New music
Jasper Rees
Some things just don’t seem to belong in a pairing. The flute and the French horn both have their distinct sonic personality. It wouldn’t be going out on a limb to suggest that the average listener tends to lean towards one or the other. Even Mozart wrote for the horn out of love but trotted out his flute compositions for money. But opposites can and do attract and so it once more proves in a new recording featuring the horn and the flute and, discreetly chaperoning the pair of them, the piano.The musicians responsible for this newly formed ensemble are horn player Dave Lee, flautist Andy Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In 1989 when Lenny Kravitz released his debut Let Love Rule people complained that he had failed to quite master the Sixties influences that cut through it. They were wrong. That year it made Kravitz the most exciting black/white crossover artist since Prince. Since then, his path has been mainly a little more straightforward - maybe a little retro, but still consistently stirring. However with Black and White America Kravitz has again thumbed back through his Black-American songbook to find new styles with which to score his treatise on 21st-century race relations. Is it as good as Let Love Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Anyone for Demis?" wasn’t the only question posed by this trawl through some of the foreign – not American - popular music that’s been hugged to our collective bosom. That the large, hirsute, kaftan-shrouded Greek wonder that’s Demis Roussos was popular is obvious. He landed in the Top 10 in 1975 with “Happy to be on an Island in the Sun” and became a chart regular for the next two years. Everyone was for Demis. The other poser was the self-cancelling, “Now that pop music’s gone global, has the appeal of the foreign pop song gone forever?”Thankfully, this wasn’t the sniggersome jaunt through Read more ...
theartsdesk
A three-piece hailing from Seattle and its environs, The Cave Singers are an authentically hairy proposition. With his tweed hat and red beard, at this Edge festival gig singer Pete Quirk looked like a cross between the late Robin Cook and a stray leprechaun from Finian’s Rainbow, while Derek Fudesco dispensed his lovely, liquid guitar lines from beneath a blur of flying hair.On record their trippy psych-folk-rock is often rather bucolic, like Fleet Foxes with more edge and on weirder drugs. On stage, however, they closed ranks, dispensing with many of the textures of their studio work and Read more ...
howard.male
I first heard Bahia-born Lucas Santtana on the best compilation of contemporary Brazilian music of the past couple of years, Oi! A nova musica Brasileira. His track “Hold Me In”, an acoustic slice of bossa nova, was a quiet interlude amonst all the dance, electronica and rock tracks. But it didn’t really give much indication of what an adventurous musical talent he might be.One curiously satisfying thing about this album is that one hardly notices which songs are sung in Portuguese and which in English (the divide is about 50/50), as focus is constantly being drawn to the sonically Read more ...
marcus.odair
“Wynton Marsalis has had an enormous impact on jazz over the last 40 years,” say the programme notes, “being one of the first artists to perform and compose across the full jazz spectrum from its New Orleans roots to bebop to modern jazz.” Although it seems to bestow an extra precociousness upon the American trumpeter, who was only born in 1961, the first part of that sentence is undoubtedly true. The second part is true too, until the last two words. The one thing Wynton Marsalis does not do is modern jazz.That was clear in his set tonight, blues-indebted and swinging – or, occasionally, Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Third in line to share their summer reading selection with theartsdesk is Colin Currie (b 1976), the leading percussionist of his generation. A driving force behind new percussion repertoire for more than a decade, in 2000 Currie was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award for his inspirational role in contemporary music and is in the unique position of being the only instrumentalist to enjoy close collaborative relationships with many of the leading composers of today, notably Rautavaara, Steve Reich and Elliott Carter. His latest CD release, which features Jennifer Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a strand of electro-assisted, dance-leaning French pop that’s captured the international consciousness. Phoenix and Justice are Grammy winners, while Air exemplify the cooler, more reflective end of it. The bands come from chi-chi burbs like Versailles or towns south of Paris, south of the Seine. And so it is for Housse de Racket, an outfit from Chaville, between Versailles and Paris. On the evidence of their second album, they’re potential border breakers.There’s a strand of electro-assisted, dance-leaning French pop that’s captured the international consciousness. Phoenix and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hiatt's regular band play as if they're taking a road trip from Nashville to... well, California maybe, Hiatt's former home which he sings about eloquently on the wistful country-rocker "Adios to California". Despite its title, it's the Golden State that springs to mind once again when he sings "Detroit Made", a dust-raising automobile ode not a little reminiscent of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land" and its tale of a trip out west.Hiatt has some serious stuff in his sights too. He wrote "Down Around my Place" after freak flooding wreaked havoc in his home town of Nashville last year, and the Read more ...
charles.farley
Bobby Bland had waited through three difficult years, recording for three different labels with no hits and not much to show for it. He had waited through more than two boring years in the Army with no more than an honorable discharge and a bus ticket to Houston. And he had waited still another two years, practising, performing - persevering more than anything - before finally recording a hit record. But now, it seemed, they were coming fast and furious. Bobby had prevailed and his dream had finally come true. He was at last a star.On the strength of the number one hit "Farther Up the Road" Read more ...
bruce.dessau
First things first. Baxter Dury is the son of Ian Dury and from the moment Happy Soup kicks in with his cockney monotone on the ska-flecked "Isabel" there is no court in the land that would deny the vocal DNA. But that does not mean that Dury Junior's third album is disappointing. Happy Soup might lack the exquisite verbal gymnastics of his father's work, but it makes up for it with a gentle, electro wistfulness and a keen sense of yearning.Happy Soup is one of those quintessentially English pop gems that anyone who loves the holy trinity of The Kinks, Madness and Blur should immediately grab Read more ...