New York
Ellie Porter
Nebraska-born singer-songwriter Josh Rouse made his name in Nashville and has spent the past 15 years living in Spain, and his latest offering gathers together elements of both sides of the Atlantic in a meandering, twinkling collection of Christmas songs.The Holiday Sounds of Josh Rouse is a pretty slight affair, clocking in at just over half an hour, filled with dreamy, laidback vocals, jazzy elements and a dash of retro charm. It's pleasant enough but, unfortunately, the first handful of tracks really noodle along, pianos a-tinkling everywhere, which means the album takes much too Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Before the days of stardom on Jay-Z and Kanye’s scale, before Brooklyn became a millionaire’s playground, Gang Starr were deeply influential in hip hop and became pioneers of jazz rap. However, Guru disassociated himself from long-term partner DJ Premier as far back as 2006 and yet here we are, nine years after his death and 16 years after their last album together listening to the duo in stereo. A long legal battle resulted in some of Guru’s old tapes featuring around 30 unreleased rhymes being given to his family, allowing DJ Premier the opportunity to "retrofit" melodies and samples around Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eric Coates: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)One reason to love Eric Coates and his music is discovering that his compositional routine involved waiting “until he was properly dressed in the morning, complete with tie and Harris Tweed coat, and, perhaps, a Turkish cigarette.” Coates came from a Nottingham mining village, taking violin lessons from a pupil of Joachim and studying musical theory with a Nottingham academic. He played in Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, concentrating on composition after being fired for missing too many rehearsals. Wood’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Of all the groups you probably wouldn’t want to be part of, surely the hyper-adrenalised, hardscrabble populace of The Wolf of Wall Street, the Jordan Belfort memoir made into an amphetamine rush of a film by Martin Scorsese, must rank near the very top. And yet here, against expectation, is an immersive theatre adaptation of the non-fiction memoirs that spawned the 2013 movie. What’s more, it is being staged in a capacious address located a coke-fuelled trot away from London’s City equivalent of the do-or-die New York milieu from which Belfort has since emerged post-imprisonment as some Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This week, one of the finest gems in the entire Hendrix catalogue finally sees the light of day in its full unedited glory – Songs for Groovy Children comprises all four sets from the Band of Gypsys New Year’s Eve 1969-70 residency at the Fillmore East in New York City.Originally recorded to free up Hendrix from a contract he’d signed earlier in his career, while transitioning from the R&B circuit towards his first psychedelic flowering, Band of Gypsys, released in April 1970 was the only full live album he ever sanctioned under his own name. It is one of rock’s great live albums. An Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to a powerful cast and crisp direction from Brian Kirk (Game of Thrones, Luther), 21 Bridges drives home its story of good cops, bad cops and a Big Apple rotten to the core with bulldozing force. Centre stage is Chadwick Boseman as Andre Davis, a detective renowned for showing bad guys no mercy. His record of shooting an alarming tally of felons has earned him a grilling by Internal Affairs, but Cool Hand Andre insists every killing was justified. Like his ailing old mother tells him, “you got to look the devil in the eye.”The son of a dedicated policeman killed in the line of duty, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
By the time Vampire Weekend reached Birmingham on their latest UK jaunt, they had unfortunately managed to mislay their support band, the colourful Songhoy Blues. This was a great shame, as the Malians would surely have added a bit of colour to the early part of an evening that would most certainly have benefitted from a bit of light and shade. Instead, the O2 Academy was treated to an extensive recording of baroque chamber music, piped through the PA system, that felt like it would never end.However, end it thankfully did and onto the stage bounced Ezra Keonig, dressed in white trousers and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brittany (Jillian Bell) is the unhappily overweight life of the party, numbing her lonely life with booze and acerbic one-liners as she nears 30. Bad medical news makes her obsessively turn to running, eventually entering the New York marathon, with side-effects include an ambiguous romance with slobby fellow house-sitter Jern (Utkarsh Amdudkar).Playwright Paul Downs Callaizzo’s film debut follows in the path of countless more obvious romcoms and ugly duckling tales in showing her redemption, while artfully complicating their clichés. Based loosely on his friend Brittany O’Neill’s jogging Read more ...
Liz Thomson
For visitors to New York, it’s all about Manhattan, its 23 square miles of skyscraper-encrusted granite instantly familiar, its many landmarks – enshrined in movies and music – must-sees on the itinerary of first-time tourists. The other four New York City boroughs? Well, the journey to and from the airport takes you through at least one of them, which is as far as many people get to visiting them.Manhattan is the most densely populated of course, Staten Island the least, and the most rural. Queens is the largest geographically and the most ethnically diverse borough in the entire Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dolly Wells’ directorial debut employs her best friend Emily Mortimer as reclusive writer Julia Price, having paired up previously in a TV satire of their professionally uneven relationship, Doll and Em. Mortimer cameos this time, as posh twentysomething slacker Lilian (Grace Van Patten) comes to stay at her Brooklyn brownstone and, undeterred by never having opened a Price book or watched a documentary, surreptitiously begins a film about her enigmatic host.Frosty Julia and the tenant she calls a “lazy, entitled oaf” gradually soften each other’s edges. In a conceit happily forced on Wells Read more ...
David Nice
She was recording Carmen in Paris, and the Radio France auditorium was packed with the press, asking such dazzling questions as "have you been up the Eiffel Tower yet?" and "what do you think of the French men?". I thought, given the statuesque approach, it might be best to wonder if there was a nobility in the characterisation. Jessye Norman refined it to "dignity" and enlarged graciously on that (I can no longer find the transcript or the printed feature). The end result in Seiji Ozawa's Philips recording was far from the expected improbability. The soprano could always float a line, and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...