London
peter.quinn
A member of Miles Davis's legendary second quintet (“arguably Miles's best ever group” according to the Penguin Jazz Guide); a composer of standards (“Watermelon Man”, “Dolphin Dance”, “Maiden Voyage”, “Cantaloupe Island”) and soundtracks (Antonioni's Blow-Up, Bertrand Tavernier's Round Midnight); winner of over 10 Grammy Awards, the first for his 1983 hit single “Rockit”, the most recent for his magnificent 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album River: The Joni Letters (one of only two jazz recordings to win the coveted Album of the Year award, the other being Getz/Gilberto over 40 years ago). Read more ...
peter.quinn
And we're off. Marking the official start of the London Jazz Festival, “Jazz Voice: Celebrating a Century of Song” provided a superbly paced and brilliantly conceived curtain-raiser. Hosted by Scottish actor Dougray Scott and presenting vocalists from both sides of the Atlantic, this paean to the art of song featured Guy Barker's consummate, high-spec arrangements lovingly performed by his hand-picked orchestra.From the engulfing beauty of Gretchen Parlato's “Butterfly” and China Moses's touchingly intimate “Walk on By” - the gorgeous, suspended ending of the latter was just one of many heart Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London’s world-famous experimental pub-theatre has secured its future with a move into Shepherd’s Bush old library. Church and council permission were given yesterday for conversion of the library (owned by the Church of England) to be ready for curtain-up in 2011 when the lease on the Bush’s space in O’Neill’s pub, Shepherd’s Bush Green, expires.The theatre established links with the library last year when it set up a script library asking publishers to donate play texts - now running to hundreds of volumes. It’s taken 18 months of negotiating with Hammersmith and Fulham Council to find a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grime music, following its emergence from (mostly) East London clubs and pirate radio stations in the very early 2000s, was archetypical music of urban disaffection. Although it produced characters like the rambunctious Jammer and the oddly melancholic Trim among its legions of young rappers, its fundamental mode is of straight-up combat and threat – of gunplay and postcode rivalries, of “slewing” (killing), “murking” (killing) and “duppying” (go on, have a guess) rivals, of fury at unspecified “haters” – and the jagged rhythms and harsh tones of the music tended to back this up.So as the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Danny Boyle closed 2010’s London Film Festival, as he did 2008’s, and picked up a British Film Institute Fellowship to boot. His 127 Hours had at least one person I know covering her head with her coat during its already infamous auto-amputation-by-penknife scene, though it falls far short of Boyle’s previous triumph with Slumdog Millionaire. This hardly matters at a festival which, while derided by film journalists for its lack of global premieres, again gave Londoners like me two weeks to be lost in cinema.No one will start 127 Hours without knowing its true story. Aron Ralston is a 28-year Read more ...
joe.muggs
Here, we present the exclusive first showing of a new video by the Brighton/London band Belleruche. This clip for “Fuzz Face” is highly arresting, an ingenious and slightly disturbing collision of hi and low-tech, made using thousands of photocopies, and its indicative of a band who are taking some very interesting ideas into the mainstream. But more importantly from theartsdesk's point of view, Belleruche's increasing profile is indicative of a broader cultural shift in the music world.Watch the video for "Fuzz Face" by Belleruche:
Although they have brought rock and hip-hop elements into Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual Dance Umbrella festival is mostly for the dance industry to talk to itself, I’ve come to feel, with a timetable so closely packed that only Londoners, and specifically those in the tight roaring circle of the know, will get to sample much of it. Then you get two such stand-out evenings as Akram Khan’s and Jonathan Burrows’ in town within a week of each other, two of the major talents in the world, who come running at the idea of theatre from opposite ends - the one spectacular and melodramatic, the other offbeat, mischievous stand-up dance-comedy.Given that there is a large border Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ever since his award-winning debut From London to Brighton (2006), Paul Andrew Williams has been an exemplary British filmmaker of sparky, low-budget genre tales. Cherry Tree Lane is Straw Dogs in suburbia, a schematic and brutal home invasion film, full of fearsome but unfulfilled ideas on the terrors waiting at your front door.For the first few minutes, as middle-aged Mike (Tom Butcher) and Christine (Rachel Blake) settle down in their north London semi after work, uncorking the wine and preparing dinner, the atmosphere is indefinably uneasy, the conversation faintly dislocated. Mike’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The keyboard player usually associated with Paul Weller is "Merton" Mick Talbot, who, after leaving mod revival band The Merton Parkas, filled out The Jam’s sound in their twilight days and accompanied Weller’s journey through the Style Council. Andy Crofts of The Moons has made the journey in reverse: currently Weller’s live keyboard player, he also fronts and plays guitar with The Moons, a five-piece he formed in 2007.Fêted by Edwyn Collins, The Moons push some classic British buttons. Crofts’ songs betray a fondness for The Kinks, but there’s a Buzzcocks edge too. Screw up your eyes and Read more ...
fisun.guner
A playful, subversive mood dominates the shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Most of the six proposals, in what is a very strong shortlist, play on notions of British identity, probing themes of heroism, heritage and conquest. The models, which include a cock (the winged variety), a cake and a kid on a rocking horse, were unveiled yesterday by Mayor Boris Johnson. Two winners will be selected next spring, with the first appearing on the Plinth at the end of next year. The six are: 1. Mariele Neudecker It’s Never Too Late and You Can’t Go Back A fictional mountainscape which, when Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Former and, he hopes, future London Mayor Ken Livingstone (looking groovy in a fashion shoot, left) has announced if elected he hopes to create a similar Festival to South By South West, the successful music Expo in Austin, Texas that has launched the careers of numerous Indie bands. Livingstone points out that the Austin city council conservatively estimated its music expo SXSW 2008 to have had an economic impact of around $110million on the Austin economy.Livingstone met musicians and members of the capital’s music industry at the Electric Ballroom, Camden, including Kate Fuller (manager of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched cross-hatching, the directness and the cunningly conceived elements of parody – am I talking about Hockney or Stravinsky? Two great individualists in complete harmony. So why the disconnection? Is it my admittedly ambivalent relationship with Stravinsky’s dazzling score – so easy to admire, so much harder to love – an imbalance in the casting for this Read more ...