‘Dee Tee’ played alto sax, flute and percussion and was stylist for celebrated soul-funk band
Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, a founding member of the long-running soul-funk band Kool & the Gang, known for such hits as Celebration and Get Down On It, has died.
He was 70 years old.
Continue reading...With the 10th anniversary of her death this week, rediscover the best of Winehouse’s discography, where heartbreak and anger are mixed up with wit and joy
After all its emotional strife, the Back to Black album concludes with a jokey paean to weed. You could construct an argument that Addicted is Winehouse once more tapping into a venerable jazz tradition – it’s easy to imagine Fats Waller singing about someone snaffling his stash in the 30s – but perhaps it’s better to just enjoy its mordant wit.
Continue reading...As the US boiled with violence, 1969’s Harlem cultural festival nourished spirits with soul, jazz and gospel. Now, Questlove has turned lost footage of it into a brilliant, pertinent documentary
It’s 29 June 1969, and at Harlem’s Mount Morris park (now Marcus Garvey park), the 5th Dimension are about to take the stage. The Los Angeles group are already stars, thanks to hits including Up, Up and Away and Aquarius, from the musical Hair, which topped the Billboard charts that spring. But their pop-oriented repertoire, often penned by white songwriters, has kept them off the US’s R&B radio stations and thus from Black audiences. “We’d tried to separate ourselves from the segregation in our society, but we still got caught up in all that,” remembers the group’s founding singer, Billy Davis Jr, today. “And the average Black family didn’t earn enough to come see us at the nightclubs we were playing. They’d seen us on TV, but they’d never seen us live.”
That was about to change with their headline performance on the opening day of the Harlem cultural festival. A series of six Sunday concerts that summer, the festival showcased the cream of the era’s soul, gospel, blues and jazz artists before an audience of 300,000, many from the surrounding neighbourhoods. “I looked out and saw a sea of faces, and their response was so loving, so welcoming and exciting,” says Davis Jr’s wife and bandmate, Marilyn McCoo, for whom the festival remains a treasured memory. She’s not alone. Harlemite Musa Jackson, then just a five-year-old, still remembers how the 5th Dimension’s orange costumes, gleaming in the sun, made them look “like Creamsicles”.
Continue reading...A US state department initiative was the unlikely catalyst for a creative explosion of Pakistani rhythm and western improv
In 1956, a new weapon was unveiled in the cold war: jazz. That year, the US introduced the Jazz Ambassadors Tour, a showcase that sent American musicians overseas to parts of the world that were perceived to be under threat of Soviet influence.
While they initially intended to send ballet dancers and symphony orchestras, the State Department were persuaded that the jazz performers who were spearheading the civil rights movement would help generate a positive image of the US to newly independent nations (between 1945 and 1960, 40 countries gained their independence, representing a quarter of the world’s population). The department saw it as a way of silencing Soviet criticism that racial inequality was a stark issue in the US. The ethics were questionable, but the musicians saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share their music directly with people in countries from Asia to Africa and beyond.
Continue reading...He’s worked with Solange, Frank Ocean, Harry Styles and more – and his own music is wondrously fun and spiritual. The LA artist explains why it sounds like butterflies and mountain lions
Amid the swirling sounds and scenes intersected by Los Angeles’ sprawling freeways, John Carroll Kirby is somewhere at the centre of it all, shirt open, hair slicked back. He circles the city’s buzzing jazz movement with his soul-dappled instrumentals and is a keysman, composer and producer who’s been enlisted by some of the most exciting names in contemporary pop: Frank Ocean, Mark Ronson, Harry Styles, Blood Orange, and Solange Knowles, whose incendiary past two albums, A Seat at the Table and When I Get Home, were shaped in part by Kirby.
He laughs as he describes his own work as “French cat burglar music”: it blends jazz with new age, funk and exotica, flutes often taking centre stage. Tracks are inspired by paintings of ayahuasca visions or stories about dolphins that turn into lost boys. Kirby is of a spiritual persuasion, but he has a sense of humour about it, too.
Continue reading...Some of you went classic rock; others Iranian ambient. And yet others took on epic challenges that will take years to complete … here’s what you’ve been listening to while working under lockdown
If I need to concentrate on something really thorny, I go for Bach every time. It seems to allow my brain to work at a high level and I do almost all my best work to Bach. András Schiff or Angela Hewitt playing keyboard works, and Hilary Hahn on violin. Beethoven’s late quartets and Schubert lieder are good for deep thought. If I’m just doing low-level stuff, then Radio Paradise is my go-to – it’s a commercial-free internet station, which I like because it mixes a lot of stuff I know from my younger days with music that I’m less familiar with. Edward Collier, software developer, Cheltenham
Continue reading...From drill’s high watermark to Tuareg rock, Colombian pop and London jazz, here are our music editors’ picks of the best LPs from the first half of the year
Continue reading...Against a backdrop of Covid, a striking number of musicians, from hard rock to jazz, made music rich with positivity. In the first of a two-part series, they tell their stories
I had really given up on music after my mom passed away [in 2014], and then of course the record that I saw as my death rattle [2017’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet] got picked up in a big way. It was a very bittersweet moment where all these great things were happening in the wake of loss. I didn’t allow myself to feel that for a long time. Now I feel ready to embrace feeling.
Continue reading...It’s hosted opera greats, suffragette rallies, Hitchcock films, sports events, sci-fi conventions – and, of course, the Proms and countless rock gigs. Artists from Led Zeppelin to Abba recall their moments on the hallowed stage
The Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old today (and the Guardian was there to see it opened by Queen Victoria). With a design based on a Roman amphitheatre, stacked balconies pack the audience close to the action – and at a capacity touching 6,000, the number of visitors entertained at the London venue runs to many millions. But what is it like to play as a performer? We asked artists and sportspeople for their memories of being centre stage at the iconic venue.
Continue reading...From the Godfathers of Arabic rap to the father of Ethio-jazz, Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan guides a tour through global music’s greatest
This week I wrote about the glaring lack of international inclusivity in the Grammys’ newly redubbed global music (formerly world music) category.
In the category’s 38-year history, almost 80% of African nations have never had an artist nominated; no Middle Eastern or eastern European musician has ever won; every winner in the past eight years has been a repeat winner; and nearly two-thirds of the nominations have come from just six countries (the US, the UK, Brazil, Mali, South Africa, India). The situation shows little signs of improving.
Continue reading...The Fania All-Stars player and record-label impresario worked with Latin music giants including Celia Cruz and fostered a more intense, political salsa sound
Johnny Pacheco, the co-founder of trailblazing salsa label Fania Records, has died aged 85. The cause was complications from pneumonia.
A representative for Fania said Pacheco was “the man most responsible for the genre of salsa music. He was a visionary and his music will live on eternally.”
Continue reading...From flights of sublime abstraction with Miles Davis to virtuoso jazz fusion, Corea’s artistry was irresistible to the last
A certain melodic sparkle and an irresistible rhythmic vitality were the elements that allowed Chick Corea to move beyond the restricted audiences of the jazz world to capture listeners from other spheres. In so doing, he inspired generations of musicians, not just with the notes he played and the ideas he explored, but with his ability to communicate those often complex elements in an approachable way.
Corea’s background in jazz, classical and Latin music provided the ingredients for a career that went in many directions, from influential solo piano recordings and watercolour duets with the vibraphonist Gary Burton to jazz-rock explosions with his Elektric Band. If his keyboard skills set standards, his spirit of inquiry encouraged others to remove barriers and cross musical frontiers.
Continue reading...The composer, keyboardist and bandleader, who won 23 Grammy awards, has died of a rare form of cancer
The jazz pioneer Chick Corea has died at the age of 79.
According to a post on his Facebook page, the musician died from “a rare form of cancer which was only discovered very recently”. In his career, Corea won 23 Grammys and was the fourth most-nominated artist in Grammys history.
Continue reading...Composer of calmly beautiful works who rejected the term ‘ambient’ collaborated with Brian Eno, Cocteau Twins and more
Harold Budd, the left-field American composer whose work straddled minimalism, jazz, dream-pop and more, has died aged 84. His death was confirmed by his close collaborator Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, who wrote on Facebook that he was “feeling empty, shattered lost and unprepared for this”.
Cocteau Twins wrote on Facebook: “It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Harold Budd. Rest in peace, poet of the piano.”
Continue reading...The movie version of August Wilson’s story of the blues, starring Boseman and a tremendous Viola Davis, is a ferocious opera of passion and pain
A detonation of pure acting firepower is what’s on offer in this movie version of August Wilson’s 1982 stage play. Declarative and theatrical it might be, but it’s also ferociously intelligent and violently focused, an opera of passion and pain. We see African-American musicians hanging around a white-owned Chicago studio one stiflingly hot day in the 1920s, waiting for the legendary blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey to show up with her entourage so they can cut an album. The lead track is expected to be her live hit, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the drama imagines a certain pushy trumpeter in the band named Levee angling for his own version to be recorded. A simmering argument about how this song is to be arranged and performed forms the basis of a confrontation about race, sex and power.
Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with tremendous hauteur: Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I never arrived at Hampton Court with more magnificent display or more queenly prerogative than Davis’s Rainey making her entrance, with her own lovers and court favourites, sweating at the temperature, her painful feet and the incompetence of the studio chiefs. And Chadwick Boseman gives a moving performance as the fiercely talented but insecure Levee, crucified by a childhood experience of racist violence and dreaming of fronting his own band.
Continue reading...The classics are back in the charts even earlier than usual – alongside the perennial row about the Pogues. So why not discover these lesser-known festive bangers?
Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.
Continue reading...He was nicknamed Bird and he soared in his music – if not in his life. For the centenary of the saxophonist who redefined jazz, today’s players reveal how his dizzying speed and spirituality changed their lives
Outside jazz circles, Charlie Parker might not be a household name like Miles Davis or Louis Armstrong, but the saxophonist, who died of cirrhosis aged 34 after struggling with addictions to heroin and alcohol, was one of music’s true innovators. By inventing the dizzyingly fast style known as bebop, Parker turned jazz from dance music into something intensely intellectual and spiritual. As the London jazz festival celebrates his centenary with a tribute, today’s jazz stars talk about the shattering impact of the man nicknamed Bird.
Continue reading...A new documentary uncovers lost tapes to tell the intimate real story of the jazz singer – one with terrible resonance today as the US continues to fight institutional racism
There’s an electrifying moment in Billie, a new documentary about Billie Holiday, when Jonathan “Jo” Jones, a tempestuous, influential African American drummer who played with Holiday from the 1930s to 50s, challenges his white interviewer. “You don’t know what we was going through then,” he says, referring to travelling through the deep south on Count Basie’s tour bus. “What were you going through?” asks the interviewer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl. “We was going through hell!” he shouts. “Miss Billie Holiday didn’t have the privilege of using a toilet in a filling station. The boys at least could go out in the woods. You don’t know anything about it because you’ve never had to subjugate yourself to it. Never!”
James Erskine’s film is constructed entirely from such interviews by Kuehl, a high-school teacher and Holiday fan with a sideline in arts journalism. In 1971, she began plans for a biography: Holiday had died aged 44 in 1959 and, 11 years on, Kuehl wanted to speak to those who were there throughout her life. She interviewed and interviewed and was still finding people in 1978 – almost 200 of them in all. The project overwhelmed her and she never finished it, and in 1979 she was found dead on a Washington sidewalk. Police deemed it suicide, Kuehl having supposedly jumped from her hotel room, although there was no proof of this.
Continue reading...Jazz musician who was key to Davis’s sound was the last surviving player on the classic album
Jimmy Cobb, the jazz drummer and last surviving player on Miles Davis’s seminal 1959 album Kind of Blue has died from lung cancer at age 91.
Cobb was key in helping to achieve the cool disposition of a handful of Davis’s masterworks, including 1959’s Porgy and Bess, 1960’s Sketches of Spain, 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come, the 1962 live set Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall and Live at the Black Hawk sessions.
Continue reading...From a six-strong indie household in Glasgow to a trans DJ thruple in a remote log cabin, we meet the bands weathering the pandemic with each other
The London indie-pop band were recording at a studio in Devon when lockdown began
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