jazz
Liz Thomson
Talk about a great big melting pot! The eighth studio album by the man born 36 ago as Andrew Heissler in Bloomington, Indiana, and known to the world as Pokey LaFarge digs deep into the bubbling cauldron of Americana, in its very broadest sense. He himself has described it as kind of like a mix-tape and even the most casual listener will discern in Rock Bottom Rhapsody elements of country, blues, bluegrass, barrelhouse, doo-wop, jazz, rockabilly, the great American songbook and even hints of movie music.Pokey’s first outing since 2017’s Manic Revelations, it was mostly written in LA, to where Read more ...
Liz Thomson
“Friday night is Amami night” – that was the ad that ran from the 1920s through to the 1950s for a brand of “setting lotion”, a delightfully old-fashioned term. Those were the days when young women stayed home and did their hair, in preparation for a Saturday night out. Perhaps some of the girls (they weren’t yet “chicks”, maybe “birds”) in the late 1950s used the product when they went to Eel Pie Island, one of the country’s legendary music scenes.The nine-acre island in the Thames, just above the river’s only lock, was the subject of BBC Four’s documentary Rock ‘n’ Roll Island: Where Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Miles – where to begin? Some 21st century revisionists find his art fatally tainted by his personal life, and his violent behaviour in relationships. His rasping, epithet-scarred voice, the sound of a snake sloughing off its own skin, able to weaponise ‘motherfucker’ to some kind of deadly bio-mass, his long rich history of drug use and abuse, his vivid, aggressive take on race relations and his studied indifference to his audience – this is not how musicians and artists are supposed to behave, especially nowadays.Miles Davis comes from a creative and political world that is the polar Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Coming in at around four hours, in two parts, this 2015 documentary is ostensibly about Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, but really, via the prism of his existence, it’s as much about America’s journey through the first two thirds of the 20th century. What other life intersects so neatly with such a scattershot selection of key names – Franklin D Roosevelt, Elvis Presley, Lucky Luciano, Mia Farrow, Louis B Mayer, Edgar J Hoover, Louis Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Eli Wallach, and on and on. It’s a compulsive biography that, like the man it covers, never slows, and never grows Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoner Shabaka Hutchings's other main groups, The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, are pretty modernist. They incorporate dub, post-rock, post punk and rhythm patterns that recall London pirate radio sounds into the playing of his ensembles, with thrillingly adrenalised and / or cosmic results. This ensemble, though – convened in South Africa with with trumpeter Mandla Mlangeni – is altogether more true to a strictly jazz lineage. It's true, in fact, to a very specific jazz lineage: “The New Thing”, the explicitly spiritual, often fiercely political music exemplified by John and Alice Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Escapism sometimes feels not just useful but necessary. To be carried back, for an evening, to the world of the 1920s/1930s dance band, with foxtrots, pasodobles, crisp starched collars and secco endings, of slick hair and even slicker arrangements, does have a lot to recommend it. And a virtually packed house in Cadogan Hall last night were palpably more than happy to be taken there.We were in assured hands. Although this is the very first UK tour by the 12-piece, Berlin-based Palast Orchester, the band led by Max Raabe has existed since the singer started it in1986, and it has kept hold the Read more ...
peter.quinn
Released to coincide with a new documentary on his life by filmmaker John Scheinfeld, In the Key of Joy celebrates the multifaceted genius of Brazilian producer, composer, keyboardist and vocalist, Sergio Mendes.Recorded between Brazil and California, disc one contains some noticeably fine things, not least collaborations with long-standing friends whom Mendes refers to as his “Three Magi” – bossa pianist João Donato cowrites and performs on the perky “Muganga”; Hermeto Pascoal features on the sinuous groove of “This Is It (É Isso)”, while Guinga writes and plays guitar on one of the album’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
From This Place (Nonesuch) is a complex, meticulously produced and many-layered album which demands concentrated and repeated listening. In many ways, it is all the better for it. Pat Metheny himself has written an essay or “Album Notes” of no fewer than 2,020 words to explain how the concept of the album evolved, as it went through a several-stage process of conception, recording, arranging, production. He also explains its significance in his oeuvre: he calls it “a kind of musical culmination, reflecting a wide range of expressions that have interested me over the years.”There Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Huey Lewis and the News were an unlikely mid-Eighties phenomenon. Their Sports album was a mega-success for a band already approaching early middle age. Their Fifties feel, given a contemporary polish and boosted by association with cinematic juggernaut Back to the Future, sat comfortably (yet incongruously) alongside the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran. They were, however, always shorthand for middle-of-the-road, their appeal satirized by Brett Easton Ellis who made them a favourite of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. It should, then, come as no surprise that their latest album is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
“Take our country back!” is the rallying cry of the self-identified “real” Americans gathered to protest the arrival of immigrants. It could be a contemporary Trump rally – or, indeed, the nastier side of current British political discourse – but in fact this scene is from a 1986 musical, set in 1910, from an all-star creative team: book by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), score by Charles Strouse (Annie) and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked). Despite that pedigree, it bombed on Broadway, but this opportune revival, transferred from Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, gains potency by Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Brussels – The Cultural Guide” for 2020 is a very substantial book. It consists of 212 tightly-packed pages in a quite small font. The message is that there is indeed a lot going on culturally in Belgium’s capital city.Whereas the separatist-led government in Flanders has recently, visibly chosen to make culture into a battleground by reducing subsidies, raising the public ire of internationally known figures such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Ivo van Hove, the Brussels-Capital Region is keen for culture to be a magnet.There are all kinds of events across all art forms throughout the Read more ...
peter.quinn
A trio of standout US vocal jazz releases included one of the year’s most hotly anticipated albums, Jazzmeia Horn’s Love and Liberation, which showcased the Dallas-born vocalist’s ever-deepening artistry and songwriter’s ear for detail. Horn’s eight originals encapsulated the sense of joyousness, playfulness and vitality that course through her music.Veronica Swift’s debut for Mack Avenue Records, Confessions, was nothing short of spectacular, displaying impeccable time, emotional depth, timbral beauty, first-rate arranging skills and a storytelling gift. With her characteristically Read more ...