Africa
Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics, BarbicanThursday, 30 September 2010
After only a couple of songs there are shouts from the audience to turn Mulatu up. But these people have missed the point. The clue is in the name of the instrument he's playing: the vibraphone, or vibes for short. The word "vibe" has long been... Read more... |
The Born Free Legacy, BBC FourTuesday, 28 September 2010
If you have fond childhood memories of either the Born Free book or movie, you might want to stay away. From the opening moments of this documentary, the knowledge that lion-loving conservationist George Adamson was fatally shot in the back on a... Read more... |
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Prog 2, Sadler's WellsThursday, 16 September 2010
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their... Read more... |
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Prog 1, Sadler's WellsWednesday, 15 September 2010
Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance... Read more... |
The Musical Pygmies of the Central African RepublicSaturday, 04 September 2010
As there's something of a forest theme this weekend on theartsdesk, with the Royal Opera House's If-A-Tree festival curated by Joanna McGregor with Scanner, and a report from this year's Borneo Rainforest World Music Festival, and here, a diary of... Read more... |
I Am Slave, Channel 4Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Berlin: Requiem for a Shaker-UpperSaturday, 28 August 2010
It is tempting to playfully twist the German language a little to come up with a word that best describes the avant garde German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief. A “Wachrüttler”, literally a shaker-upper or rouser, is probably the... Read more... |
C W Stoneking, The Windmill, BrixtonSaturday, 28 August 2010
“One afternoon back in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, I met four scientists in a bar, they were on their way to West Africa to study a parasitic worm that attacks the eyeballs of human beings and turns them into blind men.” And so begin the sleeve notes... Read more... |
Tinariwen, HMV ForumSunday, 08 August 2010
Back in June of this year, the international successful Malian blues band gave what felt at the time like a curiously muted performance at the World Cup Kick-off Celebration Concert in Johannesburg. But perhaps it was the effect of having their... Read more... |
Benda Bilili!Friday, 06 August 2010
I must confess that when I first heard about Staff Benda Bilili - a Congolese band partly made up of paraplegics – I felt a little uneasy. The last thing that one wants as a (hopefully) trusted critic is to feel compromised by an obligation to give... Read more... |
New Music CDs Round-Up 11Saturday, 31 July 2010
CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom... Read more... |
WOMAD 2, Charlton ParkTuesday, 27 July 2010
Its acronymic moniker stands for World Of Music, Arts and Dance, but the line-up at this year’s WOMAD is, as usual, very much skewed towards the first of those artforms – hailing from anywhere and everywhere between Australia and Azerbaijan. The “... Read more... |
