New York
Markie Robson-Scott
The High Line Park on the far west side of Manhattan, built on an old elevated train track, is a unique combination of everything New Yorkers love - fabulous views, a piece of history, a traffic-free zone (no dogs, skateboards or bicycles), unusual plantings, and the chance to gawp at people and real estate. And with the recent opening of its second section, there’s even more space to see and be seen in."That’s awesome. That’s the kitchen right there," says a young man, peering enthusiastically into a new apartment building situated right beside the raised walkway.
The High Line’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was early in 1949. South Pacific, the follow-up to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s huge wartime hit Carousel, had entered the try-out phase before hitting New York. Late one night the production team were deep in one of those 11th-hour how-do-we-make-it-better meetings that always precede the launch of a new musical. Eventually the composer Richard Rodgers cut to the chase. “Fellas,” he said, “this show is perfect. Let’s go to bed.”For all its perfection, for all the familiarity of “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” and “There’s Nothin’ Like a Dame”, only a few flocking to South Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
One thing became clearer to me last night – just how much Steve Reich has borrowed from world music in his compositions – we had the flamenco-tinged Clapping, Electric Counterpoint, using Central African guitar lines, and Music for 18 Musicians, a mix of West African rhythms, Indonesian gamelan and other elements. It was also clear how much a sold-out late-night Prom audience had taken this music to their hearts, nearly 40 years after some of it was written. It still sounds fresh and, rather than being mindlessly repetitive, most of it shimmers away. Like an endless. Like an endless Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Cerebral Ballzy’s debut album is over in a good deal less than half an hour. Would that American R&B and hip-hop bands took a cue here rather than filling their CDs with 80 minutes of skits and filler, as if that offered more value for money. Not that Cerebral Ballzy are an American R&B or hip-hop outfit. They are, instead, a New York hardcore punk quintet whose name is designed to make anyone who hears it ask, “Who on earth is this?”Unlike some of their peers – notably the wonderful Deathset – Cerebral Ballzy make no attempt to update raw ballistic walls of guitar with new Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Already shouldering the new Harry Potter off the top of the US box-office charts, this latest arrival from Marvel Studios harks back to a simpler America where the hero wraps himself in the stars and stripes and the bad guys speak with ridiculous German accents. It’s 1941, the Nazis are trampling Western civilisation underfoot, and gung-ho American kids are flocking to join up.But it’s bad news for 98lb weakling Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a rickety, asthmatic youth from Brooklyn who’s desperate to pull on an army uniform and head for war-torn Europe, but hasn’t a hope of passing a medical Read more ...
bruce.dessau
When They Might Be Giants first appeared in the 1980s it became rock critic shorthand to describe them as bouncy, bushy-tailed pop oddballs. What is amazing is that nearly three decades on that description still applies perfectly to the fiftysomething whipsmart duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh. On Join Us they never seem jaded or cynical or going through the motions, just joyous and delightful and as bouncy as ever.On their 15th studio album, a return to wiggy adult songs after a hiatus making wiggy music for children, they are still having a great time larking about with language, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nat Baldwin’s alt cred is impeccable. Not only is he a former bassist for Brooklyn’s über-cool Dirty Projectors, he’s also responsible for a string of releases that began with 2003’s free jazz set Solo Contrabass. Also prepared to take a stroll with the less cool, he’s been heard on a TV ad for Orange mobile phones, the one with the barefoot, ladder-descending lady. Although People Changes worms intimately in, it’s hard to detect a singular voice. Formerly in thrall to Anthony Braxton, he’s now trying on Arthur Russell.Opening People Changes with a faithful cover of Russell’s “A Little Lost” Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Kew the Music - the umbrella name for a series of outdoor concerts - did not look promising upon first arrival and, indeed, for quite some time afterwards. It was clear as soon as I walked through the gates that this was a day out for monied London, not the usual gig environment. Before the stage, in front of Kew Gardens' Victorian Temperate House, a large section of grass had been sealed off for those with pre-booked picnicking space and everywhere about people sat with hampers swigging half bottles of Veuve Clicquot and using cocktail sticks to pluck exotic varities of marinated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.Kevin Asch's directorial debut, which is based on the true story of a team of Hasidic smugglers who imported a million Ecstasy tablets from Amsterdam to the USA in 1998-99, has potential in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway may not be “just for gays any more”, as the event's unstoppably charming and funny compere Neil Patrick Harris noted in his song-and-dance opening to the 2011 Tony Awards, held last night in New York to honour that city's theatre season just gone. But it’s still very much about the Brits: some habits never die.The truism was borne out yet again at a ceremony that saw Mark Rylance pick up an additional Tony and the National Theatre’s War Horse win in every category (five) in which it was nominated, including Best Play and Best Director for Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris. For Read more ...
joe.muggs
This series of albums is the sound of one of the most epochally important producers in soul and dance music history reworking his magic. The closest analogy I can think of that non-dance music fans would appreciate is The Beatles' Love album in which George Martin went back to the master tapes and not so much remixed as recreated their work, but there is none of the whiff of superfluous tinkering here that that project had.Tom Moulton was one of the men who invented the 12-inch remix – not simply extending a song, but remaking it from the ground up with entirely new production styles Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures. The Kinetoscope was a raw instrument indeed, as the pictures could be seen through a peephole by one viewer at a time. It was the French Lumière Read more ...