Reviews & features: Music, Issue 582

Seasick Steve

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…

Hitlist - the best Festival music

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…

Robin Guthrie

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!!!

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…

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

5 Questions

Fisher King Leven

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

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

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

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!

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…

Nikki King & Marcus Ford

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…

Candide

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

‘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…

Tom Russell & Michael Martin

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…

Amanda Palmer

She may be familiar to some as one half of The Dresden Dolls, the drum’n’piano duo who do for Weimar cabaret what The White Stripes did for Mississippi blues. Palmer strides out on her own for the third year at the Fringe with a clutch of new songs frm…