Sam Bleakley’s first book, Surfing Brilliant Corners, charts a decade of "extreme surf travel" with renowned photographer John Callahan. He is a jazz fanatic and surfer from Sennen, West Cornwall and a multiple European and British Longboard surfing champion. Surfing, Jazz, Geography and Ecology mix as he journeys to the likes of Mauritania, locked in political strife, where “landmines litter access to some of the best waves on the planet"; and Haiti, which "captures my heart and makes it race as if falling in love”.
new music features
Peter Culshaw
With his sublime renditions of Azerbaijan's classical music, Alim Qasimov is one of the world's great performers. On the eve of the singer's appearance at the Barbican’s Transcender Weekend of spiritual trance music, where he is performing this Sunday, theartsdesk recalls a trip to the old Soviet state to drink vodka, play chess and find out about this extraordinary singer.
edward.seckerson
In the 1960s Des McAnuff played guitar and wrote songs to meet girls. Subsequently life became a little more complicated for the multi-talented writer/ director. His long-standing commitment to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at the other Stratford - in Ontario, Canada - has won him many plaudits and he is now director emeritus of the La Jolla Playhouse in California where so many important projects have germinated, including his Tony Award-winning production of The Who's Tommy and the forthcoming musical adaptation of Doctor Zhivago with a score by Lucy Simon.
iris.brooks
The group Pingasan’k “calls for good spirits”. The name refers to “a bucket to put rice in, tied with the bark of a tree”. Regardless of rice or spirits, this band touched my heart. The gentle, haunting sounds come from the bamboo tube zithers (pratuon’k) made from giant mountain bamboo, which is only cut down when they see the moon. “We do not want our instrument to smell sweet or our insects will bite it,” explains leader Arthur Kanying.
Peter Culshaw
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of an extraordinary trip I took in 2003 to sample the culture and music of the Pygmies deep in the heart of the Central African Republic.
Mark Kidel
The world music scene is hungry for new sensations - and Omar Souleyman, about to hit London and the Shambhala Festival, well deserves to be one of them. In the early 1980s the hunger for the exotic focused on anything that came from the parallel universes untouched by the pressures of commercialisation: polyphonic pygmy singing from Central Africa, ecstatic Sufi soul doctors from Pakistan, drone-drenched bagpipe players from Bulgaria or heart-invading praise singers from Mali. Souleyman is the singer in a small band that plays dabke music at weddings in Syria.
edward.seckerson
Kerry Ellis amassed a legion of adoring fans when she went "green" playing Elphaba in Stephen Schwartz's smash-hit musical both in London and on Broadway. But her pre-eminence as a musical-theatre-diva-cum-rock-chick was secured earlier still when Brian May, the celebrated lead guitarist of Queen, asked her to play Meat in the Queen/ Ben Elton show We Will Rock You. May quickly recognised a symbiosis between them and their CD single Wicked in Rock sprung a rip-roaring reimagining of "Defying Gravity" with Brian May's amazing guitar riffs a key feature.
Kieron Tyler
The arrival of Gainsbourg: Vie Héroique in British cinemas this week – under its Anglo-Saxon title Gainsbourg – assumes that distributors think there’s an audience. Even so, Gainsbourg hardly has the appeal of a Johnny Cash biopic. Or even an Ike Turner biopic. The release continues a process that began in the early 1990s, when a slow, posthumous rise to recognition of Serge Gainsbourg began outside the Francophone world, au delà de l’Hexagon.
peter.quinn
“A E Housman said he could recognise poetry because it made his throat tighten and his eyes water. I can recognise jazz because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even get up and caper round the room.” For those curious to discover the kind of music that made poet Philip Larkin leap around shouting “Yeah, man”, help is at hand.
Peter Culshaw
Arnaldo Baptista of Os Mutantes is telling me why South American music can be so compelling: "It's the historical mix, Incas, black Africans, Europeans, beings from Outer Space." I beg his pardon. "Oh, yes, I have seen many flying saucers". Arnaldo is being perfectly serious and launches into his theory of Time (he has formulas and diagrams) which state that once humans go faster than the speed of light, we will be able to travel back to the past. He thinks will freeze himself cryogenically and be unfrozen when this is possible, travelling in the future to go to the past. He has theories about the Age of Fire (we are, he says, about to leave it). Then he goes into a rambling but detailed and convincing comparison of the psychic effects of Gibson and Fender guitar sounds.