Africa
Fool’s Gold and Benin City, Camden Bar FlyTuesday, 27 April 2010
Fool’s Gold’s debut album brims over with the enthusiasm of a band who have discovered - primarily through African music - that there’s another way to play the electric guitar other than to just form workman-like bar-chords, stamp down hard on the... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Sarnath BanerjeeSaturday, 13 March 2010
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Sarnath BanerjeeSaturday, 13 March 2010
The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in... Read more... |
Interview: Toumani DiabatéThursday, 04 March 2010
I am talking to Toumani Diabaté on a phone line into Bamako that, as he explains with an audible shrug, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. He was due in London a couple of weeks ago to promote Ali & Toumani, his album of duets with the late... Read more... |
The South African sound of MbaqangaTuesday, 02 March 2010On a new CD compilation from Strut Records out this week, Next Stop... Soweto, we’re back in Soweto in the 1960s and 1970s and it's the dark, dark days of apartheid; an era in which it was actually against the law for a black South African to even... Read more... |
New Music CDs Round-Up 6Sunday, 28 February 2010
This month's CD selection is headed up by extraordinary albums from modern folkist Chris Wood, a startling come-back from Gil Scott-Heron and pretenders to the New Rave throne New Young Pony Club. Among the new releases we have the late Johnny Cash... Read more... |
African Soul Rebels, Barbican HallSunday, 21 February 2010
Here’s a deceptively simple question. What is African music? Does a band make African music simply by dint of the fact they come from Africa? One of last night’s three African Soul Rebels acts was South Africa’s Kalahari Surfers. Ensconced behind a... Read more... |
Vampire Weekend, Brixton O2 AcademyWednesday, 17 February 2010
The death at the weekend of Doug Fieger, the co-founder of The Knack, meant that melodic US pop had lost a fine exponent. But more than 30 years on from the eternal über-hit "My Sharona" the appeal of infectious hook-lined music lives on in the work... Read more... |
Interview: Oumou Sangare, Soul RebelMonday, 15 February 2010
Oumou Sangare, Malian diva and one of the world’s great singers, is not, as I eventually found out myself, a woman to be trifled with. When she bought some land outside Bamako, the capital of Mali, a local official by accident or oversight also sold... Read more... |
Interview: Director Peter BrookWednesday, 10 February 2010
Theatre director Peter Brook is back in London. Brightly, eloquently, he's promoting his new show, in English (most of his work since the 1970s has been in French), currently running at the Barbican: entitled Eleven and Twelve, it's a dense chamber... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright David GreigSaturday, 06 February 2010
A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and... Read more... |
Art Gallery: Afro Modern, Tate LiverpoolFriday, 05 February 2010
Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic is without doubt one of the year’s most enterprising and original exhibitions. Attempting to trace the impact on art of black cultures from around the Atlantic – in Africa, Europe and the Americas –... Read more... |
