New Music Features
Interview: Melody Gardot, Mysterious TravellerThursday, 31 May 2012
It was already apparent from Melody Gardot's last album, My One and Only Thrill, that she harboured a more than passing infatuation with the music of Brazil and Latin America. "I love Brazilian music, it's one of my favourite genres," she said at the time. "I love the Stan Getz bossa nova years, I love Getz/Giberto, Jobim, Caetano Veloso... " Read more...
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The Arts Desk Radio Show 3Tuesday, 29 May 2012
After a double set of live studio guests in our last show, it's just Joe and Peter this time, and thus a lot more music and discussion. Our intrepid explorers ponder whether there's anything new under the sun, looking at new-sounding folk and old-sounding electronica, angry British hip hop, Swedish jazz-punk, Mexican boutique hotels, murder blues and Crowley-referencing ambient music. Read more... |
Interview: 10 Questions for Russell WatsonMonday, 21 May 2012
A Salford lad who used to work as a bolt-cutter by day and sing in working men's clubs at night, Russell Watson started out in showbiz by singing popular hits by Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond or Simon & Garfunkel alongside a few belters from famous musicals. One night the patron of the Wigan Road Working Men's Club suggested he should have a go at Puccini's "Nessun Dorma". Read more... |
George Harrison: Something in the VaultsMonday, 14 May 2012
My, what strange and wondrous treasures await the record producer given exclusive access to the private vaults of a Beatle. He will, for instance, find entire radio programmes preserved on multi-track tape, and recordings of F1 cars roaring past at some unspecified race track. He will stumble upon a humbled Fab being given his very first sitar lesson by Ravi Shankar, and be privy to a brief musical moment beamed in across the decades from a room at the Jaipur Palace Hotel. Read more... |
Levon Helm: 1940-2012Friday, 20 April 2012
Levon Helm, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 71, was not only the drummer in The Band, one of the load-bearing beams of American roots rock. He was also an astonishingly soulful singer, whether as lead or harmony, with a voice that seemed to imbue everything he sang with an unfussy yet absolute truth, as inescapable and essential as the earth. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Laugharne WeekendWednesday, 18 April 2012
The Laugharne Weekend has become a fixture in the crowded calendar of festivals that now punctuates not just high days and holidays but the whole six months that make up British Summer Time. Carving a niche for itself as a halfway house between literature and music, Laugharne’s success is built on two key factors. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Busara Festival: Africa's long song of defianceSaturday, 14 April 2012
The 18th-century Omani fort in Zanzibar is silhouetted against a clear African night. Nneka, a bird-like Nigerian female artist in shabby leggings, is hammering out “Vagabonds in Power” on an open-air stage inside the fort, just metres from a sea of entranced faces. The song is a poke at Africa’s leaders, specifically their part in the Niger Delta mismanagement and related death and corruption scandals. Read more... |
Gavin Bryars on The Sinking of the TitanicWednesday, 11 April 2012
You may be feeling Titanic fatigue by now, the last straw being the so-so Julian Fellowes TV romp which heads, as Adam Sweeting points out elsewhere, “an epidemic of TV programmes” this week. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Estonia: Tallinn Music WeekThursday, 05 April 2012
It began with a warning. Opening the fourth Tallinn Music Week, Estonia’s President Toomas Hendrik Ilves cautioned, “In a free society, it’s risk-free. In an un-free society, it’s not risk-free. It’s not all fun.” From behind a hotel conference room lectern, he then began rolling a video of Russia’s Pussy Riot being arrested in Moscow a few days earlier. Not everyone can make their point, make their music, choose how they want to get it across. Read more... |
Popcorn and Polymorphia: Jonny Greenwood meets PendereckiThursday, 22 March 2012
Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia for 48 string instruments dates back to 1962, and still stands as one of the grand milestones of the avant-garde. It epitomised the Polish composer's technique of "timbre organisation", in which the plucking and bowing of strings was merely a small part of an astounding array of effects. Read more... |
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