she brings all of the different colours of her voice into play such that each song is allowed to resonate... Read more... |
Kamasi Washington, Brixton Academy review - reaching transcendenceWednesday, 06 March 2019
There’s jazz, and there’s transcendent jazz. Kamasi Washington and his band are the latter. His group — who hail from Los Angeles and have played together since childhood, made waves in 2015 when they released The Epic, a three-hour concept album,... Read more... |
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