jazz
mark.kidel
Four trombones, four trumpets and five saxophones, six percussionists – this Afro-Cuban inspired band packs an irresistible punch and it’s loud! This is a big band sound that revives the glory days of Tito Puente and Dizzy Gillespie, a 1940s fusion of Latin and jazz, as incendiary as it comes. A true wonder that London should produce music of this power and vibrancy, but the New Regency Orchestra (NRO) do just that, keeping the energy going for the full length of a 90-minute set.Deep in the heart of lively Hackney Wick, throbbing with the party excitement of a Saturday night, the NRO Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s 25 years since Lonnie Liston Smith last released an album. But this a man who earned his musical stripes with Miles Davis and Pharaoh Sanders, pretty much invented Jazz Funk with the Cosmic Echoes in the 1970s and then helped to reboot hip-hop with Guru and Digable Planets in the 1990s – and so, you pretty much take what you’re given and are thankful for it when dealing with such a musical titan.JID017, an album produced in collaboration with A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammed and film score composer Adrian Younge for their long-running label Jazz Is Dead, is a smooth mix of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
24 years since their last album, it’s pleasing to have Everything But The Girl back. That voice! They were conceived amidst post-post-punk “new pop” conceptualism, consistently made hit albums for 15 years, and only quit because they’d become bored of the naff entertainment industry circus. Happily, as only happens with a few bands who reappear after decades, Fuse does not disappoint.Also happily, it’s not the sound of a once-successful unit settling on their laurels. In the period since they were last Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have written compulsive books and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record Store Day is nearly here. At theartsdesk on Vinyl we have a selection of goodies which are appearing exclusively in record shops. See anything you fancy?THEARTSDESK ON VINYL’S VINYL OF RECORD STORE DAY APRIL 2023Suicide A Way of Life Rareties (BMG)With Suicide’s underrated 1988 album A Way of Life heading for reissue, this Record Store Day release amps the anticipation with a four-track 12” of associated odds’n’ends. It opens with a live version of, supposedly, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, but it is, in fact, frontman Alan Vega vamping around songs including Fats Domino’s “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There will be two theartsdesk on Vinyls this week. The first is here, an epic 11,000 words on a multitude of new releases in every genre, from reissues of classics to spanking new strangeness. There’s something for everyone. On Thursday we’ll have a special edition in honour of Record Store Day this coming Saturday, so watch out for that too. For now, though, dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHElsa Bergman Playon Crayon (B.Inspelningar)In the mid-1960s British composer and pal of Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, composed a piece called Treatise whose sheet music consisted of a series of symbolic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Promises attracted a lot of attention upon its 2020 release. The album brought together UK electronica artist Floating Points, The London Symphony Orchestra and storied US jazz individualist Pharoah Sanders, who died in September 2022. It became his last album. Promises – composed by Sam Sheperd in his Floating Points guise – cannot though have been conceived to be as high profile as it became.In contrast, back in February 1978 Sanders’s Love Will Find A Way album was an explicit brush with the idea that audiences beyond his usual constituency might pick up on him. It was issued by mainstream Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Two drummers are drumming. One held the beat on ABBA’s “Super Trouper”. He is Sweden’s Per Lindvall, more usually associated with jazz. The other is Norway’s Rune Arnesen, whose recording credits are also stylistically varied. Locked-in tight together, their groove provides the backbone for a band led by Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, whose 1996 album Khmer was his first for the ECM label. This is a live revisitation of the album.Also in the seven-piece outfit on stage is guitarist Eivind Aarset, who was on the album. Though there are solos, the groove binds together a hard-hitting, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In European folklore, mélusine are woman from the waist up and fish or serpent below. The fabled character is first known in the 13th century. Mélusine dwell in inland water – rivers, wells and such.For the concept driving US composer/singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s seventh album, this mélusine is married. Integral to the union is the husband, Raymondin, agreeing to not see her on Saturdays when her usually cloaked snake-like lower half is exposed. Naturally, he breaks the rule, whereupon she turns into a dragon, flees and returns only to attend her descendants – the marriage's ten male Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometime in early October 1963 John Lennon and Paul McCartney encountered The Rolling Stones and offered them one of their songs; one which became the London blues aficionado’s second single. “I Wanna be Your Man” was duly recorded on 7 October 1963 and released on 1 November. Thanks to The Beatles, the Stones charted for the first time. A Liverpool-London, north-south divide had been breached.A supposed stylistic separation was also breached – the Londoners were purported blues purists who stood apart from the pop scene. Of course, that changed as pop can absorb anything and ambitious bands Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Like certain other opera companies, WNO has leant in recent years towards popular shows of one kind or another. In their case this is not mere pandering to the Valleys coach parties, but a genuine attempt to assert an identity through an exploration of local south Welsh history. Elena Langer’s Rhondda Rips It Up (2018) was a far from studious romp through the colourful life of the Newport suffragette Margaret Mackworth, Viscountess Rhondda. This time they have gone up-valley and, in Blaze of Glory, come up with a sparkling entertainment about the closing of coal mines in the 1950s and Read more ...
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 ...
Kieron Tyler
For Dave Brubeck, his Quartet’s first concert in the Netherlands was memorable. Getting to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw for the 26 February 1958 booking was difficult, possibly unfeasible. The band were travelling from Berlin, and arrived at the show a half-hour after they were meant to be on stage.The adventure is described by Brubeck in his note for 1958’s The Dave Brubeck Quartet in Europe album (a live set recorded in Copenhagen on 5 March: pictured below left). A blizzard had hit Berlin and all flights out were grounded. They got onto one for Düsseldorf, from where they’d have to take a Read more ...