You don’t expect that one of the most sought-after and original rock bands would eventually come from an oasis city in the depths of the Algerian Sahara Desert. Still, since their inception occurred in 2006, Imarhan has grown into an unadulterated and impassionate embodiment of what the soul of rock...
Articles
Articles
There’s so much need right now to shift the focus of the news coming from Ukraine and (re)discover and support what the country has to offer culturally. That’s why DakhaBrakha’s gig at the Barbican Centre on Thursday evening couldn’t happen at a more fitting time. After three years of absence from...
It’s a true blessing when we meet musicians able to spur us to leave our comfort zone behind. Kuunatic, a leftfield and far-out all-female Tokyo-based trio is the latest act who has led us far away from our ‘safe place’. To make your way into the Kuunatic world, you have...
There’s a small but wonderful miracle going on air throughout the depths of the Peruvian Amazonas. Aptly named La Voz de La Selva, the radio station based in Iquitos (in North Eastern Peru) is the only media of communication reaching and giving voice to the communities living in the vast,...
Soweto Kinch’s White Juju dropped us on a political see-saw of time. Unsettling. Disturbing. But with an overtone of hope. It was a brutally honest and intellectual investigation into the “powerful suspicion that the current receptivity to the black experience… may only be momentary”. All conveyed through an uncommon mix of...
After winning three Grammys, it’s clear Cécile McLorin Salvant has been faced with artistic compromise. I felt she had sadly succumbed to sticking with her status quo. The performance felt bedded in her safe place. However she is a real master of reinventing songs and it’s her embodiment of every...
Beware of the front row for this night. With a twelve-piece horn and eight-piece rhythm section, some serious vibrations will be coming your way! New Regency Orchestra is a new collaborative project curated by Lex Blondin and co-led by musical director and African diasporic multi-percussionist Crispin ‘Spry’ Robinson. Presenting an...
Judi Jackson is able to tease out more erotic energy from a crowd than eighteen months of lockdown boredom. Or maybe it’s the combination of both. This was a night packed with couples flirting, whispering and grinding. I was enchanted too, and just one worrying step away from trying to...
From our personal experience, we never found it too hard to fall for local Cuban music traditions. Still, the musical infatuation is even more gratifying and intense when prompted and guided by a fully committed music researcher, journalist, podcaster and producer like Gianluca Tramontana. That’s how we approached changüí, the...
Archie Shepp may not have executed his ideas with the same technical dexterity I imagine of earlier years. However in his mid-eighties, he still delivered a beautifully effectual experience that transcended any physical limitations. Alongside Jason Moran, their musical ideas revealed their reverence towards the plight of inequality and the complexities...