New music
peter.quinn
Recorded in 2019, released in 2020, and winner of Album of the Year at the 2021 Parliamentary Jazz Awards, it was a delight to finally witness the launch of Callum Au and Claire Martin’s spectacular album of jazz standards and American Songbook classics, Songs and Stories, albeit three years later than planned.Written by Au especially for this concert, the swirling, shape-shifting counterpoint of orchestral opener “Murmurations” featured the first of a number of towering solos from saxist Nadim Teimoori (playing soprano here), with string harmonics and a tintinnabulating celeste emerging out Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
I can’t help enjoying the continuing elevation of the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) to national monument status in Canada. A park or a square here (Montreal), a boulevard there (Mississauga), a school, a concert hall, a statue, a commemorative one-dollar coin. Now Barry Avrich’s 2021 documentary Oscar Peterson: Black + White, which is being released on DVD.It tells Peterson's story well. A wide range of archival footage, notably several interviews with the pianist, has been trawled, carefully assembled, and juxtaposed with new interviews and specially commissioned Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
At some point in 1979 a duo called The Door and the Window are playing a London Musician’s Collective show in a large brick building along the road from Cecil Sharp House in Camden. One of them has a synthesiser, probably a WASP. The other has tape recorders and a guitar. The inscrutable noise made features clanks, grinding and drones.On a Saturday night in either 1979 or 1980 a band called Exhibit “A” are playing Covent Garden youth club The Central London Youth Project. It’s in a basement along Shelton Street, so is usually called “The Basement.” They’re young, and deal in a jagged yet Read more ...
Helen Wallace
2023 is surely the year the performing arts reach peak "immersive", a word endangered by its own ubiquity. From Punchdrunk’s Burnt City to Danny Boyle’s The Matrix we are promised a swallowing-up by art. Kings Cross is the location for two visual and aural initiatives: David Hockney’s 3D Bigger & Closer at the Lightroom, and Sound Unwrapped at Kings Place, a year-long series of intimate, immersive events kindled by live performance.The roots of the series are two-fold: firstly, the generous offer (from German company d&baudiotechnik) of a 360 degree, 25-speaker Soundscape system Read more ...
Guy Oddy
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, Robin Dallaway was one of the prime movers behind both dada punks the Cravats and art-pop weirdos the Very Things. His new outfit, Silverlake are ploughing a distinctly different furrow though – one that has more in common with Kylie’s more sophisticated disco tunes and dreamy trip hop grooves than anything of his previous outings in fact.Drawing from a similar well as Saint Etienne, when they are at their best, Jim Rockford’s Smile brings psychedelic soul, disco and luscious poppy sounds into play and is far more concerned with encouraging hips Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Rock'n'roll rejuvenators, Eurovision winners with more of their songs streamed online than there are people in the world, the glammy young Roman rockers have opened for The Stones in Las Vegas, delivered a city-stopping sold-out show at Rome’s historic Circus Maximus and been hailed as “America’s New Favorite Rock Band,” in the Los Angeles Times. They recorded a lovely interpretation of Elvis’s late-Sixties hit “If I Can Dream” for Baz Luhrmann last summer, and their raucous, gritty, upbeat and confrontational third album, emerging from that audience explosion of the past year or two, is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
Despite the silly name, the pigtails, the propensity for cutesy posing with ice cream and candy, and of course the title Bubblegum all playing with ingenue tropes, Biig Piig – or Jessica Smyth – is a serious proposition. Irish born, partly Spanish raised, now resident in both London and LA, she’s been in the public eye since her songs started clocking up millions of streams in her late teens, and she seems to have quite a good grasp of where she’s going.Linking with Lava La Rue’s NiNE8 multimedia collective, she’s taken her own sweet time in finding her voice and identity and is only now, at Read more ...
mark.kidel
John Cale has always walked a cutting-edge. At 80, he is still making music that stretches the mind. He is accompanied on his most recent album by a number of talented and original ground-breakers from both sides of the pond – from the eccentric and pure voice of Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood) to the Stockhausen-flavoured explorations of Actress, the psychedelic anarchy of Animal Collective to the avant-pop sweetness of Tei Shi.Cale was one of the founders of The Velvet Underground, but he soon established himself as an independent force on the fertile fringes of classically-tinged rock, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After a few listens, the second album from Evan Uschenko’s musical alter-ego Ghost Woman increasingly resembles something which could have emerged from the early Eighties Los Angeles scene dubbed the "Paisley Underground". However, this does not seem to be what Canada’s Uschenko is aiming for.The promotional text for Anne, If on the label’s website is peppered with different references: the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Nuggets compilation, a 12-string guitar evoking The Byrds, Love, and Jefferson Airplane, Safe As Milk-era Captain Beefheart, Shel Talmy's Sixties productions for Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A first encounter with Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers is unforgettable. Their summer 1970 recordings are so far out they at first seem unlistenable. Persistence pays though and the ear tunes in. It becomes clear this band swallowed the Captain Beefheart playbook and regurgitated it after applying a severe dose of the cut-up technique.Despite sending a letter which generated the interest of Beefheart fan John Peel, who wanted to add them to the roster of his Dandelion Records label, Rustic Hinge and Co were close-to unnoticed. There was a January 1971 mention in the underground Read more ...
Cheri Amour
As second-wave feminism vouched in the late 1960s, the personal is political. For Billy Nomates, the moniker of Sleaford Mods-approved musician Tor Maries, that sentiment is rife.Entrenched in her eponymously titled debut in 2020, the songwriter tapped into flailing societal structures, dead-end jobs in dead-end towns and the dichotomy of the Fat White Man. Despite touching on such evocative and self-assured issues, Billy Nomates came to being after a period of intense instability.Leaving the West Country with a relationship and a job in tow, Maries set up her seemingly picture-perfect life Read more ...
Guy Oddy
What do power-poppers do when they get older and return to the fray after an eight-year lay-off? If they’re the Subways, they recruit a new drummer, invest in a synthesiser and add some alt-rock sounds to their repertoire.That said, plenty else has also been going on with the Subways during their hiatus. In addition to Camille Phillips replacing original drummer, Josh Morgan, lead vocalist and guitarist, Billy Lunn has studied for an English degree at Cambridge University, embraced his bisexuality and had to deal with various personal mental health issues – never mind having to negotiate the Read more ...