Features
graeme.thomson
In 2009 I interviewed Jamie Cullum about Dave Brubeck, who has died today just a day before his 92nd birthday. What follows are Cullum's recollections of falling in love with Brubeck's music, and later knowing and working with a jazz legend."My parents weren’t into jazz at all, but my dad did have a tape of Dave Brubeck and, as most people did, loved "Take Five". I heard that in the car long before my jazz awakening through Herbie Hancock and the Headhunters and In A Silent Way - swampy, odd music. Dave was on my radar long before that.I’m very fond of playing those stabbing, sharp notes, and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unusually for a Turner Prize, or for contemporary art generally for that matter, it was the year that film outshone other media. Paul Noble may have initially been the popular, and the bookies' favourite, but as technically impressive as his panoramic drawings are they are also quite lifeless, made inert by the process of their meticulous execution.Neither was it to be the year for performance art, for although performance has received a tremendous boost with the opening of Tate Modern’s The Tanks, as well as the recent high profile appearances of veteran practitioner Marina Abramoviç, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Michael Haneke’s Amour was the big winner last night in the European Film Awards’ silver jubilee year. As well as Best Film, Haneke won Best Director, as he did for his previous two films The White Ribbon (2009) and Hidden (2005), while his veteran stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant were named Best Actress and Actor. It showed both the Oscars-style pack mentality of the European Film Academy voters for their favourite auteurs (shown most alarmingly with Polanski’s blanket wins for his mediocre The Ghost in 2010), and a genuine conviction that Haneke is a master European director Read more ...
Louise Gray
“I am always fascinated by how much is in a voice, by their textures and qualities,” says composer Jocelyn Pook. “They’re like aural photographs of a person and you recognise them instantly.” We are in her studio in north London and Pook flicks through audio-files in her computer to prove the point. Some of the voices she was chosen for their inherent musicality – voices on answerphones rise upwards as questions are asked and intervals are sounded for multi-syllabic words. Pook, an award-winning musician who often uses voices and vocal rhythms – real, sampled and digitally pitchshifted – in Read more ...
Peter Nichols
It was in Singapore in 1947 that my real education began. For the first time I read Lawrence, Forster, Virginia Woolf, Melville, Graham Greene and Bernard Shaw’s political works, becoming a lifelong Leftie. When Stanley Baxter explained Existentialism in our billet block, we nodded intelligently. When Kenneth Williams spoke Parlyaree, we were in advance of the rest of the nation who wouldn’t hear of it till Beyond Our Ken.Our post-war National Service was spent defending our far-flung (and about to be abandoned) empire. Twelve of us were in a revue called At Your Service. In the opening Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. In this poignant, exclusive extract from Stone Free, their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham contemplates Phil Spector, one of his inspirations with whom he was reunited in the wake of the death of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector was convicted of murdering in 2009.Stone Free is Oldham’s third book, following Stoned and 2Stoned. Unlike its predecessors, it isn’t an oral Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the Seventies/Eighties supersoap Dallas which made Larry Hagman a household name, and his portrayal of the amoral, unscrupulous oil baron JR Ewing became a benchmark character in TV history. Hagman's performance also helped to make Dallas one of the highest-rated shows of all time, and the question "Who shot JR?" (which somebody did at the end of series three) became the focus of intense global speculation. An updated version of Dallas was recently launched by the TNT network in the States, and Hagman stoically returned to the set despite his steadily worsening health.Though he'll Read more ...
Tamsin Oglesby
I read and loved The Mouse and His Child as a child. Apparently. I was reminded of this by the inscription in the copy I gave to my god-daughter 15 years ago. And again, when I read it to my own daughter 10 years later. It’s such an extraordinarily original, moving, funny, story, I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten it.But I think it’s less a case of senility and more to do with the fact that the things you absorb at an early age enter your bones, and like bones, you take for granted the fact that they’re there, even though they shape you. I grew up with a foreign mother who constantly referred Read more ...
Ismene Brown
So Tony Hall moves from heading the Royal Opera House to taking over the BBC as its new Director-General. I can't for a moment imagine a rerun of that crucial mini-conversation between Helen Boaden and George Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile programming (if you can remember all the way back to mid-October through the cannonfire since) taking anything like a similar course had it been Tony Hall rather than Entwistle.Entwistle prided himself, even congratulated himself on not asking a single question about why Newsnight's investigation into Savile should have any relevance to his programming of Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Next month, as has been the case for centuries, lovers of the poet and mystic Jalaluludin Rumi (known simply as Mevlana - The Master - in Turkey, Iran and Persia) will come together to celebrate the day of his passing, on the 17th of December 1273. Thousands gather for a week commemorating what Rumi called his “marriage to eternity” with a grand ceremony of whirling dervishes.I attended this impressive spectacle a few years ago, which took place in a basketball stadium (there were buses of Japanese tourists outside). In the last few years a more fittingly dedicated building has been Read more ...
mark.hudson
William Turnbull was a Dundee shipyard engineer’s son who became a highly respected fixture on the London art scene for over six decades, principally as a sculptor, but also as painter and printmaker. While he never quite became a household name, Turnbull had a reputation as an artist’s artist who worked in highly diverse idioms – from a classically slanted primitivism to the fringes of pop and minimalism – bringing to bear an approach that was distinctively cool, some might argue a touch dry.Born in 1922, Turnbull had the sort of hard-grinding early career that is unimaginable today, but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's 20 years since the death, backstage at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of a man who scripted high-wire emotions and extreme psychological states in a theatrical language that had widely been held to be the realm of sweetness and majesty. The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan brought the values of modern theatre, cinema and the sexual revolution to ballet, and his narrative daring remains unequalled by any choreographer in Britain after him. In fact, possibly cowed by his mastery in that department, choreographers after him have fled towards abstract and even asexual codes of movement Read more ...