Page 24 - Andy Sheppard News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Given the tenor of the times, Carla Bley’s extraordinary career shouldn’t have happened. What were the chances in the 1950s that a…

WBGO Composer, conductor and pianist Carla Bley at the Town Hall, on a 2015 memorial for her longtime collaborator Charlie Haden. When Carla Bley hitchhiked from Oakland, Calif. to New York City at age 17, it was one in a series of renegade actions that have defined an irrefutably original career. She found her way to Birdland, landing a job as a cigarette girl — and a perfect perch to absorb musical lessons from the likes of Count Basie, Miles Davis and Horace Silver. Largely self-taught as a pianist (having learned the basics from her father), Carla was first and foremost a composer. Sh...

John Doran , April 13th, 2021 08:31 Carla Bley is arguably the greatest living jazz composer; John Doran talks to the woman fellow musicians have nicknamed 'Countess Bleysie' and 'Bleythoven' about foundational free jazz sessions, the magic of The Liberation Music Orchestra and her epic jazz opera, Escalator Over The Hill. Home page photograph courtesy of Tod Papageorge Edward Said immersed himself in the final works of Beethoven, Genet and Beckett while writing his own last book. Said, who produced On Late Style while ill with leukaemia, concluded that at the end of their lives, artists did...

★★★★ DEDICATED “to the spirits of humankind that have fallen victims to the Covid-19 virus,” Garden of Expression is an exemplary album, full of spacious and reflective instrumental jazz. There is little to distinguish between individual tracks but the set is more about creating a particular mood, something US veteran saxophonist Joe Lovano, accompanied by pianist Marilyn Crispell and Carmen Castaldi on drums, is able to do in spades. All masters of their instruments, the restrained music feels as much about the silences as what is played. Crispell’s playing provides an undulati...

Stardust imagines a doomed three-week promotional trip the young singer made in 1971 when trying - and failing - to break America with his third studio LP, The Man Who Sold The World. Despite contact lenses and fake teeth, some critics have unkindly remarked on the fact that Johnny is not the spitting image of Bowie. Such is the ardour of some fans that he has been attacked online, having admitted: "I'm convinced that people are innately good, but this period has been tough for that perspective. I've been attacked online, sometimes quite violently, you know, people saying, 'Let's go and strin...