In 2004 Florent de La Tullaye and Renaud Barret encountered Leon “Ricky” Likabu playing music on the streets of Kinshasa. A victim of poliomyelitis, he was joined by fellow wheelchair-bound musicians and street youth. Together, with old beat-up or hand-made instruments, the group played what could only be described as folk music: honest, heart-felt...
Onstage, 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at times psychedelic. Mr Astatke, the originator and composer of songs in this canon, plays his principal instrument, the vibraphone, with a light touch....
Last summer members of The Roots performed a fiery tribute to Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz saxophone legend. With Vernon Reid on guitar and David Murray on saxophone, the show featured several generations of inventive African-American musicians on a London stage. The result was largely exciting, occasionally long-winded and certainly momentous. In a similar spirit...
Despite co-founding Spotify, a music-streaming service, Swedish-born Daniel Ek loves vinyl records. But don’t be fooled. Ek is intent on making music more accessible and mobile, and his iPhone and digital-music library are never far from his side. “People amass more music now than ever, but it’s not about ownership. It’s about accessibility,” he...
Last year, in a basement club in East London, California’s Flying Lotus showed local dubstep fans how elastic the electronic music genre can be. As Flying Lotus subverted its two-step, dub and breakbeat elements with strange space-like noises, abrupt beat shifts and subtle, meditative melodies and samples, the crowd didn’t always know how to...
At England’s annual Big Chill Festival, an outdoor music event in a charming wooded park in Herefordshire, the London band Chrome Hoof blitzed the audience with a 40-minute arsenal of their trademark metal disco. The ten-piece ensemble’s sound is unmistakably jittery and spacey, combining 1970s funk with electronica and metal. Their look sets them...
“No One Knows About Persian Cats” is a film directed by Bahman Ghobadi, an award-winning Kurdish-Iranian film-maker. Mr Ghobadi first came to prominence with “A Time For Drunken Horses,” a film about smuggling across the Iran-Iraq border. “Persian Cats”, which won the Special Jury Prize in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the 2009...
Camden Crawl bears some similarities to the music portion of Austin’s South by Southwest festival, in that dozens of up-and-coming bands perform at multiple sites, all day long, in one concentrated area. And at the Crawl, as at SXSW, expect long lines for the bathroom, and lots of noise and beer. But also expect...
London retro-soul music fans may remember the Dap-Kings as the American band that recorded and toured with Amy Winehouse. But the band’s Wednesday night performance at Koko with their original front woman, Sharon Jones, was an entirely different affair. The full review, on the recent Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings performance at Koko in...
A recent live performance by Vampire Weekend at the Garage in North London as part of their current UK tour was a reminder that not all bands embrace the element of surprise. Vampire Weekend played through a set that included songs from their 2008 eponymous first release, a massive hit released on the UK-based...