Piney Gir @ Upstairs at the Relentless Garage, 26th August
Piney Gir's MySpace biography makes a claim that her debut album fits into the ill-defined "electronica" category but in recent years she has played up to her Kansas origins by favouring a more country-based style. I wouldn't claim to be the biggest fan of this kind of music but Gir is an artist who I've warmed to on the couple of occasions I've seen her because of the pure energy and pizazz of her shows. She has jettisoned her previous incarnation as The Piney Gir Country Roadshow and is now billed--deep breath--as Piney Gir and the Age of Reason with the Reasonettes. Judging by what we hear tonight though, this doesn't seem to signify a move into yet more radically different musical territory. The songs are good enough and it's a typically bubbly performance but we get a disappointingly short selection. Maybe at £6 a ticket it's a bit churlish to complain about this. What does spoil things though is the poor quality of the sound: it's barely possible to make out the lead vocals.
For better or worse, ukuleles are big at the moment. The Leisure Society (see below) incorporate them nicely into their easy pastoral sound, but there seem to be a number of bands--most notably I suppose the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain--who are building careers as cover artists, often exploiting the supposed comic potential of an instrument most readily associated with the 1940s flat-cap filmic japes of George Formby playing the songs of the more profane modern era, like those who have their origins in the electric guitar-based posturings of heavy rock. Sure enough, the hysterically-titled Uke Attack!! Uke Attack!!--for it is they, one of tonight's support acts--plough through Judas Priest's "Breaking The Law" and Led Zep's "Whole Lotta Love" and the joke starts wearing thin in no time at all. In fact it's their kazoo-tastic version of Gerry Rafferty's MOR classic "Baker Street" which brings a reluctant smile to my face.
The small upstairs room at the newly-reopened Upstairs Garage--now the "Relentless" Garage--is a real disappointment as a venue: utterly soul-less, garishly lit with red and blue strobes, and cynically furnished with a handy ATM machine lest you run out of funds to buy more over-priced lager. Won't be hurrying back...
David Byrne @ The Barbican, 3rd August, featuring the Songs of Eno and Byrne
Some things we learned tonight and some things we knew already:
Talking Heads have a lot of songs which are great for dancing to. The 1980 Byrne/Eno collaboration Remain in Light is particularly good in this respect and we get a fair helping of it tonight. It was quite heavily influenced by Fela Kuti: I think the respective rhythm tracks in "Houses in Motion" and Kuti's "U Be Thief" illustrate the comparison quite well.
This ain't no disco. The Barbican is rubbish for dancing (see also Tricky below).
While we're on the subject, I found DB's three "interpretative dancers" a bit off-putting and generally surplus to requirements.
There is no-one younger than forty present. In comparison, Neil Young's Hyde Park gig which I went to last month was full of twenty-five-year-olds who knew the words to all his songs. Maybe it's because of the choice of venue and the price of the tickets. (Seats at the back of the hall cost £35.)
DB is good value though, performs for a good two hours, including five (count them) encores. The "hits" go down well--"Once in a Lifetime", "Burning Down the House", "Road to Nowhere"--but I think "Strange Overtones" is a great song.
It's no surprise that Louis Hardin became famous, inclined as he was to wander round the streets of Manhattan in Viking attire carrying a huge sword. That and playing strange and beautiful music on a selection of bizarre instruments, many his own inventions.
Moondog--for it is he--spent much of the 1950s and 60s doing these very things, mainly at the intersection of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue. At night he would sleep on nearby rooftops.
Positioned as he was near many concert venues and jazz clubs, musicians would often pass by and understandably his streetside performances aroused their curiosity. As a result, he went on to become an accepted part of the New York musical establishment, forging a particular friendship with Philip Glass, and eventually having many of his compositions performed in the concert hall.
In the 1990s, he collaborated with various British ensembles, and this tribute concert, held ten years after his death, features two of these: London Saxophonic and the Britten Sinfonia.
It's quite difficult to characterise his music: there are elements of big band jazz, sixties film soundtracks, Bach fugues and Mozart: the "Salzburg Symphony" is one work--of his total output of some 1,400 pieces--which has never been performed in public. Until tonight.
I reckon there's even a hint of a drum & bass rhythm in "Bird's Lament"...
North Sea Radio Orchestra @ Brixton Library, 29th May
Purveyors of genteel instrumentals and song settings of the poems of Blake, Tennyson, and the like, NSRO are one of the bands I've cottoned on to via Stuart Maconie's mighty 6music Freak Zone.
At full strength there are twenty players. Tonight there are ten: on clarinet, bassoon, cello, Spanish guitar, organ, piano, "monosynth" and sundry percussions. And then there's Sharron Fortnam's fantastic voice...
Five good reasons why it's a good idea to take a break from the usual diet of pop, rock and jazz and dip into the rarified world of classical music:
It allows you to go out for civilised night out with your dad and lets him go part way to redressing the balance, since you forced him to have Radio 1 on in the background throughout your teenage years.
Classical music is "soothing" (fact!), particularly if it's gentile chamber music (like we get tonight). Something to do with beats per minute, I reckon. No doubt pieces like Beethoven's near-histrionic "Ode To Joy" would be exceptions which prove this rule.
You marvel at the virtuosity of the players. Just how much practice must they have put in over how many years to reach this level? A level, actually, which is pretty much the norm for the hundreds of UK musicians in major orchestras and chamber ensembles. There's such minute precision in the playing in a small group like this. Every player is so exposed that even the tiniest slip in intonation or rhythm would stick out like a really sore thumb. Are revered instrumentalists in popular music--I don't know, Eric Clapton, say--as good as this? Do they really justify the adulation and lucre which comes their way? Or is that like comparing fish and custard?
It reminds you that the iPod, Spotify and the other modern-day gubbins I've been rattling on about lately, should not be taken for granted. The only way you would get to hear these pieces in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they were composed, was to be somewhere where there was a player of each of these instruments technically proficient enough to perform them. Then maybe you'd value your musical experiences much more than we tend to do these days...
It allows you to attempt to prove to yourself that that your A-Level in music wasn't entirely in vain, 'cos you can just about still pick out the different sections in minuet form, ("structurally the simplest movement of a symphony or string quartet", it says here, so probably not too much to write home about...)
Next week: How listening to AC/DC for ten hours a day can lead to a life of fulfilment and prosperity...
Shrag, The Tender Trap, Arthur and Martha @ The Lexington, 2nd April
Arthur and Martha are big on synths, drum machines and other electronic gubbins, including an unwieldy theremin. Bleeps and bloops ensue. They in no way sound like Hot Chip however. Song title of the evening: "Squarewave to Heaven".
The Tender Trap: Women sing and play keyboards and drums standing up. Men play guitar and bass, also standing up. (Is that that bloke out of Nirvana on guitar?) The addition of two extra woman backing vocalists recently has filled out their sound a lot since last time I heard them, and their "ba-da-ba ba-da-ba"'s remind me of Stereolab and Teenage Fanclub. Which cheers me up.
Shrag: Energetic, occasionally profane, "jagged post punk". Again, men play guitars and bass and women sing, play dinky electronic keyboards, but also shout a lot and kick a considerable amount of ass on the drums. Great stuff. Hear more at their lastfm page.
Oliver Mtukudzi, Baaba Maal & Extra Golden (African Soul Rebels Tour) @ The Roundhouse, 9th March
With the African Soul Rebels tour, now in its fifth year, you get to see three established African acts in one evening. So there's maybe enough of each of the artists to whet your appetite, but I'm not sure you get enough of a taste of any of the three. Baaba Maal's band seem to suffer particularly in this respect tonight. Having progressively increased the pace over fifty minutes or so, it seems a shame they have to make way just as the people start to dance.
Long-established Zimbabwean singer-guitarist Oliver Mtukudzi has made a career of diplomacy and tact. Where others--most notably fellow veteran Thomas Mapfumo--have moved abroad so they can safely vent their spleen on the subject of the Mugabe regime, Mtukudzi still lives there, relying on gentle allegory to get his point across rather than being openly critical. From what he says tonight, you can tell he is used to choosing his words carefully. There's what he says, then there's what he doesn't say.
Often it's up to you to fill in the blanks. “Where we come from, music is like food" (We need it to survive? It's under threat?). "Where we come from, you don’t get to sing when you have nothing to say" (People who sing have a chance to say something, to make their voice heard?). "Where we come from, most of all we use music to defuse tension" (If we just use it to criticise, we are silenced so we can no longer get our message across??).
Just occasionally his meaning is more obvious. "If one country is inferior to another, there is something wrong". "This song is about discipline. In order to be head of a family, you must have discipline."
1,000 Years Of Popular Music, starring Richard Thompson @ the Barbican, 3rd February
It's not as if Thompson hasn't recorded over twenty albums of his own songs. We heard none of them tonight though. We got madrigals. We got music hall. Abba. Early Beatles. Gilbert & Sullivan. Cole Porter. Purcell opera. A song composed (maybe) by Richard the Lionheart. Some doo-wop. Some Hank Williams. Some thirteenth-century folk with hurdy-gurdy accompaniment. Nelly Furtado's "Maneater". Songs in Renaissance French and Italian. And "Everyone's Got To Learn Sometime" by the Korgis. In other words, something for all the family...
The Coalporters @ Half Moon, Herne Hill, 5th December
This style of music isn't really my thing but the Coalporters, the "world's first alt-bluegrass band", are such great performers that you can't fail to warm to them. They have some brilliant players--particularly Dick Smith, apparently the only full-time professional banjo player in the UK, and Hana Loftus on fiddle--and Sid Griffin (mandolin) and Neil Robert Herd (guitar) are slick and enthusiastic front men.
Griffin, it says here, "displays many chapeaux in his career as a multi-faceted musician", first surfacing in the early eighties as a member of the Long Ryders, purveyors of musical fare more reliant on the sound of the electric guitar.
Tonight they sing a mix of compositions by Hern and Griffin (including this Long Ryders oldie) as well as renderings of "Teenage Kicks" and Ronnie Lane's "Ooh La La" in a bluegrass stylee. Very enjoyable they are too.
The behatted Henry Brothers--Stephen Merchant look-alike on guitar and a psychotically grinning Charlie Chaplin on what I discover is referred to as "doghouse bass"--offer support with their gruesome murder ballads.
Neil Cowley Trio and Alec Dankworth's Spanish Accents @ Royal Festival Hall, 22nd November
My November London-Jazz-Festival-induced jazz binge continues unabated with this freebee live recording of Radio 3's Jazz Line Up programme introduced by Claire Martin, the Gabby Logan of Jazz.
Neil Cowley and the boys perform the fourth of their five gigs in 24 hours. Their selection is in turn funky, rhapsodic, virtuosic and (maybe?) Svensson-esque. Alec Dankworth reveals that the family's Spanish connections--hence these compositions--stem from the times he and sister Jacqui were left by their touring jazz-royal-family parents in the care of Spanish childminders who took them on holidays to their homeland and tutored them in the language. More recently it seems his wife has been completing a PhD in flamenco music. I like these tunes.
Going all out for critcal mass, I also picked out these jazz CDs from the public library at lunch time.
Dengue Fever actually started out in 2001 and made their first album two years later but it seems to have taken until now for them to start breaking through in the UK. I enjoyed them earlier this year at the Wychwood Festival and last week they received the coveted Jools Holland seal of approval. No doubt a huge boost to CD and concert ticket sales will duly follow.
They made a good fist of it tonight keeping up a lively pace for a good hour or so, got a great reception from all present and flogged a fair few copies of their latest album at the merchandising stand afterwards.
There's an interesting contrast between Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol's Khmer-language vocals and the band's US/60s/psychedelic rock sensibilities. Founding band member Ethan Holtzman's Farfisa organ too is very much part of the band's sound.
On tonight's showing though I do wonder whether all their songs aren't pretty much the same. They all skip along at a similar tempo and seem to feature the same bass riff. Doesn't the novelty soon wear off?
Having said all that, the five songs on their myspace site in no way resemble one another, so I'm probably hopelessly wide of the mark...
It's understandable that, after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina two years ago, the State of Louisiana authorities would want to take some measures to give their ailing tourist industry a shot in the arm. This two day festival, laid on free of charge and featuring some big ole New Orleans names--Dr John, Allen Toussaint and Buckwheat Zydeco--drew a huge turn-out. It was just a shame that these three great musicians were consigned to a main stage area which allowed a big crowd to see them but only a small number of people to hear them properly. Drum beats bounced off the curved roof, more than thirty yards from the stage only an echoey gloop was audible...
The O2 prioprietors had clearly not foreseen the possibility that a free festival featuring internationally-renowned musicians would draw a large crowd and consequently failed to provide adequate bar and toilet facilities. (So how did they manage with Led Zeppelin? Oh yes, that's right. They were charging £100+ a ticket for that one.)
There was a good mix of styles though reflecting the varied musical heritage of the Big Easy: I also got to see (and hear, in the more acoustically friendly Indigo2 and Matter venues): Mardi Gras "Indian" dancers (the Hardhead Hunters), a gospel group (the Anointed Jackson Sisters) and some top class New Orleans brass band music (the New Birth).
Few people who, like me, are regulars at free events on the South Bank will not have come across the East End Elvises and, sure enough, they were there too, not only bestowing their general approval on the proceedings but also, invited up on to the stage by Kermit Ruffins, giving full reign to their hip-swinging groin-thrusting moves and almost total lack of rhythmic sense...
Considering the number of little-known acts who have reformed after thirty or more years of obscurity, maybe it's not that surprising that a band whose name survives thanks to a solitary number one hit in 1969 are touring again in 2008. "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman still gets its share of radio airplay and rightly so, it's a great song. In fact, in the days when chart success was actually a real indicator of quality, it kept songs by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ("Ballad of John and Yoko" and "Honky Tonk Woman" respectively) off the top spot.
Andy "Thunderclap" Newman definitely has something of the Brian Wilson about him, sitting behind his keyboard and staring uneasily into the audience from time to time. But it seems it was ever thus. Turning up their entry in the Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, I see that even in 1969 the "[the group's] impact derived mainly from the quirky, old-fashioned image of the pianist".
In fact it was lead singer John "Speedy" Keen, now deceased, who wrote most of the material on the "Hollywood Dreams" album which is performed in full tonight. Andy Newman is the only survivor from the original line-up but he's got an impressive bunch of musicians together.
Check out his groovy piano solo a couple of minutes in...
Alim Qasimov and the Kronos Quartet @ the Barbican, 26th September
David Harrington, the leader of the Kronos Quartet, has received a fair amount of coverage in Songlines magazine in recent months by virtue of his--and the quartet's--espousal of non-western music. There's no doubt that in tackling the kind of pieces which they perform tonight--from Iraq, Iran and Bosnia--the Kronoses' reputation for taking string quartet music into unchartered territory is well deserved.
But what about their collaborations with non-western musicians? For the second half of tonight's concert, the Kronoses accompany a recital of Azerbaijani wandering minstrel songs by Alim Qasimov and his ensemble. I'm sure their string playing is technically impressive but I wonder what the quartet contribute to the music which wouldn't be there anyway.
Before we hear them sing and play together, we're shown video footage of rehearsals for tonight's concert. There seems little interaction between the two groups of musicians and, from the interview clips we see, Qasimov seems unsure that there is any common ground between them. Interesting that while the Azerbaijanis sing and play from memory (that's probably how they've learned the music), from beginning to end the four string players have their noses well and truly buried in their sheet music.
Broadstairs Folk Week, 15th August A couple of hours' train journey from London, Broadstairs has got a fair bit to offer: a small but unspoilt town centre, an attractive promenade and beach, a bit of Dickens-related history, and, for the last couple of weeks, more Morris Dancers than you can shake a stick at. You know, those weird jangly ones with bells and ribbons on?
The Broadstairs Folk Week was founded as long ago as 1965 so not surprisingly there are some heavy duty folkies in attendance and fiddles, acoustic guitars and accordions are ten a penny. Even the folk mainliners at Broadstairs though are willing to concede that the "folk music" label spreads its wings more widely in these globalised times than used to be the case. Consequently, as well as British and Irish artists, there are also Eastern Europeans (Warsaw Village Band), Jamaicans (Two Man Ting) and West Africans (N'faly Kouyate and Dunkayan).
There are hundreds of performances during the course of the two weeks. Many of these are outdoors or in pubs where a bucket is passed round for contributions; there are also a couple of medium-sized venues at about £3 a go; then, for the stadium folky, a couple of concert hall-type affairs where you can pay a whopping £12 to see more well-known artists like Cara Dillon and the ubiquitous Eliza Carthy.
High spots of my day are Canadian duo The Wind Whistles and a two-hour long "session"--something I'd never experienced before--at the Wrotham Arms featuring Peter and Barbara Snape (left).
Disappointingly there are a fair few empty seats tonight but Maria Schneider--erstwhile student of Miles Davis arranger Gil Evans--is increasingly becoming recognised as a major jazz artist in her own right. Indeed, a track from her recent "Sky Blue" album bagged her a Grammy earlier this year.
Interestingly she doesn't have a record deal but instead makes all her music available via the ArtistShare website. With no predatory record company to cream off a percentage, all the money generated via her site is ploughed back into her musical activities. Under no outside pressure to act as an income generating machine, she's also able to make video footage of interviews and rehearsals available to her fanbase via her site.
You'd think a big venue like the Barbican would suit a 20-strong line-up like this but some of the sound seems to get lost. I enjoyed them more at the (smaller) Queen Elizabeth Hall a couple of years ago.
