Last week it was all about a coming together of hands. This week, it's hands again; but hands that are hard at work
Last week, eh? What a wonderful time it was. A thing of joy, wonder and colliding palms; truly what RR is all about. I would cry, if I hadn't had my tearducts sewn up.
Age and experience have taught me that, whatever I think of it, someone will declare the A list (oh yeah, here's the column about it a stinker but I reckon it's more of a corker than Korky the Kat corking bottles in a factory owned by the father of Jack Cork, the Chelsea midfielder. Anyway here it is: The Stooges â€' No Fun; Outkast â€' Hey Ya!; Steve Reich â€' Clapping music; Paco de Lucia â€' Cepa de Andaluza; Queen â€' We will rock you; Abyssinian Baptist Choir â€' Said I wasn't going to tell nobody; Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan â€' Allah Mohammed Char Yaar; The Marvelletes â€' Too Many Fish in the Sea; Miles Davis - Black Satin; The Ventures â€' Let's Go
For the record, I love love loved Black Satin. So wild and inventive, yet the groove still abides despite it all.
B time:
Toumast â€' Ammilana â€' This week's nominations hailed from all corners of the globe. Toumast are Touaregs from the Sahara, but ullulations aside, they sound like the distant cousins of the Velvet Underground. Clapping here forms a percussive backdrop to a mysterious ongoing drone...
The...
This groundbreaking 1959 album is as close to perfection as jazz gets without sacrificing its spontaneity
I had hoped that a blog on the popular and funky Hammond organist Jimmy Smith might attract more than the average number of commentators, but I wasn't prepared for the gratifying deluge of responses following my inclusion of Smith in this series.
It has to be said it was a passing disappointment to discover that most of the comments were about the advanced age of the England World Cup squad, with fitting eulogies for Rosie Swash running a close second. But us jazzers are always being accused of living in a world of our own, and analogies between football and jazz (check out the Vortex Club's World Cup Jazzball series) always seemed appropriate to me.
It has to be said, of course, that if jazz musicians greeted the unexpected moves of others with the reflexes of the England defence against Germany, the music would have died out a long time ago, but the best spontaneous jazz-making certainly brings Brazil or Argentina's one-touch fluency to mind. In respect of which, commenter oohrogerpalmer's aside about his Hammond-organ playing nan in his otherwise footie-centric comment brings to mind my venerable mother-in-law, and her observations on the England-Germany game: "There seemed to be a lot of people in white shirts playing football, and a lot of people in red shirts watching." Gary Lineker et al could probably have done with...
Kenzo's Creative Director Antonio Marras talks to Dazed about the clash between Japanese and French styles in the Spring/Summer 2011 menswear collection. 
In the autumn of 1964, young Kenzo Takada travelled on a boat all the way to Japan from France, arriving in Marseille on 1st January 1965. The adventurous trip turned along the way into a journey of discovery since the ship made many ports of call that contributed to give the young designer a cultural shock and that influenced in later years his designs. Kenzo's current creative director Antonio Marras reversed the story: the Alghero-born designer knows very well that travelling is encoded in the fashion house's DNA and took Kenzo's destination, the port of Marseille, as a starting point to tell a transnational fashion story.
Traditional white and blue sailor's stripes were used for c... article continues »
View Article Gallery (4 images) »
mail this article to a friend »
Let us know what went astonishingly right or horribly wrong this weekend, or even send us a short review. Was it the best Glastonbury ever?
After four days of blazing sunshine, music ranging from grime to a brass band, and attractions as diverse as a talk on the banking crisis in the Left Field to transvestite vogueing in the reliably decadent NYC Downlow, Glastonbury 2010 is over. Every year â€' even the ones in which apocalyptic weather conditions prevail â€' Michael Eavis says it's been the best ever, but this year he might have been right.
So how was it for you? What was your Glastonbury moment? What did you do after dark? What was your favourite discovery of the weekend â€' or was there anything that went horribly wrong?
We're also interested in what you thought of our coverage this year, from our podcasts, videos and picture galleries to our Glastonbury scrapbook, tweets and Grace Dent's TV liveblog. Share your thoughts below â€' and do write us a review of the best (or worst) band you saw all weekend.
Modular and DFA's Aussie band Canyons are back with their own label...
The Canyons are comprised of Leo Thomson (aka Leo Holiday) and Ryan Grieve (aka Ryan Sea-mist). The DJ/Producer team began making music in Perth before moving to Sydney which they now call home. They first began getting recognition overseas by doing releases through their own label, A Hole in the Sky, to DFA. They are renowned for their discovery of Tame Impala, and have completed remixes with such bands as Empire of the Sun, Ladyhawke, Tame Impala and Lost Valentinos. When Dazed Digital caught up with them in their studio in Sydney, they were busy working on their debut album which will be released through Modular Records in the near future.
... article continues »
mail this article to a friend »
Mflow, a new download service, encourages users to recommend tracks to each other for a free listen
If I had a penny for every time I've heard pro-piracy people say the music industry should stop whining about illegal downloading and be entrepreneurial â€' well, I'd be making more money than I or any of my colleagues are making from online streaming. It's as if they think being against piracy somehow equates to being against the internet.
The fact is, we've seen a slew of new music services aimed both at consumers and musicians themselves. There's certainly no lack of entrepreneurialism. But some of these services are more about lining their own pockets than building sustainable new models to help musicians survive. Recently, an online service called The Men from the Press aimed to charge unsigned, self-releasing artists for having their music critiqued by music journalists. The more esteemed the publications the journalists worked for, the more it would cost. The service shut down after only a few weeks, with many journalists and publications criticising it for giving artists the impression they could actually buy reviews.
As I've written, although I like the Mog.com music subscription service from a consumer point of view, I seriously doubt artists will make money from it. Indeed, it seems the money part was an afterthought: "That's for labels to work out," the CEO has said. (Incidentally, a friend of mine was surprised to see his self-released tracks on...
When it comes to the NME myth-making process â€' and hating in others what they despise in themselves â€' Julie Burchill and Nick Kent take the cake
"Karma", as the Dalai Lama has never actually been heard to say, but could certainly be forgiven for thinking, "is a bitch." One of the articles of faith outlined in Nick Kent's self-confessedly unreliable memoir Apathy for the Devil is that rock journalists have a professional duty to be "right there in the scrum as wilful participants".
Kent's involvement in early versions of the Damned and the Sex Pistols (sadly, Malcolm McLaren's attempt to reunite him with ex-girlfriend Chrissie Hynde in a band called the Masters of the Backside never really got off the ground) suggests that, in this respect at least, he was as good as his word. Ironically, Kent's willingness to live by his own credo would ultimately help make him the whipping boy â€' literally, at the chain-wielding hands of Sid Vicious â€' for punk rock's disingenuous determination to present itself as a clean break with the music that preceded it. "To be victimised by the very thing I'd helped bring into being," he observes poignantly on p288, "that was cold".
In recent weeks, this same pattern has repeated itself. When Kent decided to describe his former NME colleague Julie Burchill as having "a vibe about her that could best be described as Myra Hindley-esque", he must have known what was coming to him. But...
A new music streaming service, MOG, has set up shop. While its payment structure is unclear, it seems that the revenue split destined for artists and composers is even more uncertain than that from Spotify
For the past year, Spotify has dominated much of the debate around music streaming sites. While it's been praised by users, questions have been asked as to whether its business model is sustainable if they don't manage to convert enough of its free subscription service users to premium, paying subscribers. Record labels have largely been positive (which might have something to do with them owning equity in the service), but artists have been less so as they're wondering if any revenue will filter down to them.
Now a new American streaming service called MOG is planning to take on both Spotify and Pandora (currently only available in the US due to licensing restrictions) by offering a hybrid of on-demand and radio. I spoke to president and CEO of MOG, David Hyman, who is certainly a confident man: "I built Gracenote, monetised it and the patent is still under my name. I built my first music website, Addicted to Noise, in 1994, and it became the biggest at the time. I ended up selling it to MTV."
MOG is a $5 a month all-you-can-eat subscription user interface (Hyman says it'll probably be £5 a month in the UK as European publishing rates are higher). The service will be...
Jane's Addiction bassist quits again, Sean Lennon defends mom Yoko for allowing dad John's image in a car ad, Lil Wayne sentencing rescheduled again, Jimmy Fallon and ?uestlove talk band discovery.
Photo by Jody VB
Welcome to 5-10-15-20, where we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they really liked hearing the "Kids Incorporated" theme song over and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.
For this edition, we spoke with punk rock institution Ted Leo, 39. Ted's forthcoming album with his band the Pharmacists is called The Brutalist Bricks and it's out March 9 on Matador.
Buddy Holly: "Rave On"
I had the radio on all the time. I would wake up to it, go to sleep to it. I had one of those devices that seem so hilarious now-- it was a little speaker that's shaped like a White Castle hamburger bun, and you're supposed to stick it under your pillow and fall asleep to music. It was a hard plastic. I don't know why they thought that would be a good idea [laughs]. But I had it.
I was young as shit, but I do remember a lot of good radio. Elton John was everywhere, and I was also into bubblegum pop like ELO. There was already a lot of weird nostalgia for 60s stuff like Buddy Holly and the Beatles, too. If I was...