blues
Reissue CDs Weekly: Bobby WomackSunday, 17 May 2015
Bobby Womack: The PreacherCover versions of standards like “Fly me to the Moon” and “I Left my Heart in San Francisco” were hardly going to make a mark with a hip – or, for that matter, any – audience in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Nor was... Read more... |
BB King: 'I play the way I'm feeling'Friday, 15 May 2015
B B King was the greatest blues guitarist of the age. Many contemporary rockers credit him as a formidable inspiration, from Mick Jagger to Eric Clapton to Bono. But when I met him in 2006, the then 83-year-old musician had a different perspective... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: DionSunday, 26 April 2015
Dion: Recorded Live at the Bitter End August 1971By 1971, when he was playing the Bitter End in New York’s Greenwich Village, Dion DiMucci had already experienced the equivalent of two separate stints as a pop star. In 1961, he began a run of... Read more... |
Wild Card, Jazz Café POSKSunday, 19 April 2015
Jazz-funk organ trio Wild Card have been slowly building a reputation for smoking funk tunes and grooves you could lose a pantechnicon in for some years now. Led by French guitarist Clément Régert, with organist Andy Noble and drummer Sophie Alloway... Read more... |
CD: Boz Scaggs - A Fool To CareSunday, 15 March 2015
There is languor about the swamps of the Southern USA that’s reflected in the drawl of local speech and the slow-paced sensuality of the music. Boz Scaggs, indefatigable lover of American roots music, and one of the most consistently excellent US... Read more... |
The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities, BBC FourSaturday, 14 March 2015
When a documentary about Irish rock music starts with footage of late-period Bono shuffling about awkwardly dressed in black, my first impulse is to check my iTunes in case he’s surreptitiously shat another album into my computer. The second is to... Read more... |
Album of the year - Band of Brothers by Willie NelsonSunday, 28 December 2014
You’d have to go back almost 20 years, and to 1996's Spirit, to name a Willie Nelson album with more than one or two original new songs. The nine for Band of Brothers was a real cause for celebration. He may be 81, he may not fly over to perform in... Read more... |
Annie Lennox: The Jazz SingerSunday, 26 October 2014
Annie Lennox is a far more fascinating artist than she’s often given credit for. Perhaps because she has been around for decades (she’s now 59) and hasn’t self-destructed like her friend Amy Winehouse or gone into exile for ages like Kate Bush, or... Read more... |
CD: Yusuf/Cat Stevens - Tell 'Em I'm GoneSaturday, 25 October 2014
Every rock fan knows Cat Stevens' story: how, during the early Seventies, the son of a Greek café owner conquered the world’s charts with classics like “Wild World” and “Father and Son” but eventually tired of the music business, found Allah, and... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Hadda BrooksSunday, 03 August 2014
Hadda Brooks: Queen of the Boogie and MoreThe rolling piano is irresistible. Upbeat and swinging, it powers forward with an unstoppable momentum. Accompanied by walking double bass and brushed two-step drums, the right hand suddenly peels off... Read more... |
Porgy and Bess, Regent's Park Open Air TheatreTuesday, 29 July 2014
It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An opera? Trevor Nunn made the three-hour-plus score, much... Read more... |
Robert Cray Band, BarbicanWednesday, 07 May 2014
Robert Cray’s veteran blues band made a compelling case for their unique blend of soul and blues at the Barbican last night. Despite the five Grammys, record sales well into seven figures, and investiture in the Blues Hall of Fame in 2011 at the... Read more... |
