New music
Kieron Tyler
Axis: Bold As Love, the second album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, was released in the UK during the first week of December 1967. In America, it came out in January 1968. Now, it is the subject of a multi-disc box set titled Bold As Love.Why this puzzling new title – “Bold as Love” is the track closing the album – has been chosen is unknown. No reason for losing the word “Axis” is given in the accompanying book, or in the promotional material: which describes this as a “box set containing [the] landmark 1967 album Axis: Bold As Love.”
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Jonathan Geddes
When Yard Act headlined the O2 Academy in Glasgow back in 2023, they might have thought returning there as a support act would indicate a career that had taken a wrong turn. That’s where they found themselves on this jaunt with the Hives, though the reality was less a reflection of their status as a band and simply that what was announced as an arena tour for the Swedish garage rockers had been downgraded to a more modest setting. Not that the Leeds quartet seemed affected by it. Singer James Smith was typically verbose as ever, praising his band, their music and Glasgow itself before Read more ...
peter.quinn
Named after and dedicated to his wife, filmmaker and director Shiraz Fradi, Tunisian vocalist and oud maestro Dhafer Youssef's first album as leader on the ACT label is a thing of great beauty.Youssef leads a dynamic ensemble featuring pianist Daniel García, trumpeter Mario Rom, bassist Swaéli Mbappé, and drummer Tao Ehrlich. Guitarist Nguyên Lê joins as a special guest on four tracks, enriching the textural palette with his distinctive guitar work and sound design. The album's delicate, chamber jazz-inspired aesthetic creates an intimate space that showcases the depth and versatility of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Even people who are unfamiliar with Kneecap’s sharp but raucous music may well be aware of the legal issues that have beset the Irish-English bilingual rappers over the last eighteen months. As support for the oppressed people of Palestine has caused them no end of grief in the UK, the USA and beyond.Fortunately, this has done nothing to tame this mouthy and opinionated trio, and with a partisan crowd which included many who loudly proclaimed themselves to be part of Birmingham’s Irish community, they dedicated “Get Your Brits Out” to “all the paedophiles in the Royal Family”. Similarly, Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
According to legend, Glasgow can be a tough place for a support band a crowd do not warm to. Therefore brotherly duo Faux Real were perhaps taking a risk when they elected to bound into the audience during the first number in their Wet Leg support slot. It was greeted with mostly puzzlement from early attendees, but when they repeated the trick 30 minutes later - finding space and sprinting towards each other before jumping into the air with high kicks - the reaction was much more enthusiastic. The pair had mixed up synth-heavy pop of varying quality with relentless, hard working Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Detroit musician, Blue Note artist and expressive saxophonist Dave McMurray’s fourth album for the label, I Love Life Even When I’m Hurting, sets out to celebrate his home town, and his own life, and life in general. Warren Zevon once said wisely: “Enjoy every sandwich.” McMurray would likely enjoy the whole loaf. The phrase “I love Life Even When I’m Hurting” was seeded and conceived in the wake of a lonely death of a friend who had succumbed in body and spirit to a long, isolating illness. Out of that pain comes the fuel of resilience – a fuel that ignites his music and sax-playing too.“Man Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jimmy Cliff (b 1948) is one of Jamaican music’s biggest names. Raised in the countryside, he went to Kingston in his teens and persuaded record shop owner Leslie Kong to record him. The resulting song, “Hurricane Hattie”, was the first of a string of local hits but in the late Sixties he moved to London and, working with Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, his songs such as “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” and “Vietnam”, the latter a favourite of Bob Dylan, reached a far wider audience, becoming hits in Europe.In 1972 Cliff played the lead role in the film The Harder They Come, about a Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rufus Wainwright has long expressed his admiration for “pop music with an operatic sensibility, the profane with the divine”, inspired by The Unknown Kurt Weill and Stratas Sings Weill, the albums recorded by Greek-Canadian soprano Theresa Stratus whose final performance at the Met thirty years ago was as Jenny in Brecht-Weill’s opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Recorded live with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra under the baton of Chris Walden, who is also responsible for the arrangements, I’m a Stranger Here Myself was recorded live in March 2024 at the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Mrs Bluebird” is one of the great singles. Released in May 1968, it is airy yet lush. The filigreed harmony vocals are like velvet, the rhythm is insistent but soft. Overall, there is a sense of distance; that what’s heard is not quite within reach. When a guitar solo comes, it is sharp but muted. This is archetypal American harmony pop – but with a distinct freeze-dried character.It was the top side of the third single by Eternity’s Children, and made 69 in Billboard’s singles chart. It got to 54 in the Cash Box ranking. A UK release of “Mrs Bluebird” suggested there was chance this Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It’s not often that a band manages to get a Birmingham crowd dancing from the front of the stage to the back of the hall. However, Lambrini Girls achieved this feat on Saturday evening – from the very first bars of their set until they finally exited the stage after an encore of the lairy “Big Dick Energy”.It’s not even as if Phoebe Lunny and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez have had a great deal of time to build their audience either. Lambrini Girls only formed in 2019 but they’ve certainly grabbed the zeitgeist by the short and curlies in that time and in doing so have attracted a seriously diverse Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Out of the hundreds of gigs, surprises and collaborations that make up the EFG London Jazz Festival (LJF), this review focuses on four concerts fusing jazz with world music. They are the Korean extravaganza of Dionysus Robot (pictured) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall; British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed’s melding of jazz, Middle Eastern elements and Bahraini history at Ronnie Scott’s; a late-career turn from Ethio-jazz giant Mulatu Astatke at the subterranean Here at Outernet; and the festival’s closing weekend ‘takeover’ by the Aga Khan Master Musicians at the Royal Festival Hall.Won Il, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Noura Mint Seymali is possessed of the most extraordinary voice; its very fabric is electrifying, its reach, power and depth cut from an entirely different cloth to the rest of us. Maybe it’s a cloth of gold. And then there is her axe-hero husband Jeich Ould Chighaly’s shapeshifting, inventive guitar work, its distorted fizz and fuzz redolent of Seventies Glam and heavy rock melded into Mauritanian desert blues – and just as addictive. The guitar lines twist, smoulder, spark and melt like solder, with the traditional andine acoustic harp that Noura Mint plays and uses to define her music’s Read more ...