| rss2email.ru |
 Блог Рекламиста – SEO, SMO, Маркетинг  |  Блог-Эксперт: блог-маркетинг и бизнес  |  Новости поисковой оптимизации  |  Актуальные статьи о финансах и законах  |
 |  Music: Music blog | guardian.co.ukArticles published by guardian.co.uk Music about: Music blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- Mercury Prize 2010: Live blog
Which of the twelve nominees will take home the Mercury Music Prize? And what passes for a decent starter in the world of music these days? Follow our live blog tonight for all this and more ...
12.17am: Hello and welcome. Two years ago you may recall that I live blogged the Mercury Music Prize. It was a momentous occasion. The New York Times described it as "an unpredictable literary whirlwind, why hasn't this Jonze been promoted?", for instance. And most set texts regard it as a peak in the history of journalism that can never be topped. At least I assume that's why I haven't been asked to do another one in the last two years. Anyway ... to cut a long waffle short, I'm back in business and from 6pm today you can catch me blogging my knuckles to dust live from Grosvenor House in London. Who will win? Who will do a runner? And who will make an embarrassing fool out of themselves after too much free Pinot Grigio? As long as the answer to the last question isn't "me", this should be a lot of fun.
.
Oh, and to keep you occupied up until that point, here's a reminder of the nominees
Biffy Clyro – Only Revolutions
Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea
Dizzee Rascal – Tongue n' Cheek
Foals – Total Life Forever
I Am Kloot – Sky at Night
Kit Downes Trio – Golden
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation
Villagers – Becoming a Jackal
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
The xx – xxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Great moments in jazz: Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
It's almost impossible to choose just one great moment from the legacy of this pioneering bassist and compositional genius
"My music is evidence of my soul's will to live," Charles Mingus once said, and the evidence of that life-force amounts to some of the most dramatic and powerful jazz composed in the 20th century. A volcanically active genius, the bass player packed an incendiary mix of soulful music, impassioned politics, cross-genre vision and creative but occasionally self-destructive impetuosity into a three-decade career.
The musicologist and conductor Gunther Schuller (recently interviewed by the Guardian), Mingus's long-time advocate and close friend, regarded him as the true heir to Duke Ellington for the scope and imagination with which he sought to transform jazz. Mingus's many great moments could take up the rest of this series, but one of the greatest of all is the structurally adventurous and hauntingly eloquent 1963 work The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
This is Track C, entitled Group Dancers, with its piano intro by Jaki Byard, and a rich orchestral sound delivered by only an 11-piece band including saxophonists Booker Ervin (tenor) Charlie Mariano (alto) and Quentin Jackson (trombone).
Mingus was born in Arizona on April 22, 1922 and raised in Los Angeles. He was taught double-bass by Red Callendar, and by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's Herman Rheinshagen (classical music played as big a part in his compositional thinking as gospel songs and the blues). Mingus toured with New Orleans players Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory in the 40s, and later worked briefly with Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington. As an intuitive counter-melodic improviser, he became a key member of the 1950-51 chamber-jazz trio featuring vibraphonist Red Norvo and guitarist Tal Farlow, and he also memorably accompanied bebop heroes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Bud Powell on the famous Massey Hall Concert of 1953.
If he had been an improvising instrumentalist alone, Mingus would have been a jazz legend simply for his bass playing. But Mingus the ensemble player and Mingus the composer were one and the same. His playing style joined the traditional harmony-marking and time-keeping role of the bass to the bebop agility of the 40s, and his dexterity, harmonic sophistication and sheer power transformed every group he joined. Bass-playing also gave Mingus an insight into the low sonorities and inner hamonies of jazz composition, and his melodic approach was profoundly influenced by the blues and gospel music of his childhood.
In 1955 he formed a co-operative composers' workshop including saxophonists Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, developing a spontaneous composing approach in which he would transmit ideas from the piano rather than in notation, or shout them out while playing the bass. Unlike some of the more cerebral beboppers of the 1950s, Mingus did not camouflage the blues, gospel and popular-song melodies he loved, but constantly pummelled and stretched them with tempo changes and free-collective improvisations, or pared them down into modal or scale-based structures. He could make his orchestras shout, bustle and swing like Count Basie, but he also gave them Duke Ellington's sumptuous tone colours and ambiguous textures. He saw the jazz ensemble as a vehicle for both collective empathy and individual expressiveness, and he fearlessly allowed his players to float freely in and out of range of the written parts. The raucously spontaneous feel of a Mingus orchestra was quite different to the machine-like orderliness of much big-band jazz, and this bold approach was to have a huge influence on subsequent jazz composition; notably in the work of Carla Bley.
Mingus tirelessly fought the white-run entertainment business of his day, but his attempts to survive outside it were fraught with financial problems. These difficulties, and erratic mental health, stalled his career in the late 60s, but a Guggenheim fellowship and the success of his no-prisoners autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, brought him back. He worked on movie scores, recordings and a late-career album with Joni Mitchell. After Mingus's death in 1979, a huge symphonic piece, entitled Epitaph, was found among his papers. He started writing it in his teens, embracing Jelly Roll Morton's early jazz, standard songs and techniques adapted from Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky.
On wider matters, I'm grateful for the helpful contributions of commentators on this blog, and particularly welcome Bix2bop's recent comment on the contribution of bands like Don Ellis's and John Handy's to the often underrated 60s jazz scene, and nilpferd's on the importance of balancing an appreciation of Stan Getz's more muscular playing against the understatements of samba jazz. Apologies too for not dealing with earlier Latin jazz influences – such as Chano Pozo's with Dizzy Gillespie – earlier in the series. Space considerations force all kinds of unfair exclusions to a list like this, but please keep the comments coming.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Deerhunter – Helicopter
Bradford Cox fuses a nihilistic outlook with a ruddy lovely tune
"No one cares for me/ I keep no company/ I have minimal needs/ And now they are through with me." It's a line that pretty much sums up the frazzled sentiment running through this new track from Deerhunter's fourth album, Halcyon Digest. Over backwards-sounding drums, acoustic strums and featuring what sounds like drops of water, Helicopter is simultaneously immediate and strangely dislocated, as if recorded at the bottom of the sea. The monochrome video features an extended shot of singer Bradford Cox mouthing the lyrics while what looks like an old VHS tape plays out over his face. Like the song itself, it's simple, strangely engrossing and downright lovely.
Halcyon Digest is out on 27 Septemberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Robyn – Body Talk Pt 2: Exclusive album stream
Be among the first to hear the second instalment of the Swedish pop star's Body Talk album trilogy
This year, pop fans have been hit by the audacious, three-pronged attack of Robyn's Body Talk series. Released in June this year, Body Talk Pt 1 was eight tracks of pure pop experimentalism, veering from the ridiculous futuristic hip-hop stylings of Fembot to the dark, bass-rumbling None of Dem (produced by Röyksopp). At its core was the UK top 10 single Dancing On My Own, a juddering heartbreak anthem featuring quite possibly the saddest ever "oh, oh, ohhs" in recorded history.
If Pt 1 screamed "look at me! I'm back and I've even got an ill-advised Jamaican dancehall pastiche up my sleeve", then Body Talk Pt 2 (already the recipient of a four-star review in the Guardian) is sat at the bar, fully aware of its own brilliance, just waiting for you to catch on. Opening track In My Eyes (which features a reunion with Kleerup, the producer behind her No 1 hit With Every Heartbeat) is a gorgeous rush of twinkling keyboards with a message of "it's all going to be OK, just chill out a bit, yeah?", followed by the late-90s pop of Include Me Out, a shout-out to just about everyone ("This one's for the granny/ Take a bow"). The Diplo-assisted Criminal Intent and U Should Know Better – a duet of sorts with Snoop Dogg – both add a sense of fun, the latter featuring the great line: "When in Rome I sat down with the Romans/ Said we need a black pope and she better be a woman."But it's Robyn's ability to wrench heartache seemingly out of nowhere that defines Body Talk Part 2. Current single Hang With Me is another feather-light slice of electro-pop with a chorus of sky-scraping magnificence, while closing track Indestructible (Acoustic Version) is all sweeping strings and defiance in the face of another broken heart. If the rumours are true, Indestructible will be reborn on Part 3 as an electro-pop stomper.
In a recent interview with Popjustice.com, Robyn said about her position in pop: "I'm always going to feel like an outsider. I'm always going to identify myself as that person I was when I was 15." In many ways it's this sense of not quite fitting in that has enabled her to continue a career which could easily have ended as quickly as it began in 1997. With Body Talk Pt 2, she's proved once again that it's best to work on instinct and let everyone else catch up.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=90855&u=756462&r=477547156 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp |
