San Francisco
Kieron Tyler
George & James was originally released in March 1984. Stars & Hank Forever! emerged in October 1986. The two LPs were parts of – and, as it turned out, the only entrants in – a series of albums their creators, San Francisco’s Residents, designated the American Composer’s Series.Side One of the first was dedicated to interpretations of the compositions of George Gershwin. The flip was a heavily distorted reconfiguration of James Brown’s 1963 Live At The Apollo album. Stars & Hank Forever! tackled, respectively, John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams. In keeping with previous Residents Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The booklet coming with Just Like Gold - Live At The Matrix frequently refers to the band as “The Solution.” It will be the same here.With respect to the name this pioneering San Francisco psychedelic outfit did choose, their drummer John Chance is quoted in the booklet as saying “My mother was really upset about it [the band’s name], and I knew why.”Lead guitarist Ernie Fosselius adds “We knew vaguely somewhere back in history it was heavy. I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t realise how much the name could mean to a Jew.” Or, Ernie, anyone else.One person who realised the resonance of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miguel Zenón’s Golden City (Miel Music) is an ambitious album. Its ten tracks and a postlude seek to portray “the beauty and resilience that give San Francisco its soul”.The timing of the release is fortuitous, coming just eight days after Kamala Harris gave her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, and is impossible not to make a connection. In her impactful and historic speech, not only did Harris set out her stall to be the next US President, she also told her own story, in which the key part was her San Francisco immigrant background – and she also drew Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I don’t care what they’re talking about,” says the best bugger in the business, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). “I just want a nice fat tape.”In the minor-key masterpiece Francis Ford Coppola made in the brief interlude between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part 2 (1974), Harry is a freelance genius of surveilled sound, whose mask of isolated control is incrementally dismantled by a recording of a clandestine lovers’ rendezvous in San Francisco. “It’s not an ordinary meeting,” he realises. “It makes me feel something.”The Conversation is a shadowy tone poem Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The heart sinks (mine does, anyway) as the latest film-to-musical adaptation rolls into town, all with similar sound-worlds, exemplary hoofing and lively stagings. They are handy audience-bait, oven-ready stories. People go to see how the creative team are going to render the film’s main achievements, though not to be that surprised: the show must go on as it did before, with all the familiar tropes.So when the Mrs Doubtfire musical was announced, I bet I wasn’t the only one who wondered a) how all the costume and face changes would be handled live onstage; and b) would the ample Doubtfire Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I do like this record. Despite their tremendously loser name, this group from America is pretty good. They have a sound of their own added to by Byrd-like guitar playing and Everly Brothers voices. In a funny way, it’s rather sexy.”Although Penny Valentine’s verdict on The Beau Brummels’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers” edges towards damning the single with faint praise, it was positive and homed in on an important aspect of the San Francisco band – their Everly Brothers’s resonance. Readers of her Disc Weekly reviews column that mid-November in 1965 will have been well-aware of America’s decisive Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone in San Francisco on 15 and 16 June 1968 would have had a tough choice if they wanted to see live music. On Saturday the 15th, Big Brother & the Holding Company and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown were playing The Fillmore. That night, The Charlatans were on at The Straight Theatre. The Sunday saw Big Brother billed with The Steve Miller Blues Band, Dan Hicks (without The Charlatans), Sandy Bull and Santana at The Fillmore. On both dates, Booker T & the MG's headlined The Carousel Ballroom.At the Carousel, the Booker T combo was supported by local stars It’s A Beautiful Day. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Charles Webster is one of those connecting figures who make the idea of “the underground” seem quite convincing. Originally from the Peak District but coming of musical age in Nottingham, he was inspired by Chicago house and Detroit techno music from their very genesis in the mid 1980s, and went on to make some of the finest British house music ever. Along with Notts locals like the legendary DiY Soundsystem (prime movers of the week long Castlemorton Free Festival) and Martin “AtJazz” Iveson, he pioneered an ultra sophisticated and soulful sound that forged connections with odd Read more ...
mark.kidel
Criss Cross is a superbly taut film noir, a 1949 drama that unfolds with the inevitable downward spiral of ancient tragedy. Its doomed characters are prisoners of a hopeless struggle for freedom, caught in the web of their transgressive desires.Steve, whose tortured soul and desperado’s ambitions are beautifully rendered by Burt Lancaster, works for an armoured truck company. In a plan that feels doomed from the start, and in order to free Anna, the woman he loves passionately, from the clutches of the coolly ruthless gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), Steve offers himself as the inside man Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ives: Symphonies 3&4 San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3, subtitled ‘The Camp Meeting’, was completed in 1911 but waited until 1946 for its premiere, long after Ives had given up composing. It won him a Pulitzer Prize, and there's a tantalising, unconfirmed rumour that Mahler was planning to conduct it with the New York Philharmonic. Which isn't so surprising on reflection, both composers masters at mingling the vernacular with the symphonic. It's a fascinating transitional work, pitched between Symphony No. 2’s raucous cap Read more ...
India Lewis
Rebecca Solnit’s autobiography, Recollections of My Non-Existence, is just as you might expect it to be – tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much for how quickly our thinking about women’s rights and those of minorities has evolved recently that her feminist rhetoric almost feels dated at points. However, Solnit’s energy is still fresh, urgent, and vital, reminding the reader that although the battle seems to be on the way to being won by powers of good, we are still far from victory, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In photographer Jim Marshall’s heyday in the 60s and 70s, before the music business became corporate and restrictive, and before Marshall unravelled – he was partial to cars, cocaine and guns as well as cameras – musicians asked for him, they trusted him, and he never violated their trust because, he said, “these people have let you into their life”. The pictures he took of the Beatles, Janis Joplin (pictured below), John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duane Allman, Joni Mitchell and countless others are startlingly intimate, as if, one of his friends observes, there is no one else in the room.Alfred Read more ...