New Music Reviews
Sun Ra Arkestra, Café OtoSunday, 25 August 2013
Dalston was the place on Friday night, as the Sun Ra Arkestra put on a trademark display of Afro-jazz excellence in the intimate surrounds of Café Oto. Jazz pioneer Sun Ra might have been dead since 1993, but his influential big band is very much alive and capable of puffing their way through marathon sets. Read more... |
How To Be A World Music Star, BBC FourSaturday, 24 August 2013
This was a somewhat nostalgic look at the rise of “World Music” as a genre, starting in the Eighties when the term was first used, essentially as a marketing tool. As the ever ebullient Andy Kershaw put it, the problem was where in record stores “you could put a choir of Bulgarian tractor drivers next to some hot shot guitar slinger from Guinea-Bissau". Read more... |
Prom 54: World RoutesFriday, 23 August 2013
Why are the Malians always punching way above their weight in music? There may be some historical reasons. The French always were more welcoming to the culture of their empire than the Brits (and more used to foreign-language music), while Paris became a great centre of West African music, from where it was disseminated over Europe. Read more... |
Julia Holter, Cecil Sharp HouseWednesday, 21 August 2013
Imagine an aural swoon of a song like a mermaid’s sigh preceding one which introduces Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals to free-jazz skronk. After that, Laurie Anderson pops along to take on the soft soul of the early Seventies Isley Brothers. An evening with Julia Holter encompasses all of that, yet knits it all together gracefully to make a whole like nothing else. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: R Stevie Moore, Foxy R&B, Looking Good, A Certain RatioSunday, 18 August 2013
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Crazy About One Direction, Channel 4Friday, 16 August 2013
Sandra, 14, has worked out what it will be like if she marries One Direction’s Harry Styles. “His morning voice would be amazing,” she says, thinking forward to when the first thing she hears each day is the croak with which he greets the morning and her. Pop groups with fans are nothing new, and with them come ranks of the obsessive. Read more... |
Prom 40: 6 Music Prom, The Stranglers, Laura Marling, London SinfoniettaTuesday, 13 August 2013
“That was a bit of a dog’s breakfast,” said the guy in the row behind. Yes, but then the said canine repast can also no doubt be nutritious and delicious, for dogs anyway. The most dogs-breakfasty (in the bad sense) moment was right at the end, when the Stranglers played their greatest song “Golden Brown”, their immortal chanson to a girl and heroin. Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Eddie Noack, The Dictators, The Allman Brothers, Clifton ChenierSunday, 11 August 2013
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Camp Bestival 2013, Lulworth Castle, DorsetThursday, 08 August 2013
Camp Bestival is overrun with children, even the night is alive with them. Where WOMAD is full of old hippies, Camp Bestival is full of raver-parents who refuse to stop shaking a party limb, even if they must haul little Finlay around on an exotic, duvet-filled gurney to do so. It creates a unique atmosphere, a bit bourgeois but just the right amount of wild, inner children meeting actual children to wobble about to Benga basslines. Read more... |
CD: Mike Gibbs + TWELVE play Gil EvansMonday, 05 August 2013
Think of the ingredients you look for in a great jazz record – inspired, exploratory improv, the complete reinvention of standards, ear-catching arrangements, sonorities you've never heard before – and this new big band recording from Mike Gibbs delivers them all. By the bucketload. Read more... |
R Stevie Moore: Personal Appeal
Eddie Noack: Psycho – The K-Ark and Allstar Recordings 1962–69Pages
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