Music
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Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown
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The summertime British music scene is taken over by a series of festivals up and down the country; the biggest and most famous is Glastonbury, but the same weekend London’s Hyde Park holds the somewhat scaled-down (no sleeping over in tents) “Hard Rock Calling“. I arrived too late for the Pretenders, whom I had last…
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Ornette Coleman’s Meltdown
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The annual Meltdown festival took over London’s South Bank Centre this week. I saw Yo La Tengo‘s rock ’n’ roll Q&A, and unfortunately missed a performance by David Murray, one of my favorite saxaphonists. But the highlight was curator Ornette Coleman himself, in an evening dedicated to his “Shape of Jazz to Come”, the record…
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Musical Youth
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Sonic Youth on “Later with Jools Holland” reminds me of a US TV appearance by the band around 20 years ago, on a show called “Night Music” co-hosted by, in fact, Jools Holland and sax player David Sanborn. Sanborn’s solo recording career has largely (and not incorrectly) been tarred with “smooth jazz” brush; his broader…
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Doctor Atomic
I went to see and hear John Adams’ recent opera Doctor Atomic at the ENO last night. One of my physicist-companions was my friend, fellow blogger and cosmologist Peter Coles, and he has already applied his greater musical knowledge to the task, so I won’t attempt an overall review. In short, Doctor Atomic is the…
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Hitsville USA!
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Happy 50th Birthday to Motown! I visited the original Motown studios in Detroit once, now a museum, but preserved more or less as it was in the 60s before the company moved to LA. As soon as you walked in, it was obvious this had been just about the coolest place on the planet for…
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Writing about dancing about architecture
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For some reason a lot of music books have percolated to the top of my bedstand pile recently. I just finished Alex Ross‘ magisterial and definitive The Rest is Noise, a history of 20th Century “Western Classical” music. (Let’s pause for a moment and praise the genius of that title, by the way.) The book…
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My Critical Faculties Vindicated
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Glad to read that I wasn’t the only one to notice the Magnetic Fields homage in Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in their Summer Clothes”: Enter wry New Yorker Stephin Merritt, Mr Magnetic Field. Merritt is a pop auteur of great distinction, if not wide renown; he probably earns more comparisons to Cole Porter than royalties. He…
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The Handsome Family
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On my flight out to Cleveland via Chicago, I sat next to a lovely, hip-looking couple watching The Sopranos on DVD, wedged into the cattle-class middle seats. They turned out to be Brett and Rennie Sparks — husband-and-wife band The Handsome Family. They actually started out in Chicago in the early 1990s back when I…
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This could be me
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Imagine this. You are male, somewhere between 38 and 55, your recent purchases include recordings by the Hold Steady and that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album, and you like to think you know about new world wine and the rough outlines of global warming. For nearly 30 years, your aesthetic universe has been constructed…
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