Clik here to view.
A staircase on 86th St
Ray Barretto’s “El Watusi” was one of my favourite 45s of 1963, a sudden blast of exoticism amid the green shoots of Mersey Beat and New Wave R&B (as the emergent soul music was briefly known)....
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Thanks for the song, Mr Knight…”
Those are the words spoken by Leonard Cohen over the final notes of one of the tracks on his 1992 album, The Future, and they came to mind when I read something Sharon Robinson, Cohen’s songwriting and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lee Konitz: the improviser at 85
No musician interrogates a song more thoroughly than the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz: separating its components, wiping off the accumulated dirt and scraping away the rust, holding the bits up to the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Keith Tippett with poetry and strings
Like many British improvisers of his generation, the pianist and composer Keith Tippett could be forgiven for adopting a mildly jaundiced view of the acceptance he is accorded in his own country, at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A weekend with Booker T
It was a warm evening, and the air conditioning had packed up. An hour before midnight last Friday, Ronnie Scott’s Club was like a sauna. “That’s when it started to feel authentic,” Booker T Jones...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where the Stones were fourth on the bill
If you look carefully at the top of the building in the photograph, you’ll see the faintest shadow of the long-gone neon sign that read ODEON. I took the picture on a rainy day a couple of winters...
View ArticleA poem by Roy Kelly
Roy Kelly’s work appears from time to time in the kind of magazines that still print poetry (there’s one of his in this week’s Spectator). He was born in 1949, and Peterloo Poets published a collection...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ten Freedom Summers / 1
Fifty years ago, a wholehearted embrace of American culture made even those of us 3,000 miles away feel we had a stake in the country’s destiny. So although we may have been neither American, nor...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Joe Locke’s respite music
Joe Locke says his new album, Lay Down My Heart, is intended “to provide respite for folks who work hard every day and need an opportunity to slow down and be reacquainted with that certain something...
View ArticleA voice to remember
Maybe you’ve heard the sad news that Linda Ronstadt will never sing again. She announced it a week or so ago, letting the world know that Parkinson’s disease has taken her voice. Today I read an...
View Article