soul music
Sebastian Scotney
“There’s a rhythm in the air around Memphis, there always has been,” Carl Perkins once said. "I don't know what it is, but it's magic." The city on the Mississippi lives up to its musical heritage with performance venues aplenty, and a host of museums dealing with its illustrious musical past: there's Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion with all its garish gold lamé costumes, cars and even private jets; Sun Studios is now a museum; and there is a Stax Museum, a Blues Museum and the much-praised Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum.Memphis-born music journalist, filmmaker and author Robert Gordon has Read more ...
Barney Harsent
It can be hard to put distance between an artist and their behaviour. Woody Allen films present a problem for some, while I, for one, will never see Tommy Robinson’s impressionist landscapes in the same light again. One rock musician who recently came under scrutiny is The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, after calling the #metoo phenomenon “obnoxious” and “salacious crap”, before adding, of his extra marital activity, “Come on, men are men,” and “there have been times when I’ve hurt her [his wife] and that’s upset me.” Sending hugs, Rog, sending hugs. His rejection of the zeitgeist also Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Watching this band in action is a treat. They gel absolutely and play off one another in a manner that’s easy and mellow, yet also sparks by occasionally teetering on the edge of their virtuosic abilities. The songs played throughout the evening at Brighton Festival are protest classics and other socially aware fare, but the group’s leader-arrangers, singer Carleen Anderson and keyboard player Nikki Yeoh, have turned them, via jazz, into almost completely new pieces of music.Take an extended jam that combines “Oh, Freedom”, the anti-slavery spiritual made famous by activist-folk singer Odetta Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hosted by Jazz FM presenters Chris Philips and Jez Nelson on UNESCO’s International Jazz Day, rising stars and international icons were honoured at the fifth Jazz FM Awards on Monday night.A Grammy winner earlier this year for her remarkable 2CD set Dreams and Daggers, watching Cécile McLorin Salvant silence a capacity crowd at Shoreditch Town Hall with her vivdly dramatic reading of “The Peacocks (A Timeless Place)”, accompanied by regular pianist Aaron Diehl, was one of the evening’s standout moments. It followed her acceptance of International Jazz Artist of the Year.Sax player Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The opening couplet on Plan B’s new album runs thus: “What the hell have I got to be grateful for?/Can’t be the money as I wasn’t trying to make no more.” One appealing aspect of singer-actor-MC Ben Drew is that he’s spiky, emanating a certain rage. It’s good to see that, after six years away, it’s still there. However, Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose, is no Ill Manors, Drew’s 2012 film/album polemic about underclass Britain; instead, steeped in old soul and imaginative production, this is a rip-roaring 21st century pop album, and a very good one.Where Plan B’s last album in this vein, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It is, perhaps, a tale that suffers from overfamiliarity. Tina Turner’s rags-to-riches story – from humble beginnings as little Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her discovery, reinvention and sickening abuse by husband and manager Ike Turner, and finally her rebirth as a solo rock'n'roll star – is the stuff of showbiz legend. This new glossy but pedestrian West End musical adds little to the established narrative.The structure doesn’t help. Starting at the very beginning and racing through the years, there’s only time for broad-brushstrokes storytelling and one-note supporting Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Joan Wasser – aka Joan as Police Woman – is known as a sophisticated songwriter and a pretty groovy person. But most of all it’s her gorgeously warm voice that's earned her a cult following. Over seven albums her angst-ridden vocals have explored heartache and compulsion with a blend of soul and indie-rock. Damned Devotion, her latest LP, has been particularly well received, earning mainly four-star reviews. Her UK tour starts next week in Glasgow.Wasser was not always a singer. She started off her musical career playing violin in various youth orchestras, and later with the Boston University Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was 2011 when Gregory Porter made his first London appearances at Pizza Express in Dean Street. That club has a capacity just over 100, and yet it only seems like yesterday. Last night that same honeyed voice was filling the cavernous 5,272-seater Royal Albert Hall, on the first of 14 UK dates in big halls, with repertoire mostly associated with Nat King Cole, backed by his regular quartet, but also by the 70-piece London Studio Orchestra playing opulent arrangements by Vince Mendoza.Back in 2011, the buzz about the uniqueness of Porter’s voice was only just starting. The canny director of Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“That colourful character Zoot Money has recently been writing at length in support of psychedelic music. Now, what’s the score Zoot, has it got a contribution to make to the scene?” It’s 14 January 1967 and BBC presenter Brian Matthew is putting his guest on the spot.“I think so,” responds Money. “It’s an art form. Everything has to be broken open and seen in as many different ways as possible. I suppose that’s why we’re here, to break it open and find out what’s inside, that it was there all the time.”Six months later, Money announced the break-up of his group the Big Roll Band and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Britain, 1965 began with The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” at the top of the single’s chart. In December, the year bowed out with their double A-side “Day Tripper” / “We can Work it Out” in the same position. But 1965 was not just about The Beatles.According to the writer Jon Savage, “1965 was the year of Dylan, folk-rock and protest, and the year when the post-beat bohemian subculture took over from traditional showbiz as the principal youth culture. Suits and group uniforms were out: denim, suede and long hair in. It was also a vintage Motown year. It wasn’t like an Austin Powers film, with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“I’ve been labelled as an angry young man / Because I don’t fit into the master plan / Under society’s microscope / I look funny but it’s no joke.I’m a social end product so don’t blame me / I’m a social end product of society / It’s not my fault that I don’t belong / It’s the world around me that’s gone all wrong.”Delivered with snot-nosed venom, the lyrics of The Bluestars’ December 1966 single “Social End Product” rail against the perceptions fostering the them-and-us generation gap. The music is suitably tough, defined by an insistent fuzz guitar riff and pounding drums. Wherever it’s Read more ...