New Music Reviews
Wayne Shorter Quartet, BarbicanSunday, 09 October 2011
Wayne Shorter's current band do strange things with time - it seems to stretch and bend like in some subatomic experiment featuring rogue neutrinos. Their nifty time signatures would fuse any computer. The nature of the music itself seems outside time, both echoing that modern jazz annus mirabilis 1959 and being futuristic at the same time. Read more...
|
Snoop Dogg, O2 ArenaSaturday, 08 October 2011
In the 19 years of his million-selling gangsta-bragging pimp-shizzling hip-hop-rapping career, the man born Calvin Cordozar Broadus, Jr has gone to some lengths to inform us that his name is, in fact, Snoop Dogg. Read more... |
Nerina Pallot, Shepherds Bush EmpireFriday, 07 October 2011
It’s been a long-standing source of surprise to me how Nerina Pallot continues to operate a whisker under the radar. From the get-go, 10 years back, she’s had the voice, songs and looks to be a star. Maybe a decade ago was the wrong time for her. But now, with her musical style residing somewhere between Laura Marling and Adele, surely she’s perfect for today’s market. The critics sure think so. Read more... |
Frost, The LexingtonThursday, 06 October 2011
The Lexington on Pentonville Road is a pub with an easy-going Deep South style. The main bar looks like the sort of place where cattle barons might relax with basque-clad floozies after a hard week kicking homesteaders off their land. Instead, however, the place has a smattering of people, mostly in their twenties, a number with large sideburns and Stooges T-shirts, listening to a New Zealander called Delaney Davidson playing solo blues. Read more... |
Tony Bennett, London PalladiumTuesday, 04 October 2011
Tony Bennett receives a standing ovation just for walking on stage. His band arrive first, then Bennett in loose black suit, white shirt, black tie (not bow), and red handkerchief in breast pocket. He saunters into a spotlight stage right. It’s enough. He laps it up. There’s a real sense of occasion. The worry is that, at 85, he will not be able to deliver, that his voice will be a feeble shadow of its former self. Read more... |
Imperial Tiger Orchestra, Boston DomeMonday, 03 October 2011
There’s more than one way to reinterpret or simply embrace the extraordinary wealth of Ethiopian music that Francis Falceto has given us with the still growing Ethiopiques CD series of 1970s Ethio-jazz (as the style has been inadequately labelled). For example, Dub Colossus were seduced by the dissimulating aspect of the music that they felt it shared with dub reggae. And the Heliocentrics embraced its “otherness” over which they imposed their own art-school sensibility. Read more... |
Ecstatic Journey, BarbicanThursday, 29 September 2011
The final night of the Barbican’s adventurous if slightly awkwardly named Transcender season was a Sufi safari, with a tapas selection of four very different artists from assorted Islamic countries giving a taste of their music. Read more... |
Rock of Ages the Musical, Shaftesbury TheatreWednesday, 28 September 2011
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, all women were dressed by Frederick's of Hollywood and all men were a cross between David Lee Roth and Jon Bon Jovi. The Eighties-set Rock of Ages is so outlandish, it might as well be set on another planet. Instead, the all-singing, all-dancing action centres on a bar along LA’s Sunset Boulevard. Read more... |
The Good The Bad/ The Cut Outs/ Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club, Madame JoJo'sTuesday, 27 September 2011
There can't be many excuses for a back-up band at a triple bill, but back it up they did at last night's The Good The Bad album launch at Madame Jojo's. Way up. Read more... |
Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, BarbicanSunday, 25 September 2011
Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Album: Architects - The Sky, The Earth & All Between
Brighton metallers Architects have weathered through various tribulations in their almost twenty-year career. Formed by twins Dan and Tom Searle,...
Jopy/Lemonsuckr/King of May, Green Door Store, Brighton revi...
There’s something exhilarating about seeing bands right at the very, very dawn of their careers. Will they be headlining the Houston Astrodome in...
Gromes, Hallé, Chauhan, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review...
A cello concerto received its UK premiere in Manchester last night – almost 100 years after it was written. It’s by Maria Herz, a German-Jewish...
Bergerac, U&Drama review - the Jersey 'tec is born...
They stopped making the BBC’s original Bergerac in 1991, so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature. John Nettles became...
A Knock on the Roof, Royal Court review - poignant account o...
The war in Gaza has been going since 7 October 2023 – that’s about 15 months. But it’s strangely absent from British stages...
The Last Showgirl review - Pamela Anderson stars as a middle...
Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is a dancer. She’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle, an outdated Las Vegas show that’s full of “breasts, rhinestones and joy”,...
The Score, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - curious beast of...
Why is it so hard to write a decent play about Bach? Maybe, in part, because there are no words...
Album: Abel Selaocoe - Hymns of Bantu
The musician Abel Selaocoe reaches out to the ancestors, African and European, continuing a journey that spans continents and centuries, an...
The Ferryman, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin review - Jez Butterwort...
Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog gothic” with very real...