Reviews on The Review

Stuart McCallum, The Golden Age of Steam, Trio VD: Manchester Jazz Festival Friday, 30th July.

British Jazz appears to be going through a period of rude health. A generation of young musicians has been emerging fresh from jazz courses at British conservatoires with a technical brilliance and eclectic sense of influence that was on [...]

Amid the casualties of punk rock’s necessary and thrashing critique of popular culture and music in the mid-seventies was folk rock and psychedelic music, which had blended in so many angry young minds with the era’s MOR meanderings of British Prog. Folk became a bad word, associated with hippies and a bygone era of flared [...]

Bobby McFerrin’s new disc is a complete revamp of a capella in jazz, dragging it away from the finger clicking parodies of the Swingle Singers, via Manhattan Transfer into something edgier, larger and more contemporary.  McFerrin is universally known for Don’t Worry Be Happy and, occasionally, for his version of McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’.  But since those [...]

So the sequence of expanded Cure re-issues has finally reached Disintegration, for many the band’s defining album.  As a long-term fan I never quite saw it that way; my favourite album was, and is, ‘the one no-one else likes’ (The Top).  As time’s gone on, though, ‘the one that first got me into them’ has [...]

I should admit to a certain bias when it comes to seeing The Charlatans, this being my 19th time.  But they were a decade into their career before I caught on, when they made a giant indie disco of the 1999 Leeds Festival, so a whole gig from 1990’s Some Friendly era is still a [...]

There’s something not quite right with Bradford Cox.  Tonight specifically, I mean: what begins with a late start and some fairly surreal musings ends with the sound-tech lining-up receptacles for a threatened up-chuck by the front-man.
The last time I saw Deerhunter make their waves of big noise it was in broad daylight, in the afternoon [...]

The late, great Sun Ra operated his jazz Arkestra through much of the seventies and eighties until his ultimate and untimely return to the Saturn of his ‘birth’. Ra (aka Herman ‘Sonny’ Blount) was renowned as an iron disciplinarian who inspired either devotion or scepticism amongst the players in his band.  In the early 1950s, [...]

Are Midlake adult-oriented? A few minutes into their set and I’m still at the bar, still wearing my jacket and scarf, as M. and I are late arriving for the sold-out show. The bartenders have never heard of Midlake, and the youngish one serving us is surprised they’re so popular yet unknown to her. ‘I’ve [...]

While lacking a childhood nostalgia for the various incarnations of Sir David Attenborough’s long-running nature series – a nostalgia expressed often by many British friends and colleagues – I have in recent years developed a profound respect for what is, by North American standards, very exotic television programming. What would be relegated to the public [...]

I’ve just spent the morning with the 24-page booklet that accompanies the latest release from Manchester-based reissue masters Finders Keepers. The write-up in small print is a history of an obscure but seminal French record label that formed out of the wind-blown ashes of the May ’68 student demonstrations in Paris. It tells this via [...]