funk
Joe Muggs
We're extremely happy to be able to offer a free download of this live track by New York collective Mice Parade to mark the release of their seventh album, Candela, today. In its six minutes, this version of "Couches & Carpets" encapsulates much of the diversity that has made Mice Parade a cult act over the past decade - from indie introspection to expansive post-rock guitars, jazz-funk grooves to melodies and techniques influenced by anagramatically eponymous band leader Adam Pierce's wide research as an ethnomusicologist. In last week's review of the album, Thomas H Green found Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It was one of those entirely unverifiable "facts" that music documentaries increasingly prefer over genuine insight: early on in this serviceable but routine overview of a truly stellar talent, we were told that Nile Rodgers’s guitar has “played on two billion dollars' worth of hits”. Who really knows? Who actually cares? You don’t measure the sheer joy of Chic’s “Good Times” or Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” by counting the cash or doing the math. You simply use your ears.As Johnny Marr pointed out, Rodgers is responsible for countless records “you’d have to be made out of stone not to be Read more ...
Joe Muggs
You really don't need the context on this, do you? Event album, comeback, cheesy title, blah blah – it's all there splattered all over the internet if you really want it. I'll just cut to the chase and say: I love Justin Timberlake's music, and I'm very, very relieved to say I love this album, for a number of reasons. And rather than try and analyse anything too much, I'll just list them.It doesn't try too hard. There's nothing that explodes in your face with hyper-pop orgasms like "Cry me a River" or "Sexy Back", and neither should there be. This wouldn't be dignified for a movie star, keen Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
First off, if you want to read a proper review of Two Fingers’ album just head here where I reviewed it a few months back. Instead, starting today and for the rest of the year, the musical side of Disc of the Day will be devoting itself more subjectively to theartsdesk's new music writers’ favourite albums of 2012.My contenders range from Orbital’s startlingly vital post-sabbatical return (Wonky) to Dexys' superb concept album about life, love and relationships (One Day I’m Going To Soar), from the very different, fascinating femme-pop of Santigold (Master of My Make Believe) and Sinead O’ Read more ...
Joe Muggs
At the beginning of last night's show, Herbie Hancock looked like he was going to perform with the dignity and serenity befitting a 72-year-old with some 50 years playing experience. The improvisation that launched from a base of Wayne Shorter's “Footprints” was elegant, charming, tasteful and often very beautiful. The synthetic instrumental loops that he triggered via a couple of iPads mounted on his grand piano as backing were unobtrusive to begin with and had a delightfully loose groove.Hancock's playing over some 15 minutes of that piece ran through a meandering narrative that took in Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.From bop and soul-inflected grooves of the 1960s, through jazz fusion in the early 1970s, the solid funk of his band the Headhunters later in the decade to his engagement with electro and hip hop going into the 1980s, he continuously produced music that appealed to both the intellect and the Read more ...
garth.cartwright
At 66 Larry Graham remains a remarkably supple, handsome man. The huge afro that once towered over him is long gone but the ability to pluck and thump the funkiest rhythms on earth from his white bass remains unmatched. Graham made his name as original bassist/bass vocalist in Sly & The Family Stone, the Bay Area band that proved such a potent force in popular music 1968-1973.Assembled by DJ/vocalist/pianist Sylvester Stewart aka Sly Stone in 1966, The Family Stone combined men and women, blacks and whites, rock with soul. And in Graham they had their secret weapon – playing bass with his Read more ...
Andrew Perry
When these blazin’ psychedelic jazzers first landed here from Austin in 2007, there’d already been four or five years’ worth of herky-jerky cod-post-punk-reviving going on, way past the point of overdose, but White Denim were different, and obviously worth making an exception for. Initially a trio, comprising James Petralli (guitar/vocals), Josh Block (drums) and Steve Terembecki (bass), their early gigs here were explosive, crystallizing the genre-transcendent ideal of the original post-punk era, blasting through everything – 1960s beat, funk, Tropicalia, Krautrock, folk – with Texas-fried Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, Koko, the old Camden Palace, another of London’s lovely venues, over 100 years old, all done up in red with gold gilt, and two layers of balcony boxes intact. It’s easy, as a regular gig-goer, to become oblivious to these heritage British venues but they are truly wonderful, full of personality that dozens of airport-like civic halls and sports arenas across the Americas can never muster. It’s not surprising that foreign bands adore playing such old variety theatres and, judging from their wide grins, Quantic’s Combo Barbaro, from Colombia, appear to be revelling in their environs.It Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for Read more ...
howard.male
“It’s cultural imperialism,” a middle-aged gentleman felt compelled to say to me, presumably because I was the bloke with the notebook. “Then all pop music is cultural imperialism,” is what I should have fired back at him, had I not been so immersed in the transcendental racket of tussling brass and distorted guitars that had almost made him inaudible. But instead I took the scenic route of pointing out that this legend of 1970s Ethiopian jazz would hardly have spent the last seven years playing with these white Dutch musicians if he had felt he was being exploited.As I finished the case for Read more ...