new music reviews
Mark Guiliana Jazz Quartet, Ronnie Scott’s review - sophistication and simplicity
peter.quinn

If having several projects on the go is a necessity for most jazz musicians, the US drummer Mark Guiliana is more protean than most, with a musical CV that traverses jazz, rock and electronic music. Like the pianist Robert Glasper, Guiliana – voted Best Jazz Drummer in this year’s Modern Drummer Readers Poll – has been hugely influenced by electronic music and textures, as equally inspired by Squarepusher and Aphex Twin as by jazz drumming legends Tony Williams and Elvin Jones.

Across two perfectly paced sets in a packed Ronnie Scott’s, part of this year's EFG London Jazz Festival, we heard material from Guiliana’s latest album Jersey – featuring his entirely acoustic Jazz Quartet of tenor sax player Jason Rigby, pianist Fabian Almazan and bassist Chris Morrissey, all leaders in their own right – plus a trio of tracks from 2015’s Family First.

The album title references Guiliana’s roots – the northeastern US state rather than the Channel Islands, as he was quick to point out – where he was born and raised and now lives with his wife (vocalist Gretchen Parlato) and young son.

Co-written by Guiliana and Parlato, opener “inter-are” provided something of a blueprint for the evening’s stellar music-making. Highly charged, interlocking lines that slowly build in intensity, with Guiliana and Morrissey locked in from the get-go, Rigby’s striking, circuitous, modal-sounding melody suddenly coalescing from mere fragments, and then a solo from Almazan which took the music to entirely new harmonic places.

Placing first in the Rising Piano Star category in the 2014 Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll, Almazan’s singular rhythmic and harmonic conception, as well as an almost orchestral approach to texture, proved the perfect foil for the heat generated by Guiliana and Morrissey, whether providing virtuosic, darting single lines and huge, pulsing block chords in “From You”, or exploring the cavernous depths of the club’s Yamaha grand piano in “Big Rig Jones”, marked by crisply executed, hammered out repeated notes.

As was typical of Guiliana’s restraint, his first and only (impeccable) solo of the evening finally came in “Long Branch” towards the end of the second set, eliciting the evening’s warmest applause while simultaneously highlighting the quartet’s remarkable dynamic control – cutting in the blink of an eye from a textural whirlwind to an oceanic calm.

The evening’s sole cover was a beautiful, impressionistic reworking of David Bowie’s “Where Are We Now?” (from his penultimate album The Next Day), a touching ‘thank you’ from Guiliana for the life-changing experience of working with Bowie on Blackstar.

For the encore, the quartet dipped back in to Family First, the Guiliana-penned “One Month”, which proved to be a rhythmically charged standout. Listening to it unfold – its playfulness and objectivity, the block-like cutting between clearly differentiated material, the use of layering and the highly charged ostinatos which bookend the work – you wondered if the music of Igor Stravinsky might also be an important touchstone.

Combining the sophistication and simplicity he so admires in the playing of Miles Davis star Williams, Guiliana – unshowy yet absolutely compelling – always played exactly what the music required.

@MrPeterQuinn

Overleaf: watch the Mark Guiliana Jazz Quartet perform “Jersey”

Kesha, Electric Brixton review - a joyously sassy comeback
Thomas H. Green

There are more clothes flying Kesha’s way than onto the stage at a Las Vegas Tom Jones concert in the mid-Seventies. She started it. As she introduced her 2010 single “Take It Off”, she announced that since things were so hot she’d be discarding a few items. Duly, she removes the heavy, dark velveteen jacket, decorated with embroidered red roses, that she’s been wearing so far, and undoes her shiny gold shirt down to her sternum, revealing her bra. The song kicks in and the capacity crowd go nuts as she attacks her ballsy ode to a party hole “where they go hardcore and there's glitter on the floor”. A hail of tops bounces about the venue. Behind me a young woman, naked from the waist up, boogies like a headbanger.

Kesha’s freed-up party persona is contagious, the more so because her five-piece band, similarly clad in velveteen suits, with glittery cowboy ties, transform her older, electro-pop material into a Memphis-style rhythm'n'blues rock-out. They’re assisted by two male dancers/backing singers, one shaven-headed in glasses, the other a long-haired Adonis. This pair deliberately subvert the usual pop imagery by playing the coquette-ish role usually taken by female dancers, notably on opening number “Woman”, a horn-boosted feminist anthem on which the whole crowd shouts out the, “I’m a motherfucking woman!” chorus.

The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha

Of course, this sole British Kesha concert of 2017, amid a PR-announced “Kesha Takes Over the UK” campaign, is the European culmination of a comeback. Kesha has been through years of misery, resulting from a bitter, convoluted and well-documented legal conflict with the man who discovered her, Dr Luke. The songs on her recent album, Rainbow, deal with the subject, with her alleged abuse, exorcising it and finding empowerment in song. Perhaps more interestingly, in terms of her music, Rainbow is also about Kesha exploring new ways to express herself. Her work with The Flaming Lips, her country-rockin’ Yeast Infection outfit, and last year’s Kesha and the Creepies rock’n’roll tour all showed an artist keen to break free of the chart-pop straitjacket. Now she almost has, and the way the audience knows her new material seems to thrill her.

Indeed, when she brings her mum, the songwriter Pebe Sebert, on to help sing the strummed, Jonathan Richman-esque ballad “Godzilla”, one of Rainbow’s finest songs, and one her mother wrote, Kesha is so overcome with emotion she has to stop singing for a moment. Mostly, though, there are no such hiccups, as she shakes her waist-length pink hair extensions gleefully around, spits water – and later beer – over the audience, and hurls out towels she’s mopped her face with (“This is a big one – you can tear it into little pieces and share it”).

She’s given to very American emotional pleas, and proclamations of love for her fans. During “We R Who We R” she gives a speech about gender rights, saying there’s “no more room for hate and discrimination”. The crowd love her, very vocally. They’re mostly in their twenties and lathered in glitter, assisted by the handfuls of it Kesha and her band throw over them during the gig. They all yodel along with her jolly cowgirl stalker number “Hunt You Down” and sway, eyes closed during the new, kitsch-psychedelia number “Spaceship”, during which Kesha changes from her suit into a white, short-sleeved crochet-style dress and backwoods cowboy hat. On the final pre-encore song the whole Electric Brixton sings the self-empowerment anthem “Praying”, as if it were a hymn.

To finish the show, it’s time to go bananas as Kesha pulls her mega-hit “Tik Tok” out of the bag and the two dancers fire confetti over us. It’s one of the 21st century’s monster pop songs, a hedonist ultra-blast, and Kesha is sometimes almost inaudible beneath the crowd chorusing. She then ends with Rainbow album-opener “Bastards”, a big country-flavoured “fuck you” tune which explodes into a “Hey Jude” style “nah nah nah” vocal, accompanied by a tickertape cannon filling the air with flutter. “Don’t let the bastards get you down/Oh no, don’t let the assholes wear you out,” we all yell along. An apt close, to roaring applause. The bastards and assholes clearly haven’t broken Kesha. She seems like a woman who’s only just blooming into the artist she wants to be.

Overleaf: watch a caped Kesha perform "Learn to Let Go" at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2017

Iceland Airwaves 2017 review - political change at Reykjavík's major music festival
Kieron Tyler

Óttarr Proppé, the stylish chap pictured above, was appointed Iceland’s Minister of Health in January this year. Last Saturday, when the shot was taken, he was on stage in his other role as the singer of HAM, whose invigorating musical blast draws a line between the early Swans and Mudhoney. At that moment, at Reykjavík Art Museum, it was exactly a week on from the declaration of the first results in the country’s Parliamentary election, the second within 12 months.

Reissue CDs Weekly: The Moody Blues
Kieron Tyler

In early 1965, Birmingham’s The Moody Blues topped the British charts with a forceful reinterpretation of Bessie Banks’ R&B ballad “Go Now”. In early 1968, after some line-up changes and a radical musical rethink, they hit 19 with “Nights in White Satin”. Although as moody as “Go Now”, this was a different Moody Blues.

An Evening with Pat Metheny, Barbican - sheer joy under the Missouri sky
Sebastian Scotney

Pat Metheny recently described quite how much he enjoys just being on stage: “As Phil Woods used to say, the concert, that's for free. What the promoter is paying for is getting on the plane, getting off the plane, to pack your suitcase. The actual gig – you can have that for nothing.”

Saz'iso, Colston Hall, Bristol review - bewitching music from Southern Albania
Mark Kidel

A strange and wonderful moment: the standing area at the rear of The Lantern, the smaller venue at Bristol’s Colston Hall, is suddenly transformed into a corner of Southern Albania.

theartsdesk on Vinyl 33: Pet Shop Boys, AK/DK, Ian Dury, Grateful Dead and more
Thomas H. Green

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

Peter Perrett, Concorde 2, Brighton review - magnificent songs scorchingly rendered
Thomas H. Green

These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.

Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.

Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is

Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.  

Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.

And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.

Overleaf: Seven minute feature about Peter Perrett on Newsnight

Reissue CDs Weekly: Serge Gainsbourg & Jean-Claude Vannier
Kieron Tyler

In terms of cinema history, 1969’s Les Chemins de Katmandou is a footnote. Directed by André Cayatte, whose most interesting films were 1963’s interrelated marital dramas Jean-Marc ou la Vie Conjugale and Françoise ou la Vie Conjugale, it was a period-sensitive immersion into the world of a group of Nepal-based hippies. Though ostensibly a crime drama, a focus on drugs and free love brought an exploitation allure.

Queen: Rock the World, BBC Four review - we won't rock you
Jasper Rees

Forty years ago Whispering Bob Harris made a documentary about Queen. He eavesdropped on them as they recorded the album News of the World and then followed them around America on tour. The film was never broadcast but the footage was exhumed for this anniversary and stapled together in Queen: Rock the World (BBC Four), the latest in the BBC's prancing cavalcade of recent documentaries about the band (see sidebar).