New music
Peter Culshaw
This week, the great Brazilian songwriter Tom Jobim, in a duet with Elis Regina, as well as teaching jazzer Gerry Mulligan bossa nova and in a version by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It's also the birthday of songwriter Robert Wyatt, and trip-hop pioneer Tricky, who shares a birthday with Mozart.25 January 1927: Antonio Carlos Jobim, better known as Tom Jobim. First: a minute in 1950s paradise on the beach with Jobim, Joao Gilberto and Luiz Bonfa.
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Although you only get to see his hands in this next clip, he plays his "Águas de Março" (Waters of Read more ...
joe.muggs
The dominant look among all ages of the sell-out audience at the Barbican Hall last night was distinctly “smart-Bohemian”, with plenty of thick-rimmed specs, duffle coats and subtly outré hairdos visible as they took their seats and gave one another knowing nods on spotting the “Fruit Tree” motif in the stage décor. For Nick Drake, the fragile Cambridge-born singer-songwriter who died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1974 aged 26, is perhaps the perfect cult artist: utterly singular, too intense and serious to be appreciated in his short lifetime, but increasingly influential on the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Marisa dos Reis Nunes (b. 1973) is an African-Portuguese singing superstar whose music has deep roots in fado, Portugal’s dark-blue, intensely poetic national music, but which over the course of five albums has gradually taken on inflections of jazz, blues and bossa nova. Born in Mozambique to an African mother and a Portuguese father, Mariza (like all good divas she has long since dispensed with meddlesome surname, converting along the way the soft S in her forename to a zippy Z) grew up in Lisbon, where she fell in love with fado (it translates as “fate”), the starkly melancholic strain of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I’ve never been quite sure whether Brian Eno is a musician, or somebody for whom music happens to be the end product of a chain of cognitive processes. Certainly it was music that powered him to prominence, either as the inventor of ambient music, a performer with Roxy Music, or as a collaborator with artists ranging from rock gods U2 and David Bowie to composers Harold Budd and Philip Glass.But as this Arena film illustrated, these days Eno is as likely to be involved in art installations, software development, the study of mathematical systems or debates on the value of global governance as Read more ...
joe.muggs
Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital's multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was Read more ...
sue.steward
I’m no folky but I fell for the songs of Kate and Anna McGarrigle the moment I first heard their album Dancer with Bruised Knees, and it’s remained a companion ever since. It never struck me that their songs and the eclectic backing music was "folk", as it was often categorised; the tag presumably arose from Kate’s accordion and banjo playing, their acoustic guitars and, of course, the French-Canadian chansons they sang at home as children - and thankfully introduced to the rest of us.But regardless of definitions, when Kate sat at the piano and Anna played guitar, or they swapped places and Read more ...
howard.male
I used to argue that there was no such thing as a World Music style, in the sense that, say, indie music or trad jazz are fairly sonically delineated. But now I’m not so sure. Over the past decade or so, most cosmopolitan cities in the world have probably produced at least one band with a line-up that invariably includes an accordion player, a double bassist (rather than a bass guitarist), a violinist (just the one), maybe a horn player or two, and a multi-lingual vocalist.These earnest, impassioned groups of musicians will generally endeavour to create a new, exciting sound from their joint Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Nashville is much more than the Grand Ol’ Opry, big hairdos and rhinestones, and I was looking for something beyond the occasionally enjoyable kitsch. I was failing to make much sense of the place and fell back on a technique which I’ve often found produces results when somewhere unfamiliar – ask the musicians themselves who they most respect. One name kept coming up – Guy Clark, who it became obvious was a city legend, a songwriters’ songwriter. I turned up at Clark’s house at 11 in the morning, and he offered me a drink from an already open bottle of Bourbon. I asked him for an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Neil Campbell is a one-man subculture. In 30 years of music-making in various configurations of improvised rock, psychedelia and electronics, he has released hundreds of hours of recordings, mainly in micro-editions of home-produced cassette, CD or mp3, and collaborated endlessly with a global network of musicians that have fallen through the cracks of genre or stylistic allegiance. Since separating from Leeds-based guitar drone group Vibracathedral Orchestra in 2006, he has mainly concentrated on his activities as Astral Social Club, under which name he performed a relatively rare live set Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays. This week Don Van Vliet, also known as Captain Beefheart, in a fascinating 1997 documentary made by John Peel, master drummer Gene Krupa, singer Long John Baldry on a TV special hosted by the Beatles, producer Jerry Wexler talking about working with Bob Dylan, smooth operator Sade whose first album of new material in ten years is due to be released next month and a brief farewell to producer Willie Mitchell.15 January 1941: Don Van Vliet, or Captain Beefheart, retired from music in the early 1980s to pursue painting. This 1997 documentary is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. And that was him somewhere under the computer-generated fur as the ultimate unreconstructed he-man Kong. Whence it is but a small step to Ian Dury. In sex&drugs&rock Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The singer Lhasa de Sela passed away from breast cancer in her Montreal home on 1 January just before midnight, at the age of 37. Since this news emerged my email box has had numerous messages about this tragic loss, including from theartsdesk critic Robert Sandall who wrote about her “extraordinary talent, amazing life… a total original, a real artist”, and adds a note below this article. Howard Male said, “The Living Road is one of the truly great albums in any genre, in my opinion.” While never forming a conventional career, her three albums La Llorona, The Living Road and the self-titled Read more ...