jazz
peter.quinn
Django Bates ascribes the variety of musical influences at play in his work to his childhood - growing up listening to his father's remarkably eclectic record collection. In the first part of my conversation with Django, he talks about Loose Tubes, StoRMChaser and his new post at Bern University of the Arts. In this second part of our conversation, he talks about craftsmanship, confounding expectations and why strumming one chord all day can be time well spent.PETER QUINN: Your father’s record collection included Romanian folk music, African music, jazz. I’m intrigued to know how that music Read more ...
peter.quinn
Born in Beckenham, Kent, in 1960, Django Bates is a self-taught composer and founder member of the seminal big band Loose Tubes (1983-1990). As well as leading his own groups, Human Chain and Delightful Precipice, he has composed works for the Brodsky Quartet, Joanna MacGregor, Evelyn Glennie, the Britten Sinfonia and the Dutch Metropole Orchestra, amongst others. In 1997, Bates was awarded the prestigious Jazzpar prize, known as the 'Nobel Prize of Jazz' (previous recipients include Lee Konitz, Roy Haynes and Geri Allen). He currently teaches at Bern University of the Arts and the Read more ...
Nick Levine
Neneh Cherry has never been conventional. The singer and rapper's latest album is a collaboration with The Thing, a Swedish free jazz trio who have previously tackled songs by PJ Harvey and The White Stripes. If anything, the presence of Cherry has made them braver: The Cherry Thing features reworkings of The Stooges' "Dirt", Suicide's "Dream Baby Dream" and MF Doom's "Accordion". It's gutsy stuff, but it works. The album already sounds like a contender for the end of year lists.At first, this project seems like an unlikely comeback vehicle for Cherry, but on closer inspection it could be Read more ...
theartsdesk
Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, IdlewildJasper ReesCan it really be nearly three decades since the release of Eden defined the quintessential bedsit sound? Everything But The Girl are somehow ageless, a reality underwritten by this bloody wonderful set of reissues which tells the story of their quietly immense contribution to intelligent Eighties pop. There is also a clear narrative of their early progress from the undergraduate balladeering of Eden (1984), embellished and politicised in Love Not Money (1985), thrown entirely over for Ben Watt’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
My Bloody Valentine: Isn’t Anything, Loveless, EPs 1988-1991Kieron TylerEach of these three CDs is essential. My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 Isn’t Anything and 1991’s Loveless were era-defining albums that time has done nothing to tarnish. The EPs they released around then are just as indispensable. But the world of My Bloody Valentine is as mysterious as their noise. Reissues were originally scheduled in 2008 and promo copies sent out. But nothing hit the shops. After that, the band began being seen live again, while main man Kevin Shields also cropped up playing with former Creation label mates Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Norah Jones is back. New haircut, new sound, new producer. The first of these, while very nice, needn't concern us too much. The second, meanwhile, is largely a result of the presence of the third, the ubiquitous Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, who is working so hard these days I'm starting to suspect there might actually be two of him: Danger and Mouse. The daughter of legendary Indian musician Ravi Shankar and US concert promoter Sue Jones, Geethali Norah Jones Shankar was born in Brooklyn and raised in Texas. She emerged - seemingly fully formed - in 2002 with Come Away With Me, one of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This has to be the only music festival I've ever been to where two vacuum cleaners were on standby in case the star performer conked out. But that's what happens when your star performer is a player piano - they seem to run on Hoover tubes. With 11 concerts and one film in two days, this celebration of American maverick Conlon Nancarrow was London's alternative marathon. One that was no less eccentric, exhausting or adrenalin-generating (though much less running-based).At the core of the weekend was a nine-concert cycle of the complete studies for player piano. As far as anyone knew, it was Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across.The contrast between Pussy Riot’s fate and a festival that celebrates new music in all its forms, held in a country bordering Russia, was marked by Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“I guess it's jazz, but it's not what jazz was... if you have to call it something... " Esbjörn Svensson was the leader, pianist and main composer of e.s.t. and at the time of his death in a scuba-diving accident on 14 June, 2008, it would seem the band had the world at its feet.Although the band were formed in Sweden in 1993, it wasn’t until From Gagarin’s Point of View in 1999 that they reached a large international audience, and a series of acclaimed albums such as 2006’s Tuesday Wonderland consolidated them as the archetypal modern jazz band. Partly responsible for shifting jazz's centre Read more ...
peter.quinn
This fourth album from Scandinavian/British jazz trio Phronesis is the follow-up to their much-lauded 2010 release Alive, chosen as 'Jazz Album of the Year' by both Jazzwise and MOJO magazines. It's also the first in which all three of its members – Danish bassist Jasper Høiby, British pianist Ivo Neame and Swedish drummer Anton Eger – contribute to the writing and arranging duties. And it's all the richer for it.The album opener and title track is a typically Høibyesque creation, beginning with a pointillistic riff that gets tapped out, Morse code style, by all three players before it Read more ...
joe.muggs
Welcome to theartsdesk's first radio show with Peter Culshaw and Joe Muggs, recorded with the extremely able help of Brendon Harding at Red Bull Studio London.In the course of this show, Peter and Joe take a look at the depth and breadth of music covered by theartsdesk, playing some delicious tracks just out or about to be released (see below), and discussing the meaning of musical genre in a globalised world and asking whether it is still a useful way of bracketing artists. In amongst this you can hear an interview with the young Soweto-born musician Spoek Mathambo, now mainly residing Read more ...
mark.kidel
Ambrose Akinmusire is the new jazz sensation, the messiah of the post-bop trumpet. With his hyper-talented and youthful quintet, the 29-year-old Californian delivered a set in Bristol that rang all the changes from the soft and lyrical to high-energy heat.Akinmusire took the stage following an at times dazzling opening performance from the equally young, gifted and black British pianist Robert Mitchell. The American trumpeter started with a kind of alaap, a jazz equivalent of the prelude to a raga when the lead instrumentalist explores the tonalities of his chosen mode. It was as if Read more ...