New music
Peter Culshaw
Oumou Sangare, Malian diva and one of the world’s great singers, is not, as I eventually found out myself, a woman to be trifled with. When she bought some land outside Bamako, the capital of Mali, a local official by accident or oversight also sold the land to someone else who planted the fields. Sangare turned up with a bulldozer and destroyed the man’s crops. She also had a quiet word with the President of Mali and got the offending official sacked. I could easily imagine Sangare in her preferred garb of traditional colourful African robes and Parisian stilettos in the driving seat of a Read more ...
Anonymous
The force of Israeli-born Gilad Atzmon’s world view – his anti-Zionism, but also what Robert Wyatt, a self-confessed “Gilad groupie”, calls the “intrinsically non-racialist philosophy that's implicit in jazz” – comes through loud and clear in his stage banter. Not many jazzers namecheck the Chilcot Inquiry or dedicate tunes to “the biggest arseholes on the planet”: ie a good handful of (named) British and Israeli politicians. Crucially, though, that ideology comes through at least as strongly in the saxophonist’s music, the mix of jazz and Middle Eastern folk music pursued by his now decade- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Along with the compact disc and record company profits, the Guitar Hero has become virtually extinct in the modern era. Thus, finding two gilt-edged specimens of this increasingly scarce breed sharing a stage is gold dust indeed. Both of them have been drenched in accolades, Jeff Beck having been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice and Eric Clapton three times.Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds in 1965 after "God" decided that the group were becoming too commercial and un-bluesy, but while Clapton has remained stubbornly true to his blues calling over the decades, Beck has Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
“The human body is extremely limited. I would love to upgrade myself” says Kevin Warwick, one of the boffins interviewed on screen in Three Tales, the “video opera” from composer Steve Reich and his partner - they live as well as work together- video artist Beryl Korot, their “meditation on 20th Century technology.” When I met them the morning after the launch party in Amsterdam I could have done with an upgrade myself.Three Tales will be reprised next week at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge for four late night performances from the 17th – the first time the piece will have been reprised Read more ...
joe.muggs
It has been reported today that Google - via its Blogger and Blogspot services - has been closing down popular music blogs and wiping their archives without warning, citing copyright violation by those blogs who post downloadable mp3s of the tracks they review. While hosting copyright material may not by the letter of the law be legal, it seems that this heavy handed approach completely ignores the subtlety of the "grey economy" that exists between bloggers and a music industry which knows full well what a valuable promotional tool they can be - and it appears to be yet another example of how Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Should we be silent in classical concerts? Alex Ross, the classical critic of the New Yorker and writer of the superb panorama of 20th Century music The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, an “unlikely mass-market proposition” which has been a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic will be giving this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture. His talk is entitled Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert and will be given on 8 March at the Wigmore Hall. In the lecture Alex Ross will address concert culture - what has changed since the 18th century and what Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Zinc ft Ms Dynamite, Wile Out (Zinc)It takes a lot for an artist to admit they've taken a wrong turn and return to what they do best. So kudos to Ms Dynamite for ditching the dreary, wholemeal attempts to become a British Lauryn Hill and taking her rightful place again as one of this country's best rave MCs. With the irresistible electro-house beats and bouncing bass of DJ Zinc, she's turned up the attitude and created a very British twist on dancehall that almost, but not quite, betters her 2001 debut "Booo!".In slang terms, "wile" means "wild", thus "wile out" means "go wild"; the intimate Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Hoxton area of Shoreditch is a strange place for gigs by bands with general appeal. Specialist acts bring specialist crowds who know what they're going to get, but any like Music Go Music – whose records show a huge pop sensibility – will attract a fair few curious local scenesters, which sadly in Shoreditch means a load of drunk posh twits and Peaches Geldof clones falling over themselves to photograph one another every three seconds and show how fabulously bored they are with everything. These were out in force last night and it didn't, frankly, set up a celebratory atmosphere for the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Mine's a Strawberry Mivvi, if you are buying, thanks. Suburban Counterpoint: Music for Seven Ice Cream Vans is a deliciously intriguing work by composer Dan Jones that does what it says on the tin. It will be performed as part of this year's Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May, before being reprised in London.A set of seven ice-cream vans will, we are told, "weave a spellbinding counterpoint across an entire suburb at a time, weaving a carefully planned route as melodies echo from one van to another, calling out across great distances through the evening and sometimes into the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
As Jude Kelly put it today, the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil this summer is about a country "living its future now" (link here for the initial programme). That is certainly exciting for a city like London trying to live down its last decade (writes Josh Spero).
Kelly, the Southbank Centre’s artistic director, was keen to talk about the "ardent escapism" Brazilian culture manifests in its desire to forget its often tough reality. To this end, the livelier muses have been invoked: Ernesto Neto’s vibrant, delicate and organic art at the Hayward Gallery (19 June-5 September); the Campana Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is an unlikely star. A 39-year-old blind singer and multi-instrumentalist from Elcho Island, a remote indigenous community off the coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, Gurrumul’s eponymous solo album was Britain’s best selling world music album of 2009.Now, in what has become standard practice for million-selling pop monsters like Lady Gaga's The Fame and Amy Winehouse's Back to Black but is surely a first for a record of sparse Aboriginal spirituals, a year after its initial release the album is to be reissued in expanded ' Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
I meet Corinne Bailey Rae upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho – she wanders into the room and a couple of record company types intercept her. I hear phrases like “consumer segmentation”, “demographics”, “functionality of streaming” floating across the room – it sounds like someone has a new type of iPhone app they want her to sign up to. She looks polite, if a bit bemused. But in a depressed record business, Corinne Bailey Rae is a really big deal.Her self-titled 2006 debut album sold nearly four million copies, went straight in to the top of the British pop charts, spent 71 weeks in the Read more ...