jazz
howard.male
“I can’t fucking hear yer!” are not the welcoming words one expects to hear from a world music favourite, it has to be said. But the audience at Dingwalls don’t look like the usual world music crowd either. This Brooklyn trio have clearly crossed over into the more lucrative club global category, and their hyperactive light show is further evidence of this. But good luck to them, because they are certainly the best of the bunch at doing this whole funky, jazzy, ragga, reggae thing, as well as being far more interesting than the more pantomime-like Gogol Bordello (of which Tamir Muskat used to Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week’s birthdays of musicians include a couple of disturbed geniuses, Billie Holiday and Joe Meek, underrated rock’n‘roller Carl Perkins, country legend Merle Haggard, as well as Doris Day, Pharrell Williams and bluesman Muddy Waters, whose mojo is working overtime. Videos below.9 April 1932: Carl Perkins was never the most famous rock’n’roller, but among aficionados is one of the best. Shot on a fuzzy Canadian TV show from 1956. 7 April 1915: Billie Holiday, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, sings “My Man”, about an abusive relationship that was all too Read more ...
Anonymous
Like Hugh Masekela, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim first emerged as a member of The Jazz Epistles - that seminal, if short-lived, group who at the start of the 1960s were the first to offer a South African take on modern jazz. Both under the stage name Dollar Brand and, following his conversion to Islam, as Abdullah Ibrahim, it's an instinct he's been honing ever since. As early influences such as Ellington and Monk have gradually become less tangible, he has emerged as one of the most distinctive artistic voices of his generation.In his old age, however, Ibrahim seems to have re-embraced Ellington Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
This week's musicians birthdays include the genius/lecherous mediocrity (according to taste) Serge Gainsbourg, singing a duet with Brigitte Bardot, classic early 60s footage of Marvin Gaye, vibraphone maestro Red Norvo, Herb Alpert in a rodeo video doing “Casino Royale”, and Astrud Gilberto from Ipanema. Composer birthdays of the week are Franz Joseph Haydn and William Walton. Videos below.2 April 1928: French maverick Serge Gainsbourg, here singing a duet with Brigitte Bardot of “Bonnie and Clyde”. 2 April 1939: Marvin Gaye, with an early TV appearance singing the sublime “Can I Get Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Next month a concert celebrating the unique career of Humphrey Lyttelton, the great jazzer, broadcaster and quizmaster, will take place at HMV Apollo in Hammersmith, west London. The show, which takes place on 25 April, has been constructed about Lyttelton’s twin talents: blowing a trumpet and giving people silly things to do. All proceeds will go to a new charity known as the Humph Trust. Its aim will be to help develop the careers of young jazz musicians. To give the Humph Trust’s efforts a focus, the Royal Academy of Music is introducing an annual gong known as the Humphrey Lyttelton Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I was promised a night of free jazz. This was more a threat than a promise, having spent some of the worst nights of my life listening to the stuff - the strange thing about this most liberating sounding form is how everyone sounds more or less the same. Anyway, this wasn’t a night of wibbly-wobbly squeaky-gate music, but a fully realised, if sometimes chilly, vision. It was spontaneous architecture and interesting structures and lyricism. It was original without being self-conscious about it.You can tell a lot about a jazzer by what they call the tunes. With no vocals there’s a lot of scope Read more ...
howard.male
On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even be a musician, and live music was banned from most public places in black areas. There were also no cinemas, bars, hotels, shopping centres or electricity and death was an everyday fact of life. Yet only fifteen miles away, white Johannesburg’s skyscrapers glistened; an affront to the asbestos roofed, poverty-steeped insult to human dignity that was Read more ...
peter.quinn
The cliché which gets trotted out most often when describing Jan Garbarek's saxophone playing is his supposedly "icy" tone (Google “Garbarek” and “icy” and you'll see what I mean). As Garbarek's long-standing bassist Eberhard Weber amusingly points out in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, “I challenge the ladies and gentlemen of the press to think what they would write if Jan Garbarek wasn't Norwegian but Greek and his name was Garabekoulos! Then his music would immediately turn into the smouldering, sun-drenched sound of the scorching South.” Fair point, Eberhard.Hearing the latest Read more ...
joe.muggs
The dominant look among all ages of the sell-out audience at the Barbican Hall last night was distinctly “smart-Bohemian”, with plenty of thick-rimmed specs, duffle coats and subtly outré hairdos visible as they took their seats and gave one another knowing nods on spotting the “Fruit Tree” motif in the stage décor. For Nick Drake, the fragile Cambridge-born singer-songwriter who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 aged 26, is perhaps the perfect cult artist: utterly singular, too intense and serious to be appreciated in his short lifetime, but increasingly influential on the 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 ...
robert.sandall
As Terry Teachout makes clear in this terrific biography, the world that Louis Armstrong inhabited was anything but wonderful. It was, for most of his life, both profoundly racist and astonishingly bitchy. By the late 1950s, with his 60th birthday approaching and four decades of solid success behind him, Armstrong was still forced to sleep in a gymnasium while playing in segregated North Carolina, and denied access to a public toilet in Connecticut. In Knoxville, Tennessee, dynamite was thrown at the auditorium where he and his All Stars band were performing. “It’s just the phone,” he told Read more ...
peter.quinn
Watching some jazz musicians play live, you're made acutely aware of the intense effort that goes into their performance. Conveying a non-verbal message that roughly translates as “this shit is really hard, you know”, tell-tale signs include the pained rictus of deep concentration, the sotto voce grunts, groans and exhalations, and the self-communing, head-down-to-the-floor mode adopted for solos of five minutes or longer.Observing Esperanza Spalding's sunny disposition in the hallowed confines of Ronnie Scott's, on the other hand, you get the impression that she's barely breaking a sweat. Read more ...