Africa
Graham Fuller
A wondrous antidote to digital movies’ colonisation of the darkening continent of cinema, Miguel Gomes’s luminously black-and-white Tabu is a tripartite paean to the past: to the perils of Portuguese imperialism in Africa; to Hollywood silent movies as they transitioned to sound; to an adulterous affair that trapped its enraptured lovers for the remaining 50 years of their lives.It’s also a picture with a few meta-movie tropes – a waterlogged camera lens, a home-movie shoot with a malfunctioning Bolex, an irrational sideways shot – that addresses the storytelling impulse and the undiminished Read more ...
mark.kidel
With the overwhelming acclaim that welcomed their first album, Très Très Fort, the musical paralympic champions Staff Benda Bilii faced a challenge with their second. Would their unusually stirring backstory as disabled polio victims and destitute street children in Kinshasa become a burden rather than a draw?Bouger Le Monde doesn’t disappoint, although there are moments when their very exuberance becomes a little excessive, as if they were responding to audiences that clearly preferred the super-charged frenzy of their up-tempo rumba to the slower songs that brought greater balance and Read more ...
terry.friel
The most striking thing about the first photographic exhibition to specifically address post-revolution Libya is that there is no blood. Libya: A Nation Reborn is situated in the marbled ballroom of Tripoli’s five-star Corinthia Hotel – a long way from the dust, sweat and blood of the streets – and poignantly lays out the reality of the revolution. And its costs.The recent showing was the work of a new generation of Libyan men and women, most of whom had never even touched a camera barely a year ago. “It is now time the people of the world realised the new Libya,” says one of the organisers, Read more ...
howard.male
The North African desert blues, as played by Tuareg musicians like Tinariwen, may well be the most popular kind of “world music” amongst mainstream rock fans since South African township jive post-Paul Simon’s Graceland. However, this presents a problem in that it’s intrinsically a rather limited form and so there’s a risk that its audience may soon grow tired of those circling, intertwining guitars, that mid-tempo lope and those understated almost-spoken vocals that make up a typical song. So does this debut solo album from the one-time Etran Finatawa member bring anything new to the Tuareg Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Sellars has a talent for controversy, from his early days when he was the director who brought you Così fan tutte set in a diner on Cape Cod, Don Giovanni as a cocaine-snorting, Big Mac-eating slum thug, and Figaro getting married in Trump Tower. At his best, in John Adams's Nixon in China, Saariaho’s L’amour du loin, or his Teodora at Glyndebourne, the results have been some of the freshest and most inspiring stagings of new music seen in recent times. Anyone who has met him knows he is a brilliant polymath, extremely charming and charismatic, even if many hate his haircut (see Read more ...
howard.male
Over recent years a number of musicians and bands have immersed themselves in the exotic funky sound of 1960s/70s Ethiopian jazz (brought to our attention by the Éthiopiques CD series) to produce excellent new music. The best of these acts include The Heliocentrics (with guest Éthiopiques star Mulatu Astatke), The Imperial Tiger Orchestra, Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex (Mekuria being another of the style’s original exponents) and Dub Colossus. The latter provided a useful launchpad for this supremely gifted and versatile young pianist.But this solo album is by no means just a showcase for Read more ...
howard.male
The strikingly clumsy cover (possibly designed by a 12-year-old boy with a rotring pen, a compass and a setsquare) is so amateurish that it just about tips over into being good, but it gives no indication of what the music therein might be like. So it came as something of a pleasant surprise that it was the most sophisticated, superbly played Afro-funk I’ve heard in the last year.While Nigerian Afrobeat is arguably the main template for this London based Ghanaian band, the grooves are looser and more elastic than we are used to from that genre. There’s an agreeable amount of air Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Euro 2012 about to end and the Olympics looming, we'll be hearing an awful lot of national anthems over the next couple of months. Don't we all agree that the majority of them are inadequate - often being turgid tunes with no reference to the culture of the countries involved? Isn't it about time we had some alternatives? Here are a few suggestions.United KingdomAnthem: God Save the QueenThe obvious alternative for Team GB would be "Jerusalem". Athletes could also sing along to the stirring strains of "Anarchy in the UK" by the Sex Pistols. Another possibility was suggested by Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Some people go on holiday to relax on a beach. Others to trek through a glorious landscape. Or to explore magnificent architecture/extravagant nightclubs. Myself, well, I’m a musical tourist. Which often means I’m in rather blighted states. I’ve spent more time in Mississippi than New York, regularly returned to Romania yet barely know France. So when the offer came to attend a musical festival in La Réunion I didn’t have to think twice.La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean, rarely attracts UK attention – beyond when Piton de la Fournaise, Réunion’s very active volcano (pictured below), Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.Shakespeare set any number of plays in the Italy he encountered in his source material, but with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet, none feels quite so much of a statement about the Italian state of mind as Julius Caesar. It’s no coincidence that this was the play given to an Italian company for the recent Globe to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms — families as they actually are — tend to be ignored. So initially the good thing about Vivienne Franzmann’s new play is that it focuses on a family where the child is adopted. More controversially, it is about a white man who adopts a black girl from Africa.The story takes place in today’s Hampstead but has roots in the past. Joseph is a news photographer whose images of war and atrocity are world famous. Since the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Everything But The Girl: Eden, Love Not Money, Baby, The Stars Shine Bright, IdlewildJasper ReesCan it really be nearly three decades since the release of Eden defined the quintessential bedsit sound? Everything But The Girl are somehow ageless, a reality underwritten by this bloody wonderful set of reissues which tells the story of their quietly immense contribution to intelligent Eighties pop. There is also a clear narrative of their early progress from the undergraduate balladeering of Eden (1984), embellished and politicised in Love Not Money (1985), thrown entirely over for Ben Watt’s Read more ...