Africa
howard.male
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give a positive review, or feel guilty about lessening their chances of bettering their circumstances with a bad review. Yes, the vanity and solipsism of your reviewer has no bounds! But this visual and musical treat of a film wastes no time in informing us that there is no room for pity in the story of this resilient collective of musicians who, rather Read more ...
theartsdesk
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom Jones hamming it up with Robbie Williams or Cerys Matthews or Stereophonics. Jones seems to have reached the same conclusion. On his last outing, 2008’s 24 Hours, he circled back towards his traditional strengths, revisiting some of the musical styles he became associated with in the Sixties and Seventies but with the aid of a submerged iceberg of Read more ...
Anonymous
Its acronymic moniker stands for World Of Music, Arts and Dance, but the line-up at this year’s WOMAD is, as usual, very much skewed towards the first of those artforms – hailing from anywhere and everywhere between Australia and Azerbaijan. The “arts” component is likewise fully evident; in the two different venues for film screenings, for instance, or in the four small wooden stages in construction throughout the weekend as a demonstration of sustainable architecture.
The dancing, by contrast, though covered in various workshops, seems to be left largely in the hands (and feet) of the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Come the end of June in Essaouira on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, up to half a million festival-goers team the narrow, traffic-free streets of the medina, its two huge open squares, and numerous courtyards and riyads around town, for what must be the world’s biggest free festival. It is dedicated to Gnawa, the trance and healing music of African Moroccans who had been inveigled into slavery in centuries past – there was a slave market in Essaouria until the early part of the 20th century – and whose music, until the festival kicked off in 1998, was regarded with suspicion and disdain by Read more ...
howard.male
Many press releases from now up until Christmas are sure to begin with the words, “Fresh from wowing the crowds at Glastonbury…”, but that’s not going to stop me using them now with reference to this great Malian band. This is because we world music journalists feel a particular swell of pride when one of our beloved acts breaks through the Womad glass ceiling and gets to bring their complex polyrhythms and weird-looking instruments to the mainstream music fan. And what’s more, in the case of Ngoni ba, I’m sure that they genuinely did “wow” that sea of sun-burnt punters, because Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Isabelle Huppert has always had a wandering soul, ever since she cropped up as a strawberry blonde cowboy’s moll in Michael Cimino’s fabled folly, Heaven’s Gate. That was 30 years ago. Middle age has by no means withered but certainly has hardened her pretty freckled moue into something fierce and obdurate. The owner of that forthright jawline ploughs a self-sufficient furrow these days. The characters she chooses to embody are, for one reason or another, doing it for themselves out on society’s limb.In Villa Amalia a betrayed wife dumps every vestige of her marital existence to embark on an Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Afro-Cubism is the fruition of the World Circuit label's original intention for Buena Vista Social Club album, which was to have been a stellar collaboration of musicians from Mali and Cuba. In 1996, the African contingent of Bassekou Kouyate and Djeliomady Tounkara claimed they couldn't get visas and so the label used the studio time to record the Buena Vista album, and the Rueben Gonzalez one, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars' first album, a trio of classics. (Another story has it that the Africans were offered a better paying gig at home - if so, bad call, gents, as the Buena Vista album has Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Tragedy reminds us how to live,” declares Moira Buffini’s democratically elected heroine, Eurydice. It’s a reminder the playwright herself and her latest work, Welcome to Thebes, is eager to provide. Following on the well-worn heels of last season’s Mother Courage at the National comes a new play that once again places women in the front line. Leaving to Brecht the barren fields of Western Europe, Buffini sets up her stall in the fertile dramatic ground of contemporary Africa – a place where gang-rape and murder are just the prologue.Within this political reaction chamber Buffini collides Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's most delicious sounds found by our reviewers include a return to form by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett and bassist Charlie Haden, new electronica/grime from Rude Kid, impressive debuts from Villagers and Hindi Zahra, and the latest from Band Of Horses, Tracey Thorn, Teenage Fan Club, Nina Nastasia, Konono No1, Bobby McFerrin and the Ipanemas. CD of the month is by the "lovely and kaleidoscopic" Afro-Colombian band Choc Quib Town. Reviewers are Robert Sandall, Sue Steward, Howard Male, Graeme Thomson, Russ Coffey, Bruce Dessau, Thomas H Green, Marcus O'Dair, Joe Muggs, Peter Read more ...
fisun.guner
From his tall column in Trafalgar Square, Admiral Lord Nelson won’t be able to glimpse the new work on the Fourth Plinth, since he faces the other way. But of all the works that have occupied this space – from Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, to Antony Gormley’s One & Other – the latest must surely be the one that would please him most: a model of his own ship, HMS Victory, displayed in a huge bottle.From his tall column in Trafalgar Square, Admiral Lord Nelson won’t be able to glimpse the new work on the Fourth Plinth, since he faces the other way. But of all the works that have Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
With Fela Kuti's old band playing Brighton this evening fronted by his son Seun and on the same bill as Tony Allen, the drummer who co-created the increasingly influential Afro-beat sound, it seemed a good excuse to revisit the first interview I ever got published, which was with the great African pop star in 1984 (in Blitz magazine, also a version for the Observer). A polygamist, with at one point 28 wives, a political and musical revolutionary, Fela was one of the most extraordinary musicians ever to walk the planet.Watch Fela Kuti and his band in 1971Paul McCartney found himself in Lagos Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Brian Eno’s on the phone. He’s been up all night. But he does want to talk to theartsdesk about his Afro-beat concert in Brighton as part of the Brighton Festival he is curating which this evening sees Seun Kuti - the son of Fela Kuti, who has basically inherited his legendary father’s band - and Tony Allen’s band on the same bill. Tony Allen was the drummer with Fela’s band and co-creator of the Afro-beat sound which seems to become more popular with each passing year (Fela died in 1997).Brian says that he became obsessed with Afro-beat in about 1972. “I thought at that time it was the most Read more ...