In the post-EST era, the jazz piano trio seems to be going two ways. The European trio seems as influenced by contemporary European classical music as it is by the jazz ‘traditions’ of America. Tord Gustafsen’s trio play music that is as influenced by the folk-music of his native Norway as it is by anything […]
The Soundcarriers. Celeste. Melodic Records 2010 (MEL0070CD).
The sound of Nottingham’s Soundcarriers seems both right and wrong. One can hear in the opening bars of their second record, Celeste, their interests and influences from the contemporary to the obscure: early Stereolab, Birmingham’s underappreciated Broadcast, the cool Kosmische Musik of Neu! and Can, the psychedelic era of Italian composers Ennio Morricone and Piero […]
Winter’s Bone (2010), dir. Debra Granik
This wonderful film is held together by a mesmerising central performance from Jennifer Lawrence and immaculate direction by Debra Granik. The story is well-known by now. Lawrence as Ree Dolly is the seventeen-year old who holds her family together. Her mother is a catatonic depressive, and Ree has two younger siblings, Sonny, her twelve-year old […]
Kunwar Narain, No Other World, trans. Apurva Narain (Arc Publications) £10.99, reviewed Edmund Prestwich
In his Introduction to this volume, Harish Trivedi says that Kunwar Narain is probably the most highly regarded Hindi poet alive today. Both Trivedi and Apurva Narain emphasise how deeply the poet has read Indian literature from its Sanskrit roots to now. As an outsider to Indian culture I’m not in a position to judge […]
Stuart McCallum, The Golden Age of Steam, Trio VD: Manchester Jazz Festival Friday, 30th July.
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 show […]
Lee Rourke, The Canal (Melville House) £9.99
Rourke’s novel is set on a stretch of the Regent Canal between Hackney and Islington, a symbolic hinterland between Old London and New Labour’s London. Its unnamed narrator, having recently resigned from his job, returns daily to the same bench and watches the swans and the coots and the slick-suited workers going about their business […]
Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick ed. by Darryl Pinckney (NYRB) £7.99
On this side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Hardwick tends to live in the shadow of her husband, Robert Lowell.In America, however, she is seen as a major literary figure in her own right.Born in Kentucky, she decided early on that New York was the place to develop a career that encompassed the creation of the […]
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (Faber) £8.99
Byrne’s half-travelogue, half-pro-cycling-manifesto is probably not, unfortunately, the magic book that will persuade car owners to leave their vehicles at home, bus drivers to give cyclists an extra foot of room, Jeremy Clarkson to take a monastic vow of silence, or any of the other things that would make life safer and more enjoyable for […]
Jane Weaver. The Fallen By Watchbird. Bird Records 2010 (10EGGSCD).
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 […]
Doris Kareva, Shape of Time, trans. by Tiina Aleman (Arc Publications) £10.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
In her Translator’s Preface, Tiina Aleman explains how closely she and Doris Kareva worked on the poems in this volume. Kareva herself is a well-regarded translator who has translated widely from English into Estonian, so I assume these versions achieve a high level of fidelity to the originals. They certainly read well in English and […]
Two Books on Roy Fischer, reviewed by Ian Pople
Roy Fisher, Standard Midland (Bloodaxe Books) £7.95 An Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. by Peter Robinson (Shearsman Books) £12.95 Like Eliot’s Webster, Roy Fisher is much possessed by death. However, it’s not the skull beneath the skin he sees; it is the relationship we have with the dead in the transition of dying; what he elsewhere […]
Michael Haslam, A Cure for Woodness, (Arc Publications)
Michael Haslam’s writing is an eerie combination of late High Modernism of the Bunting and David Jones kind, and an unswerving allegiance to the poetics of the ‘Cambridge Axis’ of Prynne, Crozier and the Rileys. Like the Bunting and David Jones, Haslam reaches back through Modernism to the alliterative foundations of Early English verse, and […]
Bobby McFerrin Vocabularies Wrasse Records
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 […]
Dawn Rowland, FRBS, 1 New York St, Manchester
When my other half told me he’d spotted a Modernist sculpture exhibition I didn’t know about in the city, I thought he was just trying to impress me. Quite where he’d glimpsed it was another matter, but then the foyer of one of Bruntwood’s city centre office blocks isn’t an obvious location. Although Dawn Rowland […]
Jill Bialosky, The Skiers: Selected Poems (Arc Publications)
Jill Bialosky’s first publication in the UK, consists of substantial selections from her three US collections. The first of these, The End of Desire, consists mainly of pitch-perfect narratives of childhood and growing up. Bialosky moves between her own life and those of her mother and her two sisters, and gathers details of the domestic […]
The Cure – Disintegration, Deluxe Edition
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 […]
The Charlatans perform ‘Some Friendly’, Blackpool Empress Ballroom, 15 May 2010
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 […]
Deerhunter, Club Academy, 4 May 2010
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 […]
Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta) £7.99
So where does the God of Love hang out? Apparently in the company of middle class intellectuals, heartbroken widows, middle aged adulterers, devoted mothers and alcoholic stepsons with tangled oedipal issues to work out . . . he hangs out in the motorcars, kitchens and living rooms of Middle America, a local which, for all […]
Shanta Acharya, Dreams That Spell the Light (Arc Publications) £7.99, reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in India, gained a doctorate from Oxford and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. She has written a book on Emerson, three books on asset management, and five volumes of poetry. This new collection reflects both the breadth of cultural reference and the rather privileged perspective one might expect […]
Shed your Tears and Walk Away (2009), dir. Jez Lewis
(KinoFilm European Short Film Festival, Manchester) I first visited Hebden Bridge 20 years ago, and was captivated by its gothic remoteness and Victorian charm. Its plethora of book, record and junk shops didn’t hurt either, and I’ve been drawn back to the town every year or two since. If it hadn’t been so distant from […]
Identity Parade: New British & Irish Poets, ed. by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books) £12.00
This new anthology from Bloodaxe, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is their second such offering in recent months, arriving hot on the heels (in poetry terms) of their last, Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (September, 2009); that anthology concentrated on newness and this one in many ways is no different, aiming to introduce […]
Arshile Gorky, A Retrospective/Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde, Tate Modern, London
If there’s some bad news for art lovers who haven’t been to London recently, it’s that there’s less than a month left to see the Arshile Gorky retrospective at Tate Modern. The good news is that there are seven weeks left to see its partner exhbition, Van Doesberg & the International Avant-Garde. The Gorky exhibition […]
Laila Lalami, Secret Son (Penguin) £9.99
Lalami’s Secret Son, long-listed for the Orange prize, is an interesting debut novel. Set in Lalami’s home country, Morocco, it deliberately eschews that cliché ‘Write about what you know’, in that the central figure of the book is a young man, Youssef. He has been brought up by his widowed mother, Rachida, to believe that […]
Jerry Dammers’ Spatial A.K.A at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall
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, […]
Perrier’s Bounty (2009), dir. Ian Fitzgibbon
With the summer blockbuster season still some way off, it’s possible that there may yet be a worse film released this year, but they’re going to have to try particularly hard to sink to lower depths than Perrier’s Bounty. Set in contemporary Dublin, this shockingly clichéd film follows Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) through 48 hours […]
James Kelman, If it is your life (Hamish Hamilton) £18.99
After the sprawling trawl through Glaswegian boyhood that was Keiron Smith, Boy, James Kelman returns to the short form with a new collection of stories, If it is your life. As ever with Kelman, the writing is sharp, blackly funny and masterfully aware of rhythm. But it also gives the reader a clear impression that […]
Lourdes (2009), dir. Jessica Hausner
The strapline for Jessica Hausner’s wonderful Lourdes is ‘Nothing tests faith more than a miracle’. The other issue that’s central to the film is the deeply human ‘Why me?’. Lourdes is set among a tour party to the shrine organised by the Order of Malta. It centres on Christine who suffers from multiple schlerosis; her […]
Don Delillo, Point Omega (Picador)
Foul deeds will arise ere the earth o’erhelm them to men’s eyes. The perspective in Hamlet seems unlikely to be shared by the main protagonist of DeLillos’s new novel, a ‘desert in the woods’ academic policy wonk grinding out the linguistic and idea upholstery to the neocon ideologues of the former Bush administration. Enhanced interrogation, […]
Glengarry Glen Ross, The Library Theatre
In Mamet’s coiled spring of a play, four real-estate agents are locked in a battle for survival. Each month as they compete to sell plots of undesirable land, the man with the biggest sales wins a Cadillac and the man with the smallest gets the sack. This month’s man on top is Ricky Roma (Richard Dormer). Slick […]
Ian McEwan, Solar (Vintage) £8.99
Ian McEwan is widely considered to be a ‘national treasure’. He is a literary heavyweight whose meticulous research and plot designs deliver novels that capture the zeitgeist of an age and also entertain. His latest offering, ‘Solar’ published by Jonathan Cape, is no exception. It is a reflection on the latest calamity plaguing mankind – […]
Shutter Island (2010), dir. Martin Scorcese
Shutter Island is a rather odd film. The script is sometimes very good; its abrupt transitions and elliptical style ensure a good if not great performance from the film’s main star, Leonardo Dicaprio. But elsewhere the script feels stagey and mannered, resulting in rather forced performances from the European players who play the supporting characters, […]
Midlake, Manchester Academy 2, 17 February 2010
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 […]
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Royal Exchange
Having counted George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four among my favourite books since the age of 13, I was concerned that over-familiarity might mar my enjoyment of Matthew Dunster’s new stage adaptation. After three hours’ immersion in this powerful and affecting show, however, I was overwhelmed by empathetic exhaustion, sadness and resignation, alongside deep admiration for the […]
Razmik Davoyan, Whispers and Breath of the Meadows (Arc Publications)
This book is not Davoyan’s first publication in the UK; Heinemann brought out an edition of his work some years ago but Davoyan can seldom have been as well served as in this sumptuous Arc edition, with its felicitous translations and its loving production values. In his introduction, W.N.Herbert notes that Davoyan’s work contains both […]