singer-songwriters
peter.quinn
After watching so many gigs through a computer screen, it was a joy to hear live music again in familiar haunts – from Ronnie Scott’s and the Southbank to Grand Junction, Paddington – in 2021. It made you appreciate anew not only the high-wire artistry and unfolding musical conversations happening on stage, but also the collective thrill of that shared "in the room" experience.No album more aptly epitomised that sense of musical communication, risk-taking and acute listening than pianist Eliane Elias’s Mirror Mirror, which featured Elias in alternating duets with Chucho Valdés and the late Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's netherworlds for his tales of misfits and misdeeds.So it's no surprise to see The Tiger Lillies bring their unique sensibility to A Christmas Carol, Jacques' song cycle taking us into the head of the miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, paring the tale back to its psychological trauma and its bitter social critique. The Lillies' leader is front and centre, of Read more ...
Harry Freedman
On hearing that I had recently written a book about Leonard Cohen, someone asked me why I thought Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature rather than Cohen. Not being a Nobel prize adjudicator I couldn’t answer the question but I did agree that although Leonard Cohen is best known as a singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen was first and foremost a poet extraordinaire. One of the things that makes listening to him so compelling is that his songs are poems set to music.A hallmark of Leonard Cohen’s musical poetry is its deep spirituality. But unlike most spiritual poetry drawn it Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“How to explain Theresa May?” Grace Petrie muses from the Summerhall stage as she introduces decade-old opener “Farewell To Welfare”. “Well, in 2010, she was as bad as we thought it was going to get.”That is, on the face of it, the problem with being a protest singer: in a just world, your songs should ultimately lose their potency. But the crowd at this twice-rescheduled Edinburgh show have been waiting a long time to hear Petrie’s powerful messages of solidarity across class, race, gender and ability lines and while the names may change, the sentiments are as relevant as ever.Lockdowns Read more ...
peter.quinn
A fascinating song list that juxtaposed originals with musical theatre, pop songs, Brazilian music and more. An inventive, listening band – take a bow Glenn Zaleski (piano), Alexa Tarantino (flute), Marvin Sewell (guitar), Yasushi Nakamura (bass) and Keito Ogawa (percussion) – who supported singer and song in the most empathetic way possible. And a central performance that combined strength and vulnerability, humour and irony, a strikingly beautiful timbre, and an absolute focus on the lyrics and the story.Vocalist, composer and three-time Grammy winner Cécile McLorin Salvant, together with Read more ...
peter.quinn
A celebration of that most extraordinary instrument, the human voice, this year’s edition of Jazz Voice – which gladly welcomed back a live audience and a full-strength EFG London Jazz Festival Orchestra – ranged from music of intimate delicacy to stunning virtuosity. Across two separate sets, eight singularly gifted artists showcased their distinctive storytelling gifts, enveloped by Guy Barker’s richly detailed arrangements.Georgia Cécile kickstarted proceedings in impressive style with “The Month Of May” from her all-original debut album – recently nominated in this year’s Scottish Jazz Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Amid the spume of insults at the close of the song “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle” by Malcolm McLaren’s Rotten-less, end-game version of the Sex Pistols, Rod Stewart is a prime target. Sandwiched between abuse for David Bowie and Elton John, Rod is accused of having “a luggage label tied to his tonsils”. It’s hardly a cutting verbal blow but the point is he’s amongst those the Pistols were supposedly rendering irrelevant. Over four decades later, though, his musical output remains relatively prolific and his albums massive hits. This new one will be. A terrifying thought as it contains many Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s hard to navigate the gap between Ed Sheeran’s ordinary songs and the rarefied air of his career’s stellar orbit, which he now breathes with Adele and Chris Martin - the rump aristos of a once ruling rock culture. The image of him as a modern troubadour alone with his guitar at Wembley Stadium in 2015 symbolises both his admirable personal achievement, and something vacant at singer-songwriting’s pop summit. This fourth solo album arrives in the wake of wedding his childhood friend Cherry Seaborn in 2019, and her having their child the next year, events which understandably dominate =. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Like a more genuinely earthed Springsteen, Billy Bragg’s middle-aged, Dorset years have offered somewhat self-conscious wisdom and awareness of his singer-songwriter status. He’s grown up and into himself, diligently expanding both his craft and ideals. Like his near contemporary Elvis Costello, he has also found musical comfort in Americana and country-soul, with accompanying, initially disorientating American accent.The Million Things That Never Happened was additionally inspired by the recent sharp fear, as successive tours were cancelled, that Covid might permanently decimate his working Read more ...
Liz Thomson
A “sonic photograph” is how Tori Amos describes her sixteenth album, recorded at her home in Cornwall during the spring and summer of Britain’s third lockdown, when, travel, her usual mode of coping with “troubling things”, was not an option. Living in Bude, with her English husband Mark Hawley, their daughter and her partner, she had no option but to “sit with myself and accept where I was”. “Swim to New York State” is her song of escape, a languorous opening with beautiful sonorities.For some musicians, a break from the gypsy life was, at least for a time, a novelty. For Amos, the third Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lana Del Rey’s eighth album would tell her story “and pretty much nothing else”, she teased, as her planned, near instant follow-up to Chemtrails Over the Country Club slipped back from spring to autumn. Del Rey has often claimed autobiography at the heart of her artful glamour, flesh and blood behind the celluloid poise, the ad man’s daughter, metaphysics student and Williamsburg singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant still writing intently beneath the film star veneer.Chemtrails’ masterful opener “White Dress” certainly turned a teenage waitress job into a transcendently glowing snapshot of an Read more ...
Liz Thomson
I always thought those celebrity duets albums, recorded across the miles – or sometimes with someone who had long since passed to the great arena in the sky – were generally fraudulent, always cheesy and sometimes mawkish. Now Covid and 18 months of forced separation have legitimised them, and all sorts of other things to boot.Hearing about Elton’s new album in the abstract I’d hoped it would be the singer unplugged, sitting in his living room at the piano and singing into a posh recording device. An appealing idea. And having now listened several times to The Lockdown Sessions I can’t help Read more ...