jazz
Kieron Tyler
In 2020, one archive release exerted a more forceful presence than any other. Live At Goose Lake August 8th 1970 caught The Stooges as they promoted their second album Fun House. The source was a previously unknown, professionally recorded tape documenting the whole album as it was played live, in its running order. Iggy Pop and the band were hard yet sloppy, tight yet rough, always blazing. Wonderful – and a reminder that musical surprises still crop up.While contemplating what’s been covered in this column over the last year, the feeling that archive releases can shift perceptions rises to Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This year of all years – surely – we need music which takes us to better, happier places. And the new album from Norwegian-born saxophonist/composer Marius Neset does that. It also gives us a bit more hindsight and context as to what his two previous albums involving large ensembles were all about. One can now see more clearly that the 500+ pages of dense orchestral scoring that he painstakingly wrote for his quintet and the London Sinfonietta in Snowmelt and Viaduct were his ‘années de galère’ as a composer.Tributes (ACT) is not simple music by any means, and yet there is a complete sense of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
I’ll leave it to others, better placed, to unpack 2020’s gruelling impact on so many. But one of its side effects was the elevation, alongside food and television, of recorded music. It became a salve, a focus, a locus of social media blather about what was getting us through. Lockdown ears were lifted by a heady gumbo of new discoveries and old favourites. Certainly, my best-of-year lists are overfull. There’s nothing I'm taking a punt on; it’s all lived stuff, revelled in.100% Yes, the third album from London jazz-punk-funk unit Melt Yourself Down, from its title onwards, musters an Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl reviews. This year vinyl boomed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, with gig-goers stuck at home but wanting new music. 2020’s sales are now heading for the £100 million mark, vinyl’s biggest year since 1990. When theartsdesk on Vinyl began, six years ago, it was a very different picture. All things must pass, and vinyl eventually will, but that’s for the churls! Let’s enjoy these boom times. So check out the reviews below, which run the gamut from the grungiest thrash Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Gary Barlow’s Music Played By Humans is, in all but name, a Christmas album. Mixing big-band jazz, Latin and pop, it’s an assortment box of bubbly, broad-based business bangers deployed by the Take That veteran with help from a host of showbiz pals. Michael Bublé, Barry Manilow, Chilly Gonzales, Alesha Dixon, Beverley Knight, James Corden… these are big boots to put on the ground.It’s got “Secret Santa” written all over it – and not just because it’s a precision-built, one-size-fits-all, weapons-grade gifting opportunity for work acquaintances and pissed aunties alike. No. It’s Read more ...
Paul Bullock
Producing music programmes for TV with live performance during the past few months has not been without its challenges, but somehow doing so right now feels more important than ever – both for the pleasure it brings audiences and as support for the performing arts. As we entered the first national lockdown, we’d just completed filming the Category Finals of BBC Young Musician – the classical edition. Immediately we had to reconfigure our edit schedule to deliver the series remotely. Everyone agreed it was important to broadcast the programmes as planned in the spring. And that’s Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I really wanted to like this album – indeed, from a short sample, I thought I would love it. But while there are indeed some lovely moments, repeated listenings fail to persuade me of anything other than two good musicians with evident talents who have been too clever by half with a baker’s dozen of traditional and modern folk songs and fatally compromised the qualities that make such music unique – its glorious clarity and simplicity.Sylvia Schmidt has a lovely voice, gossamer-light, and James Kitchman plays a mean jazz guitar. But they are each too tricksy and the sum of their tricksiness Read more ...
peter.quinn
When Aaron Copland wrote his most beloved work, Appalachian Spring, in 1943/44, he gave it the unfussy working title of “Ballet for Martha” – Martha being the choreographer Martha Graham, for whom he’d written the score. It was only shortly before the premiere, long after the ink was dry on the score, that Graham appended the more alluring title, excerpted from Hart Crane’s poem "The Dance", by which the work is now known. At a birthday concert held in his honour at the Library of Congress in 1981, the composer noted with amusement how, due to the oft-repeated scenario of people telling him Read more ...
peter.quinn
Oh to have been in the beautiful surrounds of Cadogan Hall last night – not just to have experienced the gorgeous wall of sound, heartfelt artistry and musical camaraderie at first hand, but also to have been able to show our appreciation for a concert which takes months of preparation.Social distancing measures saw the EFG London Jazz Festival Ensemble reduced from its customary 40-plus musicians, but while the textural palette may not have been quite as luxuriant as usual, the slightly leaner charts provided their own rewards. This was a necessarily different Jazz Voice, but even a computer Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.Weller’s plan was to escape the lad-friendly guitar sound of The Jam. With The Style Council, he and Talbot explored soul, funk, jazz, R&B, easy listening, and more, resulting in a golden run of Top 20 hits that lasted Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Due to COVID-related nonsense too tedious to relate, this month’s theartsdesk on Vinyl was delayed. But here it is, over 7500 words on new music on plastic, covering a greater breadth of genres and styles than most major festivals. From reissues of some of the biggest bands that ever lived, to limited edition micro-releases from tiny independents, it’s all here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHKiko Dinucci Rastilho (Mais Um)São Paulo artist Kiko Dinucci has said, “The idea has always been to play the guitar as a percussion instrument.” Couldn’t agree more. Dinucci has iron in his musical blood and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
What a pick-me-up this album is. Released as the days darken, literally and metaphorically, it’s a real joy – a transport of delight to dappled squares in Paris or Lisbon, or a street party in Rio. Sunset in the Blue is billed as “an orchestral celebration of Melody Gardot’s jazz roots” but the abiding sound that remains in the mind’s ear after the album’s finished is that of a jazz guitar, played with a bossa nova rhythm.This is Gardot’s fifth album in twelve years, a mix of standards and originals in which her voice is close-miked and properly out front in the mix. Peggy Lee, Eartha Kitt Read more ...