Music and Issue 582

O’Death

Head Home

9 Aug 2007

ALT.COUNTRY O’Death are five guys with barely a shirt between them, who, despite hailing from New York, evoke the deep south in their punk country songs: toothless yokels and moonshine-fuelled barn dances. Greg Jamie’s weathered vocals swings from…

Nikki King & Marcus Ford

9 Aug 2007

Singer Niki King has covered a lot of ground in stylistic terms, but her work with guitarist Marcus Ford has been the strand most deeply rooted in a mainstream jazz approach. This gig is part of their current promotion of a new duo album bearing the…

Seasick Steve

9 Aug 2007

Every now and then pop culture throws something into the public consciousness based solely on quality. It may not be fashionable, it’s not part of a new movement, it doesn’t fit into any scene, it’s just good. This year’s phenomenal anomaly is…

Bill Callahan

9 Aug 2007

By way of a typically cryptic explanation, the enigmatic American singer-songwriter Bill Callahan once said – in response to what can only have been a helluva lot of queries about his willfully opaque moniker Smog – ‘I live in smog.’ He may have done…

Take That

9 Aug 2007

Faced with the prospect of Never Forget, ‘a new musical based on the songs of Take That’, you’d be forgiven for thinking ‘Mamma Mia, here we go again...’

Made in Scotland

9 Aug 2007

Think of Scotland’s most famous traditional exports and what comes to mind? While in reality they may now be as diverse as the people living within its boundaries, Scotland still sometimes struggles to escape the clichés – tartan, whisky, misty…

Scottish Opera appoints new director

News

9 Aug 2007

Italian conductor Francesco Corti signed up as new music director

Hitlist - the best Festival music

9 Aug 2007

International Festival Opening Concert: Candide Jonathan Mills kicks off his first Internataional Festival at the helm with a concert that aims to bridge the gap between the Fringe and the Festival, featuring Bernstein’s vivacious Candide with Laura…

Singles & Downloads

9 Aug 2007

Nose plugs and a pair of Marigolds were required to sift through this week’s singles bag, such was its predominantly stinky content. The main offender being Shop Boyz’ gang banging rotter ‘Party Like a Rockstar’ (Universal) lllll, the fastest selling…

Hitlist - The best rock, pop, jazz & folk

9 Aug 2007

• Ari-Up She’ll always be best known as the lead singer of seminal grrrrl punks The Slits but now, club night Pretty Ugly welcomes her back witha new band The True Warriors, who will be playing new material plus the songs of The Slits with a heavy…

Common

Finding Forever

9 Aug 2007

HIP HOP Billed all too regularly as the nearly man of hip hop, this isn’t technically true of Common. Seven albums in, he was, until 2005’s Be an underground doyen, releasing excellent albums such as Like Water for Chocolate, which were scholarly…

Robin Guthrie

9 Aug 2007

A sonic layer here, a melodic texture there – and so continue the musical exploits of former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, a man who invariably finds himself mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase ‘beautiful ambient soundscapes’. Grangemouth-born…

5 Reasons To Go See - Giant Tank vs The Fringe!!!

9 Aug 2007

Edinburgh’s premiere promoters of aktionist noise happenings commemorate a decade of cottage industry chunder with three bloody Sundays of non-Fringe-based hissy fits. Five reasons for their essentialness follow 1 It’s not music. It’s just noise And…

Òran Mór launches new music strand

News

9 Aug 2007

It introduced a whole new audience to theatre with its popular A Play, A Pie and A Pint series. Now Òran Mór is preparing to set its stall for something more sophisticated.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

9 Aug 2007

5 Questions

Fisher King Leven

9 Aug 2007

Musical collaborations are often more for the benefit of the artists involved than their audiences but fans of narrative songwriting of the folk-country variety will appreciate the coming together of Fisher, King and Leven. This triumvirate of…

Tony Monaco Trio

9 Aug 2007

Ohio-born Hammond organ star Tony Monaco started out on accordion as a kid, but was converted to the B3 when a heard a Jimmy Smith album as a youngster. It sparked a passion that ultimately took him onto the international festival circuit, while his…

Dick Lee Septet

9 Aug 2007

Clarinetist Dick Lee is a regular at this venue, and leads his seven-piece expansion of Swing 2007, featuring a four-horn frontline in which he is joined by Anne Evans, Duncan Nairn and Martin Foster, a combination that gives him access to a wide…

Music of Thomas Adès

9 Aug 2007

For some inexplicable reason, the music of the young English composer Thomas Adès doesn’t get much of an airing north of the border. Putting that to rights is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, with Adès himself conducting his violin concerto and the…

Les Bof!

9 Aug 2007

There’s a certain ‘I don’t know what’ about this bunch of freakbeat rockers. The French language four-piece may be based in Edinburgh, but they are fronted by a bona fide Frenchy, the sharply dressed show-off singer Laurent Mombel, who left behind his…

Candide

9 Aug 2007

In setting up this year’s Opening Concert of the Edinburgh International Festival, Jonathan Mills has quickly ditched the tradition of a Sunday evening kick-off (although the St Giles’ Festival Service remains in place for the morning) and has brought…

L’Orfeo

9 Aug 2007

‘Festivals are a sort of personal odyssey,’ says EIF director Jonathan Mills, ‘like a pilgrimage or rite of passage, where you can learn about yourself.’ In programming his first Festival, Mills also threw down a personal gauntlet, meeting the challenge…

Mark Soskin

One Hopeful Day

9 Aug 2007

JAZZ Pianist Mark Soskin has long seemed one of those musicians destined to be pretty much the perennial sideman, turning in high-class performances for a range of other leaders, from Sonny Rollins downwards. It is good, then, to see him get another…

Tom Russell & Michael Martin

9 Aug 2007

Folk singers of any depth and quality should be the real historians of a nation, capturing the essence of a people through their own distilled musical methods. The work of a man like Tom Russell should be looked up and devoured in libraries by eager…

Genaro

Genaro

9 Aug 2007

ROCK There is a fine line in the risky profession of innovative guitar music between brilliance and wanksmithery and Benbecula signings Genaro appear to tread this with glee. Still, the majority of their debut sits on the right side of the divide…