Album reviews: Jonny | Diddy Dirty Money | Classical | Jazz | Folk | World

Published on Sunday 30 January 2011 19:06

Our critics review the best and worst of this week's new releases from around the world of music......

POP:

Jonny: Jonny

Turnstile Music, 10.99 ****

EVER wondered what it would be like to splice Teenage Fanclub and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci? This melodic baby, spawned by the groups' respective frontmen, Norman Blake and Euros Childs, provides the answer. And the answer is, dare we say it, at times not unlike Chas & Dave performing the works of Marc Bolan. In a good way. Both musicians are traditionally strong on simple, sweet tunes but Childs's natural songwriting eccentricity comes to the fore on the quirky Bread and the nursery rhyme romp of Cave Dance ("we've no concept of time, don't know how long it will last" – ten minutes, once they add on the serpentine psychedelic electronica coda, as it turns out). By the end of the album, Jonny is sounding more like a Childs solo record but it's a good place to come for charming, childlike kicks.

Diddy Dirty Money: Last Train To Paris

Interscope, 13.99 ***

P DIDDY'S latest album was a major operation – three years in the making and no fewer than 16 vocalists, including Grace Jones (underused and autotuned), Lil Wayne, Usher, Justin Timberlake and Chris Brown, in addition to his own Dirty Money collective. So it's some achievement that Last Train To Paris is not a dog's dinner. Rather, it is a commendable change from the hip-hop norm – a concept album about a train journey from London to Paris, drawing to a fair degree on Euro club and electronica influences, and sticking lyrically to affairs of the heart. Even the grainy cover shot is more arthouse than bling city. But claims that "this is a brand new sound" which "will change your life" are just good old Diddy ego. FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL:

Thomas Arne: Artaxerxes

Linn, 15.99 ****

THOMAS Arne will forever be known as the composer of Rule, Britannia!, but his influence and place in musical history was considerably more significant. In Handel's wake he was London's foremost opera composer, and what is more, gave his audience opera in their native tongue.

Certain fates have obscured this prolificacy, such as the 1808 fire at London's Theatre Royal that destroyed the original performance material for his opera Artaxerxes. However, the conductor Ian Page engineered a reconstruction of the entire work for Covent Garden two years ago, including a complete new finale by Duncan Druce, which – through the stylistic virility of the Classical Opera Company and a cast bearing such vocal treasures as Christopher Ainslie (Artaxerxes) and Elizabeth Watts (Mandane) – is now available in this classy, crystal clear recording. KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ:

Gary Husband: Dirty & Beautiful, Volume 1

Abstract Logix, 12.99 ****

KEYBOARD player and drummer Gary Husband is both the common factor and the uniting force in the various duo, trio and quartet settings which make up this project, and is equally impressive on both his instruments. It represents something of a treasure chest for fusion guitar fans, with John McLaughlin, Allan Holdsworth, Robin Trower and Steve Hackett among the large cast of musicians (although never together). Two of McLaughlin's former Mahavishnu Orchestra band mates, violinist Jerry Goodman and keyboard player Jan Hammer, also feature, as does Level 42 bassist Mark King. The music is mostly by Husband, but includes a brief take on Miles Davis's Yesternow with Trower, and features Holdsworth and guitarist Steve Topping on their own tunes Leave 'Em On and The Maverick. It all adds up to a persuasive demonstration that jazz-rock still has plenty to offer. KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK:

Tom McElvogue & Paddy Kerr: The Long Hard Road

TMc Productions, Available online only ****

A LONG time a-coming this album, originally recorded in 2003/4 and only just released by the Newcastle-born, now Dublin-based, Irish flautist Tom McElvogue. It proves worth the wait, however. A musician's musician, McElvogue combines lyricism and meticulous technique with a zest that doesn't need to break sound barriers to make a point, although he can certainly fly with style and elegance. He's accompanied peerlessly by Paddy Kerr on bouzouki, guitar and bodhran – listen, for example, to the bouzouki skittering neatly along under the flute in Jackie Daly's Reel, or the drumming damped strings carrying along a fluid version of Colonel Fraser.

McElvogue has a considerable repertoire of jigs, both his own compositions as well as some old chestnuts like Gan Ainm, but for an unadorned showpiece, listen to the unaccompanied Old Walls of Liscaroll, velvet-toned flute rolling it out unhurriedly but with perfect poise and intonation. JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD:

Ravi Shankar: The Extraordinary Lesson

Accords Croises, 24.99 ****

RAVI Shankar is old and frail now, but his energy is still phenomenal as, flanked by his daughter Anoushka plus some of his favourite Indian musicians, he delivers an illustrated lesson on the nature of Indian music from both North and South.

As he points out, the great bifurcation started back in the 13th century, but now, as Hindustani musicians borrow scales from the wider repertoire of the South, the two traditions are once more melding. Whereas the North has ten scales, the South has 72; both revel in a multiplicity of talas, or time-schemes, with some based on a module of eleven-and-a-half beats, and others on one of thirty-two-and-a-half: Indian musicians must be instinctive mathematical geniuses, as well as possessing aesthetic brilliance. And they must all be fired by passion, says Shankar: without that their music would be dead.

When he was starting out in the 1930s – having decided to renounce his career as a boy dancer – training meant learning everything by ear and committing it to memory, with the day beginning at 4:30am and continuing until 8pm. Today, he says, Indian musicians can use records and videos, and enjoy the luxury of notation.

There are three parts to this DVD. First a rather conventional documentary, whose musical and interview segments are liberally intercut with footage from the streets of Delhi.

Then comes the main event – a public lesson in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, in which Shankar gets his colleagues to demonstrate how time is measured, and how musicians must be absolutely in sync so that their exits fall exactly on the beat. He also gets them to show how their respective instruments are played: Anoushka's demonstrations on the sitar are dazzling, her comments quick and articulate.

Finally, in Delhi, we get a full-dress concert. MICHAEL CHURCH