Cat Power is American singer, songwriter, musician, occasional actress, and model. Charlyn Marie Marshall (also known as Chan, pronounced “Shawn”) was born in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. on 21 January 1972. Cat Power was originally the name of Marshall’s first band, but has become her stage name as a solo artist.
After dropping out of high school, Marshall started performing under the name Cat Power, while in Atlanta, backed by musicians Glen Thrasher, Mark Moore, and others. She soon moved to New York City, New York, United States in 1992, then later opening for Liz Phair in 1994, she met Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Tim Foljahn of Two Dollar Guitar, who encouraged her to record, and played on her first two albums, 1995’s Dear Sir and 1996’s Myra Lee. In 1996 she was signed to Matador Records, and released her third album, What Would the Community Think, which spawned a single and music video, “Nude as the News”.
Shortly following the release of What Would the Community Think Marshall disappeared from the musical scene, initially working as a baby sitter in Portland, Oregon and then moving to a farmhouse in Prosperity, South Carolina with boyfriend Bill Callahan(who performs under the name Smog). The plan was to permanently retire from music but during a sleepless night resulting from a nightmare, Marshall wrote several new songs. These songs would make up the bulk of Moon Pix. The album was recorded at Sing Sing Studios in Melbourne in eleven days with backing musicians Mick Turner and Jim White of the Dirty Three. The album was well-received by critics, and gained her recognition in the indie rock scene. However, during the subsequent tours she grew tired of her own material. This resulted in a series of shows during 1999 involving Marshall providing musical accompaniment to a series of screenings of the silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc. The shows combined original material and many covers, many of which would later see release on The Covers Record, a collection of cover songs recorded at various sessions in 1998 and 1999. A selection of covers that didn’t make it on to the album were recorded at Peel Acres, home of the highly influential and legendary British DJ John Peel. The session was broadcast on his BBC Radio 1 show and featured Marshall’s own interpretations of Bob Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York Town” amongst others.
In 2003 she resumed releasing original material with You Are Free, a diverse and critically acclaimed album that featured guest musicians such as Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis.
2004 saw the release of Speaking for Trees, a critically polarizing DVD which featured a single two-hour static shot of Marshall performing in a woodland. It was accompanied by an audio CD containing the 18-minute song “Willie Deadwilder”, which featured M. Ward on guitar. 2005 found Cat Power out on the road again, touring the world and playing sold-out solo shows, including an Australian tour supporting Nick Cave. The shows largely consisted of material for her next album.
Cat Power’s seventh record, The Greatest, was released in January, 2006. This was not a “Greatest Hits” record but rather a collaboration with Al Green’s guitarist Teenie Hodges and many other well-known R&B musicians. A tour followed in the fall of 2006.
Early in 2006, Marshall announced the cancellation of her upcoming United States tour, citing “health-related issues”. A few days later, Matador announced the cancellation of her two shows in London and Paris. She resumed touring in April 2006, playing some of the most well received shows of her career both with the Memphis Rhythm Band and as a solo performer.
In 2007, she played live music for the spring/ summer Chanel Haute Couture collection in Paris and appeared in Wong Kar Wai’s film My Blueberry Nights as Katya. Also in 2007, she became the first female ever to win the Shortlist Music Prize when The Greatest was voted album of the year in June. Earlier in the year she was nominated in the Best International Female category at the annual Brit Awards, alongside more mainstream artists like Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado.
On January 22, 2008, Cat Power released a second collection of covers called Jukebox–her eighth LP overall. It included versions of songs by artists such as Hank Williams, James Brown, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Patsy Cline and Janis Joplin.
Since then, she has released an EP called “The Dark End of the Street” on vinyl, only.
Cat Power released her first original song since 2008 just before Christmas 2011 when an MP3 of “King Rides By” was made available on her official site, in exchange for a donation of at least $0.99 to the Festival of Children Foundation and the Ali Forney Center charities. (King Rides By Songfacts).
In 2012, Cat Power released her 9th studio album, Sun which received generally positive reviews from critics. The album was included in several year-end lists by music critics and publications. Rolling Stone magazine, in their list of the “50 Best Albums of 2012”, ranked it at sixteenth place, writing “the idea of the brilliantly morose Chan Marshall making a dance-rock record is almost absurd. Yet the groove-powered Sun is a perfect fit.” The A.V. Club placed the album at number twenty-two on their list of the “Best Albums of 2012.” Billboard also placed the album at number nine in their list of the “10 Best Albums of 2012.”The L.A. Times and Filter magazine both placed the album at number six in their lists of the best albums of 2012. Sun was also included on two separate “Best Music of 2012” lists compiled by NPR, appearing at number five on the list compiled by Bob Boilen,while topping the list compiled by Robin Hilton. The album was also listed twenty-eighth on Stereogum’s list of top 50 albums of 2012. Thus, becoming Cat Power’s most successful original album.
In April 2015, Marshall announced that she recently had a baby.
In February 2016, Marshall had to cancel her New Zealand shows due to health reasons. According to an official press release, this is the first time in Marshall’s 18-year touring history she has been forced to postpone, but is “determined to make it back ASAP, and in good health”.
Every year, France hosts several teknivals, but the teknival of May 1st remains emblematic. This historic event pushes us to revisit the most significant teknivals since 1994, the year these underground gatherings began.
1994-2000: The first sparks
From 1994 to 2000, teknivals grew rapidly in France. The very first teknival on May 1st was launched in 1994, near Fontainebleau, thanks to the initiative of the Spiral Tribe and other British soundsystems. This event brought together several hundred participants, marking the emergence of alternative festive gatherings. In the following years, especially in 1995, these collectives continued to ignite Fontainebleau with their energy.
1997: Commitment and Music
In 1997, the teknival took on a committed dimension with an edition focused on the fight against nuclear, organized on the Carnet site near Nantes. This action followed plans for the construction of nuclear power plants by the State on a natural territory. The group Noir Désir marked the event by going on stage to make their music resonate.
2001-2006: Evolutions and Recognitions
The period from 2001 to 2006 was marked by significant advances for teknivals. In 2003, the initiative of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, opened a new era. The teknival became legal for the first time, thus establishing a formal dialogue between organizers and authorities. Under the name “Free Open Festival”, this event brought together nearly 70,000 participants at the Marigny-sur-Marne air base. This event marked the implementation of the 2001 Mariani amendment, a law that regulates the free parties movement.
In 2004, the edition on the disused Chambley air base exceeded 100,000 participants, marking a historic moment by its exceptional influx. The next edition in Marigny in 2005 was overshadowed by tragedies and troubles.
2007-2009: The Era of Contestation
From 2007 to 2009, a period of protest marked the history of teknivals. In response to the official “Sarkoval”, the Insoumis teknival was held on the sidelines of the event authorized in 2007, giving birth to the Insoumis collective. Although fewer participants joined, this event left a memorable mark by going back to the roots of the movement, with a warm and community atmosphere.
2009: The Test of the Contestation
In 2009, despite the supposed legality of teknivals, the State refused to authorize the event, breaking any dialogue with the collectives a few months before the scheduled date. Despite this, the gathering was organized illegally in the Eure, still bringing together 30,000 participants. However, after the festivities, a total of 27 soundsystems were seized for a period of 5 months. Only one collective was designated as responsible by the authorities, fined nearly €55,000, three years after the events.
2010-2017: Developments and Highlights In 2013, the teknival celebrated its 20th anniversary with the Twentytek, organized at the Cambrai-Epinoy air base. The Kraken Krew soundsystems coalition was born during this edition, while the Spiral Tribe met exceptionally for the occasion, around a quadriphony scene.
2016: An Act of Protest In 2016
The movement made a bold decision by declaring itself the 23rd teknival illegal, in protest. Despite the participation of only 30,000 people in soundsystems for this edition, the following year was marked by an enthusiastic and passionate response, with double the number of participants responding to the call. This signaled a revival of enthusiasm for the free party movement.
2018-2020: New Directions
After an illegal edition in 2018, the teknival returned to Marigny for the fourth time, becoming the place that hosted the most teknivals. In 2019, the event took a different turn. Faced with the repression of the State with prefectural decrees limiting the circulation of vehicles carrying sound equipment, the Frenchtek 26 was established in Creuse on the Millevaches plateau. Between 5,000 and 10,000 participants braved the snow to dance for three days, marking an unprecedented event in the history of the movement.
Françoise Hardy is a pop and fashion icon celebrated as a French national treasure. With her signature breathy alto, she was one of the earliest and most definitive French participants in the yé-yé movement (a style of pop music that initially emerged from Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal before spreading to France in the early 1960s). She is one of only a few female vocalists who could or would write and perform her own material. She offered a startling contrast to the boy’s club of French pop in the early ’60s, paving the way for literally thousands of women all over the globe. Known for romantically nostalgic songs and melancholy lyrics, Hardy’s first single, “Tous Les Garçons et les Filles,” sold over two million copies and made her a European star overnight. Outside music, Hardy also established herself as a fashion model, actress, astrologer, and author. Though she has recorded songs in several languages, it was her early French tunes — that ranged across pop, jazz, blues, and more — that helped to establish her as a legend. In the ’70s, she reinvented herself as an artist transcending teen-friendly pop to interpret songs by everyone from Leonard Cohen to Patrick Modiano and has remained a grande dame of French popular song ever since.
Hardy was born in Paris in 1944. She and her sister were raised by a single mom who made a meager living as an accountant’s assistant. Money was always in short supply. After graduating from high school, she was given a guitar by her absent father — he had to be convinced by her mother to purchase it. As a teen she was influenced heavily by French chanson, especially the music of Charles Trenet and Cora Vaucaire. Thanks to the pervasive reach of Radio Luxembourg, she also found inspiration in the music of English-speaking singers such as Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, and Connie Francis. While attending the Sorbonne to study political science and Germanic languages, she answered a newspaper notice advertising for young singers. Hardy failed that first audition, but she was inspired to attend others. She auditioned a bit later for the French Vogue label and signed her first recording contract at the end of 1961. She was 17. In April of the following year, she left university and released her first record, “Oh Oh Chéri,” written by Johnny Hallyday’s creative team. The flipside was her own composition “Tous Les Garçons et les Filles.” Riding the emergent French wave of yé-yé introduced to the country by songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, the recording was a smash, selling over two million copies. In 1963, she took fifth place (for Monaco) in the Eurovision Song Contest with “L’amour s’en Va” and was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque. Soon she was on the cover of virtually every top music magazine. It was while working on a photo shoot for a magazine that Hardy would meet photographer Jean-Marie Perier, who transformed her image from a shy schoolgirl into a cultural trend setter. He became not only her lover but also the greatest influence on her early career. Their shoot established her as a fashion icon as well as a pop star, and Perier persuaded Hardy to model. Because of her place in pop music, he was able to persuade top designers including Paco Rabanne, Chanel, and Yves Saint-Laurent to adopt her as a model. French director Roger Vadim offered her a prime role in Château en Suède; the experience only increased her national popularity, but her heart was in music not cinema. In 1963 she sang at the L’Olympia Theatre in Paris for the first time as an opening act for yé-yé singer Richard Anthony. She stole she show. Her debut album was essentially an umbrella for her singles and sold exceptionally well, and the recording won the Prix de l’Académie Charles-Cros and Trophée de la Télévision Française awards. In 1965, she tried film again, this time Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Une Balle Au Cœur. Released in February of 1966, her performance drew raves from critics and audiences alike. Hardy’s reputation as a singer spread across Europe and soon she was spending time with artists ranging from the Beatles and Mick Jagger to Bob Dylan (the latter once refused to play his second set at L’Olympia until she showed up). She quickly became her country’s most exportable pop star, releasing ten albums between 1962 and 1968.
Perier and Hardy ended their romance in 1967, the stress and strain of a jet-set lifestyle was beginning to take its toll. That said, she met songwriter and pop star Jacques Dutronc the same year and fell in love — they wed in 1981. After massive whirlwind tours of Europe, she cut her sophomore outing, Ma Jeunesse Fout L’Camp, which was issued in 1968, just before the curtain fell on yé-yé in France. That same year she gave a farewell performance at London’s famed Savoy and seemingly retired from the stage to concentrate on her recording career. This caused friction with her label and resulted in a court battle from which she emerged free but wary of all future business dealings. Hardy carefully considered her next step. In 1970, as a nod to her fans in Switzerland and Germany, she released the German-language Träume for United Artists. But it was a stop-gap. 1971’s self-titled offering for Sonopress, written in collaboration with female Brazilian guitarist Tuca, was her first mature outing and featured the singles “Chanson d’O” and “La Question.” While it didn’t do well commercially, it remains the singer’s favorite recording and the one that established her as an influence on later generations. She didn’t care about the relatively poor sales; she considered it an artistic achievement, and history has proven her correct. The new decade also helped establish Hardy as burgeoning professional astrologer. In the summer of 1973 she gave birth to a son with Dutronc. Amazingly, the couple, not yet married, didn’t live together until well after their child was born.
Hardy signed to the North American Warner Brothers label late in the year, and proceeded to record Message Personnel with producer Michael Berger. The pair disagreed on many things during the sessions, but its title track single became one of her most beloved songs. In the spring of 1974 she worked with French violinist, composer, and singer Catherine Lara and English producer Del Newman for Entr’Acte. The album was only a moderate success commercially, but has since become one of her most beloved among fans. Hardy abandoned fashion in 1974, and all but left music for two years to concentrate on being a mother. She did write and record “Que Vas-Tu Faire” for the soundtrack of Claude Lelouch’s film Si C’était à Refaire. (It was arranged by Jean-Michel Jarre.)
Through a friend, Hardy met Gabriel Yared, a great fan of her music. He offered to produce and arrange a new album for her. Entitled Star, the set featured excellent material by herself, Michel Jonasz, Gainsbourg, William Sheller, Janis Ian, and Lara; it proved a commercial and critical success. Issued by Pathé-Marconi, Star revealed a different side of the singer, establishing her with a second generation of younger fans. The record sold exceptionally well and brought Hardy back to the forefront of French popular music. In all, the singer and producer/arranger cut four very successful albums together including J’Ecoute de la Musique Saoule (1978), Gin Tonic (1980), and A Suivre (1982, that was also the first of her albums to feature the talents of songwriter Jean Claude Vannier). The latter album featured two chart-topping singles in “Tamalou” and “Villégiature.” Fans have argued for decades that the album would have been even more successful had she resumed touring, but Hardy was far more concerned with astrology and motherhood. Over the next two years, she released only two new singles while her label focused on issuing compilations. In 1988 she issued Décalage. Announced as her final recording, her lyrics were set to music by name writers including William Sheller, Etienne Daho, and husband Dutronc. Interestingly, while it has developed a reputation as one of her finest records, it was greeted with only middling praise at the time. Apparently, fans expected more from a grand finale.
Her retirement proved short-lived. In 1992, she recorded the duet “Si Ca Fait Mal” with songwriter Alain Lubrano, a young singer/songwriter from the south of France. The topic, about love, sex, and AIDS, was cut for the AIDS fund-raising compilation album Urgence. She later re-recorded it as one of her own singles — again with Lubrano. In 1995, Hardy signed with Virgin Records. Le Danger, her debut for the label, appeared in 1996 and established her as a pop star — at the age of 52 — in the U.K. Hardy co-wrote all 13 songs, enlisting help from Lubrano and Rodolphe Burger (Kat Onoma). Deeply influenced by the alternative music scene — especially the music of Portishead — Hardy again reinvented her sound as a totally modern brand of indie pop. The album was successful beyond her dreams; she appeared at the BBC on radio and television, on John Peel’s program and eventually guested on recordings by Malcolm McLaren and Blur.
Hardy crowned the new century with her second Virgin album, Clair-Obscur, in 2000. The set was marked by a wide range of songs from composers ranging from Django Reinhardt, Lubrano, and Daho to Eric Clapton and Don Everly. It also included a pair of critically regarded duets in “Puisque Vous Partez en Voyage” with Dutronc, and “I’ll Be Seeing You” with Iggy Pop. In 2004, she issued Tant de Belles Choses, with songs by Lubrano, Benjamin Biolay, Thierry Stremler, and Jacno (Denis Quilliard of Stinky Toys fame). She also enlisted assistance from English singer/songwriter Ben Christophers and Irish songwriter Perry Blake. Her son, Thomas Dutronc, produced and/or played guitar on four tracks. Two years later she issued Parenthèses, a collection of duets with material from her back catalog. Her collaborators included Alain Bashung, Biolay, Rodolphe Burger, Maurane, Arthur H, and French film star Alain Delon. She also recorded with her husband and son at the same time — a first. The set’s first hit single was a version of “Partir Quand Même” with Julio Iglesias. Not touring left Hardy plenty of time for pursuits other than music and astrology, including writing. In 2008, Editions Robert Laffront published her memoir entitled Le Désespoir des Singes et Autres Bagatelles (The Monkey’s Despair and Other Trifles). The book became an instant best-seller. Hardy didn’t rest, however, and in 2010 issued the album La Pluie Sans Parapluie. She penned all the lyrics herself and collaborated on the music with Lubrano, Ben Christophers, Pascale Daniel, Stremler, and others. Rather than the cool, wry wit and melancholy that was her trademark, this set offered listeners a different portrait of the singer, one more sensitive and intimate. Two years later, Hardy celebrated her 50th anniversary in music with both a novel (her first) and an album that shared the title L’Amour Fou. She was also battling cancer of the lymphatic system and designated it her last album. She again composed all the lyrics with assistance on the music side from Stremler, Calogero, Benoît Carré (Lilicub) and Julien Doré. Dominique Blanc-Francard and Bénédicte Schmitt co-produced the recording.
While Hardy hasn’t set any sales records with her post-millennial output, virtually all of her recordings did well enough to remain commercially viable and enhance her legend. In the aftermath of publication and release of L’Amour Fou, the singer was absent for nearly five years. After its release she became ill while undergoing chemo and eventually ended up in a coma for eight days. While recovering and continuing to undergo treatment, she had little to no interest in recording again — that is, until she heard the song “Sleep” by the Finnish band Poets of the Fall. She played for producer and songwriter Erick Benzi (Celine Dion), who loved it. As a response, he sent Hardy several melodies of his own, inspiring her to pen lyrics for them. French indie songwriter La Grande Sophie (Sophie Huriaux) knew she had started writing again and emailed Hardy the song “Le Large.” Other composers who contributed were Pascale Daniel and Yael Naim, who gave her “You’re My Home.” When Hardy began recording with Benzi, the sessions went uncharacteristically smoothly, resulting in the album Personne d’Autre. Preceded by the single “Le Large”–which was also released as a video directed by François Ozon — the full-length was released in Europe and the U.S. in April of 2018.
While Marvin Gaye’s life was cut short, his impact on the music industry continues today as the singer produced numerous hits and helped shape the sound of Motown throughout the 1960s. Often referred to as the Prince of Motown or the Prince of Soul, the artist gained high praise, releasing 17 albums throughout his time in the spotlight. With his last album, Midnight Love, released in 1982, fans of Gaye received a special treat when news broke that over 60 lost tracks of the singer surfaced in Belgium.
With many iconic singers passing away over the years, fans often wonder what new music from them would sound like or what they were working on at the time of their death. Well, for Gaye, he stayed with musician Charles Dumolin in Ostend, Belgium before passing away. And while staying with him, Gaye apparently left 30 tapes behind. But that wasn’t all as the Dumolin family also held onto notebooks, letters, and costumes from the icon.
Having kept the items in their possession for over 40 years, the family lawyer, Alex Trappeniers, discussed the treasures with the BBC. “We can open a time capsule here and share the music of Marvin with the world. It’s very clear. He’s very present.” Sharing some of the items, the lawyer added, “A few of them are complete and a few of them are as good as ‘Sexual Healing,’ because it was made in the same time. There was one song that when I listened to it for ten seconds I found the music was in my head all day, the words were in my head all day, like a moment of planetary alignment.”
What The Law Has To Say About The Lost Collection Of Marvin Gaye
According to the law in Belgium, ownership of an item happens when in possession for 30 years. That means, that Gaye’s items are legally the property of the Dumolin family. Trappeniers insisted, “Marvin gave it to them and said, ‘Do whatever you want with it’ and he never came back. That’s important.”
While the Dumolin family owns the collection, the law does not encompass intellectual property. That means that the family can’t release Gaye’s collection without legal repercussions.
The pianist Maurizio Pollini has died at the age of 82
The great Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini has died in his home-city of Milan. While his repertoire centred on the great Austro-German Romantic piano literature – Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann – and Chopin, he was a noted champion of modern music, often performing the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Gianluca Cascioli, Giacomo Manzoni, George Benjamin and Salvatore Sciarrino.
Among his extensive recorded catalogue, almost exclusively for DG, are numerous now-classic recordings including his set of the last five Beethoven piano sonatas (a Gramophone Award winner in 1977), the Bartók piano concertos Nos 1 and 2 (with Claudio Abbado and the Chicago SO: another Gramophone Award winner, 1979), the Brahms Piano Quintet (with the Quartetto Italiano; GramophoneAward 1980), 20th-century piano works by Stravinsky (Three Movements from Petrushka), Prokofiev (Piano Sonata No 7), later joined on disc by Webern’s Variations Op 27 and Boulez’s Piano Sonata No 2, the piano concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, and the Chopin Piano Concerto No 1 (with the Philharmonia and Paul Kletzki, recorded for EMI).
Born in Milan to an architect father, Gino Pollini, and a mother, Renata, who was the sister of the sculptor Fausto Melotti, Pollini studied in his home city, graduating from the Conservatory in 1959. The career turning point occurred the next year, when he took First Prize in the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw; the jury was chaired by Arthur Rubinstein and included Nadia Boulanger, Stefan Askenase, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Heinrich Neuhaus and Magda Tagliaferro. After his win he withdrew from public performance for a year (his recording of the Chopin First Concerto followed his return to the stage – ‘Pollini, an eighteen-year-old Italian, gives a spine-tingling performance of this magnificent music, and if you have not in the past thought it magnificent, listen to this performance and be converted’, wrote Roger Fiske in Gramophonein November 1960). He also studied with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli at this time. A hitherto unreleased recording of the Chopin Etudes for EMI, made shortly after his Chopin Competition win, was made available by Testament in 2012 and was awarded Gramophone’s Historic Award (‘All lovers of great piano-playing will need to add this to their collection together with later Pollini, early Ashkenazy, Cortot and, most recently, Perahia. The recording captures much of Pollini’s pristine sound and there are sensible gaps between each Etude, allowing the listener to recover his breath before the start of the next marvel,’ wrote Bryce Morrison in January 2012.)
He made his first studio recording for DG in 1971 – the Stravinsky Petrushka Movements and Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata – and the album was greeted with unanimous acclaim. ‘I cannot think when I last heard such an exciting new piano record – not since that legendary Schumann record that was the first most of us knew of Sviatoslav Richter, perhaps. And the excitement is produced, as then, by a combination of three things: virtuosity of the highest degree, a sense of musical purpose and commitment that is in complete control of the virtuosity, and, finally, first-rate recording,’ wrote Jeremy Noble in June 1972.
Recordings for DG followed regularly and embraced much of the great piano literature – he recorded the Beethoven concertos twice (once with Jochum and Böhm, and later with Abbado), the complete Beethoven sonatas (some twice), the Brahms concertos (three times: Böhm/Abbado/Thielemann) and Mozart piano concertos. His classic Chopin albums include the Nocturnes, Ballades, Polonaises (‘This is Pollini in all his early glory, in expertly transferred performances. Shorn of all virtuoso compromise or indulgence, the majestic force of his command is indissolubly integrated with the seriousness of his heroic impulse,’ wrote Bryce Morrison in February 1999), Preludes, Scherzos and sonatas.
His only appearance as a ‘podium’ conductor on record was when he conducted Rossini’s La donna del lago at Pesaro in 1983, the work’s first-ever recording (for CBS), with a cast that included Katia Ricciarelli, Samuel Ramey, Lucia Valentini-Terrani, Dalmacio Gonzales and Dano Raffanti.
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me. by Bernie Taupin is published by Monoray
Bernie Taupin is recalling a creative journey he started with Elton John almost six decades ago. It was the Summer of Love, 1967. Taupin was 17, unemployed, and living in Lincolnshire in the north of England, when he stumbled across an ad in New Musical Express placed by Liberty Records in London seeking talent. “I wanted to be a writer, so I replied to that ad, and popped in a few abstract, inconsistent verses,” Taupin explains from his home in Santa Barbara, California. “I believe I may have been the only person to send in lyrics and that is probably why I got a response.”
Taupin later took a train to London, where he was introduced to a piano player and singer named Reg Dwight. Their first meeting happened at Lancaster Grill, not far from Tin Pan Alley, where several music publishers had their offices. Over eggs, sausage and baked beans they discussed music. Dwight was three years older and playing in a band, backing blues player Long John Baldry. Taupin immediately sensed a kindred spirit.
The now 73-year-old lyricist elaborates on this remarkable story in Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me. The first part of the autobiography is a coming-of-age tale about two naive young men desperate to make a name for themselves in the music business. They were initially employed as jobbing songwriters by Dick James Music. It was a promising start. James had secured the rights to The Beatles’ songs in 1963.
But Taupin, on a paltry wage of £10 a week, couldn’t afford to rent a flat. Initially he stayed with relatives but eventually moved in with Dwight, his mother, Sheila, and stepfather, Fred (nicknamed “Derf” by Dwight), into their small apartment in Middlesex. Taupin worked on lyrics in their shared bedroom, while Dwight hammered away at the piano in the living room.
“Reg, as he was then, was like a brother to me and incredibly protective,” Taupin recalls. “We had periphery friends but did everything together.”
Creatively, though, it was a rough start. They were being asked to write songs for pop acts such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Cilla Black. When it didn’t work, their employers told them to focus on their own material instead. “Once we dropped the middle-of-the-road songwriting, it meant that one of us would have to become the actual performer of our own songs,” says Taupin. “So ultimately, Reg Dwight became Elton John.”
In June 2022, when Yunchan Lim took the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at just 18 years of age, he became the youngest winner in the history of this prestigious event. A crowning achievement for the South Korean prodigy, who already possesses the sensitivity, virtuosity and musical depth that presage an exceptional career.
Born in Siheung, Korea, Yunchan Lim began piano lessons at age 7, when it was time to choose an after-school activity; he entered the Music Academy of the Seoul Arts Center the next year and quickly became immersed in his musical studies. He auditioned for and was accepted into the Korea National Institute for the Gifted in Arts at age 13, where he met his teacher and mentor, Minsoo Sohn. Yunchan entered the international music stage a year later, in 2018, winning second prize and the Chopin Special Award in his first-ever competition, the Cleveland International Piano Competition for Young Artists. Also that year, he stood out as the youngest participant in the Cooper International Competition, where he won both third prize and the audience prize, and was provided the opportunity to perform with the Cleveland Orchestra. The next year, 2019, brought more accolades, when, at the age of 15, he was the youngest to win Korea’s IsangYun International Competition, also taking home two special prizes.
Yunchan has since performed across South Korea—including with the Korean Orchestra Festival, Korea Symphony, Suwon Philharmonic, and Busan Philharmonic Orchestras, among others—as well as in Madrid, at the invitation of the Korea Cultural Center in Spain. He also participated in the recording of “2020 Young Musicians of Korea,” organized by the Korean Broadcasting System and released that November. His 2022–2023 inaugural tour as Cliburn winner will take him across four continents, with highlights including the Aspen Music Festival, La Jolla Music Society, and Performing Arts Houston in the United States; Seoul Arts Center, National Concert Hall in Taipei, and the KBS and Korean National Symphony Orchestras in Asia; Wigmore Hall and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Europe; and a recital tour in South America. Also coming soon: the release of his debut studio recording on the Steinway label.
Speaking at a press conference after the Competition, Yunchan said, “I made up my mind that I will live my life only for the sake of music, and I decided that I will give up everything for music… I wanted my music to become deeper, and if that desire reached the audience, I’m satisfied.”
He is currently in his second year at the Korea National University of Arts, where he continues to study with Mr. Sohn.
One Love entertains with a powerful soundtrack, magnificent visuals and a very good performance by the cast, especially Kingsly Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as his wife Rita Marley.
BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE celebrates the life and music of an icon who inspired generations through his message of love and unity.
In addition to being a cultural icon, Bob Marley is the subject of the film “Bob Marley: One Love” which follows a specific time frame in Marley’s life. So don’t walk into this film expecting a thorough biography. It focuses on the last three years of his life with some recurring flashbacks to his childhood.
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as his wife Rita, the film follows the icon’s controversial concert in his native Jamaica. The country, which had recently gained independence from Great Britain, was on the verge of a civil war. To bring peace and hope to Jamaica, Marley decides to have a concert in the name of unity.
Ben-Adir has been on my radar since his standout performance in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami” as the human rights activist, Malcolm X. So my interest peaked after hearing Ben-Adir was taking on the role of Bob Marley. I’m not entirely sure what I expected from the performance, but it left an everlasting impression.
Ben-Adir loses himself in this character. For several moments, I genuinely believed that I was watching Bob Marley perform. The voice, the accent, his mannerisms and facial expressions were all meticulously studied and represented.
My Marley knowledge comes from cultural references, interviews, music, and stories from others who knew him. I’ve learned about him through others since I wasn’t around during the peak of his career. Working adjacent to Ben-Adir is the equally talented Lynch who also delivers a committed powerful performance.
Marley’s dedication to seeking peace and unity in his native country is admirable. His message of love is timeless and is simultaneously timely. In our current state where multiple wars are unfolding globally, his message can be one to consider. The music is fantastic! And it chronicles the inception of what’s thought to be one of the most essential albums of the 20th century, Exodus.
For the first 15 minutes, I had some challenges understanding what Ben-Adir was saying. The accent was thick and a bit fast, but I could decipher everything once I got accustomed to his dialect. Another downside to this film is the formulaic structure. It’s a semi-biopic, so many tropes are found here. Lastly, the plot felt spotty at times. It felt like jumping from one thing to another, but it wasn’t distracting enough to disappoint.
“Bob Marley: One Love” is a decent look at a specific window into the life of one of the most remarkable musicians to ever live. Anchored by an extraordinary leading performance from Ben-Adir, the message of love and unity could not be more timely—a perfect introduction of an icon to the newer generations.
Taylor Swift is still the number one best-performing artist, after overthrowing Drake last year. The most popular male artist is Drake at number two.
Bad Bunny dropped five places, from number three to number eight. Eminem climbed from eighth to fourth. Nicki Minaj replaces Dua Lipa at the number ten spot.
The data is based on Chartmetric’s cross platform performance analysis, which takes into account the artist’s overall reach with listeners in terms of listens, views and consumption, and how many followers the artist has in their fanbase across the web.
21st February 2024 – IFPI, the organisation that represents the recorded music industry worldwide, has announced Taylor Swift as the winner of IFPI’s 2023 Global Recording Artist of the Year Award.
The unique award is calculated according to an artist’s or group’s worldwide sales across streaming, download and physical music formats during the calendar year and covers their entire body of work. The award is presented to the artist finishing #1 in IFPI’s Global Artist Chart, which was also released today.
This year marks the 11th year of the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year Award, with Taylor Swift having topped the chart more than any other artist during that time (her 2023 win following successes in 2014, 2019 and 2022). This latest win follows a stellar year in which the artist has seen three albums (Midnights and the Taylor’s Versionreleases of the Speak Now and 1989 albums) top the charts, and the record-breaking Eras tour lift engagement with her entire catalogue on streaming platforms around the world. This phenomenon was demonstrated by the resurgence of the track Cruel Summer, initially released in 2019 but which topped charts around the world four years later.
K-Pop stars SEVENTEEN and Stray Kids placed second and third respectively in the chart in a record year for Korean artists. Four K-Pop acts featured in the Top 10 with TOMORROW X TOGETHER AT #7 and NewJeans at #8, while IVE and NCT Dream also made their first appearances in the IFPI Global Artist Chart Top 20, at #12 and #15 respectively.
US country star Morgan Wallen (#6) also made his first ever appearance in the IFPI Global Artist chart following the huge success of 2023 release One Thing At A Time, and Lana Del Rey (#10) also entered the Top 10 for the first time, beating her previous high of #17 in 2014. Outside the Top 10, Japanese stars King & Prince and US artists SZA and Zach Bryan also made their IFPI Global Artist Chart debuts. All in all, eight of the Top 20 artists in 2023 were making their first appearance in the chart.
Lewis Morrison, Director of Charts and Certifications at IFPI said: “We are immensely proud to award the IFPI Global Recording Artist of the Year Award to Taylor Swift for the fourth time, as she continues to redefine the limits of global success. Taylor is a singular talent and her commitment to her craft and her fans is truly phenomenal.
“It is also fantastic to see so many artists entering the chart for the first time, and the return of established acts years after their last appearance. As the global recorded music landscape shifts and new opportunities emerge, record companies continue their work to build global, long-term careers for their artists.”
About the IFPI Global Charts
IFPI’s Global Charts provide the most complete picture of artist, album and track performance worldwide. The Charts capture streaming, downloads and physical formats in every country directly from the participating record labels, which is then converted using IFPI’s unique methodology to a single, global chart figure. The methodology, developed in partnership with IFPI’s member record labels, reflects global commercial success by combining the most exhaustive reporting of unit sales and streams with the country-level economics of each consumption type.
“Self-abuse, or whatever you wanna call it, is also incredibly creative.”
Shane MacGowan, the lead singer and songwriter of trailblazing Celtic punk band the Pogues and one of the all-time great bandleaders, has died aged 65 following a long period of ill health. A family statement said he died at 3.30am on 30 November, and was described as “our most beautiful, darling and dearly beloved”.
His wife Victoria Mary Clarke wrote in a statement on social media: “Shane will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life … I am blessed beyond words to have met him and to have loved him and to have been so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him.”
In December 2022, MacGowan was hospitalised with viral encephalitis, and as a result spent several months of 2023 in intensive care.
MacGowan sought to bring the power of Irish folk music to the rock scene, with his writing drawing from literature, mythology and the Bible. “It became obvious that everything that could be done with a standard rock format had been done, usually quite badly,” he told the NME in 1983 as the Pogues were getting off the ground. “We just wanted to shove music that had roots, and is just generally stronger and has more real anger and emotion, down the throats of a completely pap-orientated pop audience.”
He frequently wrote about Irish culture and nationalism and the experiences of the Irish diaspora, reclaiming the racist “Paddy” stereotype – or reinforcing it, depending on who you asked. Early in his career, he often performed in a union jack suit – but in Julien Temple’s 2020 documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan, he said: “I was ashamed I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA – and the Pogues was my way of overcoming that.”
His dedication to his craft earned him the Ivor Novello songwriting inspiration award in 2018, following five albums with the Pogues and various solo releases. The Pogues’ highest-charting song, Fairytale of New York, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, reached No 2 in 1987 and became a Christmas classic.
Irish president Michael Higgins was among those paying tribute, writing: “His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history … The genius of Shane’s contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams – of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from.”
Anne-Sophie Mutter is universally considered to be one of the greatest violinists of modern times. Her artistry embraces everything from tonal richness and consummate technical virtuosity to transcendent expression and profound musicianship. Born in the German border town of Rheinfelden, she showed signs of exceptional talent at an early age. Anne-Sophie began to study piano at the age of five; soon after, she received her first violin lessons from Erna Honigberger, a pupil of Carl Flesch. At the age of nine she commenced studies with Aïda Stucki, one of Switzerland’s finest musicians and an inspirational teacher.
In 1976 Herbert von Karajan heard the 13-year-old Mutter in recital at the Lucerne Festival. The legendary conductor subsequently invited the young violinist to make her concerto debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker at the 1977 Salzburg Whitsun Festival. Their partnership continued in 1978 when Mutter made her first recording for Deutsche Grammophon, an album of Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3 and 5. Mutter collaborated regularly with Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker to create a landmark series of recordings of violin concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch and Mendelssohn for the Yellow Label. Meanwhile her debuts in Berlin (1978), Washington and New York (1980), Tokyo (1981) and Moscow (1985) garnered critical acclaim and helped establish her regular presence at the world’s major concert halls.
In 1986 Mutter was appointed International Chair in Violin Studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The following year she founded the Rudolf Eberle Trust to support the development of outstandingly gifted young string players throughout Europe. The initiative’s reach extended worldwide in 1997 after it was incorporated into the Friends of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation, with the establishment of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation itself following in 2008. Mutter’s commitment to the promotion of young musicians has helped launch the careers of many fine artists, Daniel Müller-Schott, Sergey Khachatryan, Roman Patkoló, Leonard Elschenbroich and Kian Soltani among them. In 2011 she established Mutter’s Virtuosi, an ensemble made up of former and current scholarship holders of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation and selected other young musicians. Her Foundation’s commissions include Previn’s Concerto for Violin and Double Bass and Nonet for Two String Quartets and Double Bass, Penderecki’s Duo concertante, Wolfgang Rihm’s Dyadeand Sebastian Currier’s Ringtone Variations.
In 1986, Mutter gave the first performance of Chain II, written for her and the Paul Sacher Foundation by Witold Lutosławski, and recorded the work for DG. Her world premiere performances also include Rihm’s Gesungene Zeit and Lichtes Spiel, Penderecki’s Second Violin Concerto Metamorphosen, La Follia for solo violin and Duo concertante for violin and double bass, Dutilleux’s Sur le même accord, Gubaidulina’s Violin Concerto In tempus praesens, Previn’s Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie”, Violin Concerto No. 2 and Second Violin Sonata, and Currier’s Aftersong and Time Machines. She has recorded these and other new works for the Yellow Label, together with such monuments of the 20th-century repertoire as Berg’s and Stravinsky’s Violin Concertos and Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto.
In the late 1990s, Mutter recorded Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons with the Trondheim Soloists and Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas with her regular duo partner Lambert Orkis. The latter went on to win Grammy® and Echo Awards, while her Vivaldi album attracted critical acclaim and sold over 370,000 copies worldwide. She began the new millennium with a series of touring and recording projects, including Back to the Future, a retrospective look at major works from the 20th-century violin repertoire, and Recital 2000, an album of chamber works by Crumb, Prokofiev, Respighi and Webern. In 2001 Mutter performed Mozart’s complete violin concertos in two evenings as artist-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and with the Wiener Philharmoniker in Vienna and on tour in Germany. Previn’s Tango Song and Dance, dedicated to and premiered by Mutter, formed the core of a 2003 recital album. Her recordings with Previn as conductor include award-winning accounts of his Violin Concerto “Anne-Sophie” and a pairing of the violin concertos by Korngold and Tchaikovsky (Echo Award 2005 for “Instrumentalist of the Year”). Mutter celebrated the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 2006 with world tours and complete recordings of his sonatas and concertos for violin.
The year 2008 saw the release of her first Bach recordings for Deutsche Grammophon in a disc coupling his two violin concertos with the world premiere recording of Gubaidulina’s In tempus praesens. This was followed by a Mendelssohn album marking the bicentenary of the composer’s birth (2009); a complete recording of the Brahms violin sonatas with Lambert Orkis (2010); an album of first recordings of works by Rihm, Currier and Penderecki (2011); and the release of ASM35, a 40-disc box set of her complete recordings for Deutsche Grammophon (2011) issued to mark the 35th anniversary of her professional debut. In June 2013, Mutter and the Berliner Philharmoniker came together at the Berlin Philharmonie to make their first studio album in 30 years: the resulting recording of Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, Mutter’s first, was released to critical acclaim in October 2013.
Having made her debut in Deutsche Grammophon’s Yellow Lounge in September 2013, at Berlin’s Asphalt club, Anne-Sophie Mutter repeated the experience in May 2015 with two dates at Berlin’s Neue Heimat venue, a converted railway station in the city’s bohemian Friedrichshain district. Her performances were recorded live for Deutsche Grammophon’s first Yellow Lounge album, released in August 2015. The event was also filmed by ZDF for subsequent television broadcast and as the subject of a documentary film.
In October 2016 Mutter celebrated the 35th anniversary of her debut in Japan with appearances in Tokyo with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Seiji Ozawa, Mutter’s Virtuosi and Lambert Orkis. The 2016–17 season also featured a concert marking the 40th anniversary of her debut at the Salzburg Whitsun Festival and the world premiere of John Williams’s Markings for solo violin, strings and harp at the Tanglewood Festival, while her recording of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and “Notturno” Piano Trio, made with Daniil Trifonov and Mutter’s Virtuosi, was released in November 2017. Her focus for 2018 was the music of Penderecki, one notable example being her recital with Lambert Orkis at Carnegie Hall, where they performed the Second Violin Sonata as part of a programme that also featured the world premiere of Previn’s The Fifth Season. Mutter’s first recording of the Second Violin Sonata, meanwhile, appeared on Hommage à Penderecki (released in 2018).
The 2018–19 season saw her play a key role in the DG120 celebrations. In November 2018 she appeared at the DG120 Berlin gala with Manfred Honeck and the Staatskapelle Berlin, giving the German premiere of Markings and the world premiere of Williams’s Across the Stars – based on motifs from Star Wars – it too dedicated to the violinist. She also took part in the Tokyo and Seoul DG120 galas, the former in the presence of the Japanese imperial family.
In April 2019 Mutter and Williams met in Hollywood to record a selection of his film themes in new adaptations written especially for her. The resulting album, Across the Stars (2019), won an Opus Klassik award. For her next recording she joined forces with Daniel Barenboim, Yo‑Yo Ma and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for piano, violin, cello and orchestra. Released in May 2020, the album marked the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth and the 20th anniversary of the West-Eastern Divan, as well as appearing 40 years after the legendary recording of the work made by Mutter and Ma with Karajan.
Anne-Sophie Mutter’s artistic partnership with John Williams has continued to bear fruit: in January 2020 she appeared on stage with him at the Vienna Musikverein – where he was making his conducting debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker – and on the resulting John Williams in Vienna album. In July 2021 Mutter gave the world premiere of his Second Violin Concerto (2022) at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the composer. Their world premiere recording of the work, along with three new Williams film-theme adaptations, was released in June 2022.
A year later, as the artist celebrated her 60th birthday (29 June 2023), DG marked her towering achievements by releasing a new 5-LP limited-edition box set, containing her complete solo concerto recordings with Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker. A trio of essential albums from her extensive catalogue were also re-released digitally (available in Dolby Atmos for the first time): Carmen-Fantaisie, Vivaldi – The Four Seasons and Mozart – The Violin Concertos. The celebrations continued on STAGE+, with the screening of a new documentary, Anne-Sophie Mutter – Vivace (directed by Sigrid Faltin) and a recent performance with Mutter’s Virtuosi at the Vienna Musikverein, as well as a wide range of video-on-demand content.
Anne-Sophie Mutter has long used her public profile to support and promote charitable causes, notably those associated with the alleviation of medical and social problems. Her benefit concerts have raised funds for, among other organisations, Save the Children Japan and Save the Children Yemen, the Swiss Multiple Sclerosis Society, victims of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and nuclear energy disasters, the Hanna and Paul Gräb Foundation’s Haus der Diakonie in Wehr-Öflingen, Artists against Aids in the United States, the Bruno Bloch Foundation, the UK-based Beethoven Fund for Deaf Children, SOS Children’s Villages in Syria, the Leipzig Refugee Council and the “Healing Arts Program” at the Fred and Pamela Buffett Cancer Center (Omaha).
Mutter’s many awards and honours reflect the nature of her humanitarian work as well as the excellence of her artistry. She has won the Grammy® Award for “Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with orchestra)” three times, received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2008 and the Légion d’honneur in 2009 for services to contemporary French music, and in 2011 was awarded the Erich-Fromm-Preis for the advancement of Humanism through social engagement. Other honours include the Merit Cross 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Mendelssohn and Brahms prizes, the Herbert von Karajan Music Prize and the Bavarian Order of Merit.
In 2013 Anne-Sophie Mutter became an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in 2015 she was appointed an Honorary Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, and in 2016 she was awarded the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Arts by Spain’s Ministry of Culture. In November 2017 she was both awarded Romania’s Order of Cultural Merit (Grand Officer) and made a Commander of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She was named an Honorary Member of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in February 2018 and, a month later, was awarded Poland’s Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis. In 2019 she was one of the Laureates of Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and received Japan’s Praemium Imperiale for Music. She received an honorary doctorate from the Krzysztof Penderecki Music Academy in Kraków in 2022.
Jean-Jacques Goldman is a French singer-songwriter and music record producer. He is hugely popular in the French-speaking world. Since the death of Johnny . he has been the highest grossing living French pop rock act
Born in Paris and active in the music scene since 1975, he had a highly successful solo career in the 1980s, and was part of the trio Fredericks Goldman Jones, releasing another string of hits in the 1990s.
He also wrote successful albums and songs for many artists, including D’eux for Céline Dion, which is the most successful french language record to date.
He was also part of the Les Enfoirés charity collective from 1986 to 2016, and got his most notable official recognition in the English-speaking world for winning a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1997, as a co-author of three tracks on Céline Dion’s Falling Into You.
Despite a voluntary retirement from the music scene in the early 2000s, he remains very popular and influential in France and French-speaking countries.
French electro-pop duo. Jean-Benoît Dunckel from Versaille and Nicolas Godin from nearby Le Chesnay combined with others in a group called Orange, but the demo tapes failed to impress, so Godin went back to the drawing board and created the instumental ‘Modular’, released by Virgin on a compilation called Source Lab vol1 ’95 which became a collector’s item. ‘Modular’ was also picked up by British producer James Lavalle’s trip-hop label Mo’Wax ’96; Godin had chosen the name Air, and Dunckel came back on board for another maxi-single ‘Casanova 70’ mid-’96, and a third, ‘le Soleil est près de moi’ a year later, included on a 5-track mini album Premiers symptômes. Their stuff was soon considered super-trendy everywhere; unusually for a French group, they were even more successful outside France, so good at their high-tech creation that artists like Neneh Cherry and Depeche Mode wanted to work with them. They worked with 70-year-old techno wizard and Moog master Jean-Jacques Perry on tracks such as ‘Remember’ and ‘Cosmic Bird’. Their first proper album was Moon Safari, recorded by David Whitaker at Abbey Road in London and released in 40 countries ’98: ten tracks, mostly smooth instrumentals, also included two vocals by American Beth Hirsch, and Air’s own voices on ‘Sexy Boy’, which Beck liked so much he made a remix of it. Moon Safari ´ was the point where Anglo Saxons stopped ignoring the surreptitious delights of French pop.
In latter ’98 they toured eight countries including the USA. Sofia Coppola asked them to do the soundtrack for her film The Virgin Suicides 2000, and their next album was 10,000Hz Legend 2001 (with a vocal by Beck on ‘The Vagabond’). Further releases included a remix album Everybody herz 2002 with loads of guest artists, City Reading (Tre Storie Western) 2003 and Talkie Walkie 2004.
The duo have also carved out solo careers for themselves. Less than a year ago, I was over in Paris speaking to Godin for Loud And Quiet about his own first album, the superb, Bach-inspired ‘Contrepoint’ (I’d like to consider Godin and I are best friends now but I’m afraid it might be a one-sided arrangement).
Arte tv : This three-part documentary looks back at the origins of European jihadism and traces its development over the last forty years, starting with 1980s Afghanistan.
In the last decades, Europe has been confronted with the multiplication of jihadist attacks on its territory, in almost every country – 150 attacks, more than 800 dead and nearly 5,000 injured. On the old continent, the expansion of this radical ideology and the perpetration of its deadly acts have become one of the greatest political and intellectual issues of today. If the phenomenon is at the core of the public debate, it remains poorly understood. This series delves into highly complex system: that of European jihadism.
Far from being an isolated phenomenon, it is at the crossroads of a multitude of political, socio-economic, religious and cultural issues. Major geopolitical crises – instilling anger and fear – have contributed to the ideology taking root throughout the continent. France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark have become major sources of recruits for ISIS, together accounting 90% of European jihadists in the Middle East. How did we get here? From the beginning of the Afghan conflict at the dawn of the 1980s to the recent military defeat of the Islamic State, this documentary thoroughly examines the establishment and spread of a terrible pattern of violence, while questioning the future of our societies.
Combining archives and interventions of historians, political scientists and former CIA and counterterrorism agents, this miniseriesgives an unprecedented historical and geographical reconstruction that unveils a complex and still active international network. Fighting against reductionism, it chooses to analyze the extremist mechanisms from the inside, giving the floor to those who have lived it – from afar or up close.
Director
Magali Serre
Production
Artline Films
Producer
Artline Films for ARTE France, Histoire TV, RTBF & RTS
Mark Linkous’s final Sparklehorse album: words of love and beauty from beyond the grave
Although a modest and self-deprecating figure, Linkous left an indelible mark on alternative folk and indie rock, beginning in the mid-90s. Albums such as 1995’s Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, 1998’s Good Morning Spider and 2001’s It’s a Wonderful Life are lush, expansive and utterly heartbreaking. He released only four solo albums, the last in 2006, followed by a collaboration in 2009 with electronic musician Fennesz, as well as the Dark Night of the Soul project with Danger Mouse. The latter, which also featured contributions from Iggy Pop, David Lynch and others, was initially issued as a blank CD.
The Virginia-based musician was a frequent collaborator, producing albums by Daniel Johnston and Nina Persson, and performing with PJ Harvey, Tom Waits and Vic Chesnutt, who took his own life in December. In the months before the Dark Night of the Soul seesions, Linkous described the recording process as a “happy time”. “I was enjoying myself,” he told Dazed Digital magazine. “It was something that I wasn’t used [to], a different world. All I could think about was music … I didn’t get into my brain too much because I didn’t have time to like I usually do when I make music in solitary situations.”
Linkous had wrestled with demons before. Touring with Radiohead in 1996, the songwriter took a mixture of valium and anti-depressants, spending 14 hours unconscious in his London hotel room. When paramedics straightened his legs, which had been pinned beneath him, Linkous suffered a heart attack. He spent six months in a wheelchair. “I was really scared that when I technically died – which I guess I did for a few minutes – that the part of my brain that allowed me to write songs would be damaged,” he told Rolling Stone in 1999.
Just before his death, Linkous was reportedly in the process of moving to Knoxville. He had completed most of a new album, according to his manager, which he hoped to finish at a new studio.
13 years after the death of Mark Linkous, his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa reveal how they pieced together its songs to complete the album.
Martha Argerich is known as one of the finest pianists in the history of classical music, with her performances – in particular – of Schumann, Prokofiev, Chopin, Ravel and Rachmaninov commonly topping the ‘best ever performance’ lists.
Martha Argerich was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1941. Her family on her father’s side were from Catalonia, in north-eastern Spain: however, they had settled in Argentina in the 18th century. Martha’s maternal grandparents, meanwhile, were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, who had settled in Argentina at the end of the 19th century.
The young Martha Argerich performed her first piano concert in 1949, at the age of eight. She performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor and Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in C major. A little later, in 1955, Martha’s family moved to Europe, allowing Martha to study piano in Austria with the great classical and jazz pianist Friedrich Gulda.
She also had lessons with pianists Abbey Simon and Nikita Magaloff, as well as Madeleine Lipatti (widow of the pianist Dinu Lipatti). The year 1957 was a red-letter one for the young pianist: aged just 16, Argerich won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition within three weeks of each other.
Not everything was plain sailing during this time, however. Argerich had a frustrating time trying to study with the great, but reclusive and enigmatic pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who gave her only four lessons over the course of a year and a half. After that, the young Argerich was off to New York, hoping to study with her pianistic hero Vladimir Horowitz – but this did not bear fruit either.
Discouraged, Argerich abandoned the piano for three years and toyed with giving up altogether. However, she did eventually return – and in some style, winning the VII International Chopin Piano Competition in 1965 at the age of 24.
The pianist made her first recording in 1960, aged just 19.
The recording featured works by Chopin, Brahms, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Liszt, and was a critical success. Over the decades since, Martha Argerich has recorded works by a wide range of composers, with the Romantic era a speciality. Indeed, her recordings of the piano works of Robert Schumann, such as the Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana and Fantasia, arguably represent the pianist at her expressive, emotional and virtuosic peak
From the early days of the Tahrir Square protests, music was vital to the young people making their voices heard. And though the country is taking another authoritarian turn, that spirit of dissent cannot be extinguished.
For anyone who participated in the 18 days of protests in 2011 that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, the early days of the revolution, when people camped out in Tahrir Square, had the feeling of a festive event, somewhat like a concert. Ramy Essam, then in his early 20s, was one of the singers who brought music to the heart of the revolution. During the height of the uprising, Essam performed in front of the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered in and around the square. He got up on a small platform set up for political manifestos, brought out his classical guitar and started to sing political rock. Slowly he commanded the attention of all those in the square who could hear him. Word spread and the crowds around him grew. He would scribble down his lyrics at night in the tent he shared with friends.
His song Irhal (Leave) became an anthem to the revolution: “We’re all one hand and we have one demand / Leave leave leave down / Down with Hosni Mubarak! The people demand / The fall of the regime / He will leave / We won’t leave / We’re all one hand and we have one demand / Leave leave leave.”
Essam became one of the musical voices of the uprising, and when Mubarak finally stepped down on 11 February 2011, the song Sawt al-Hurriya (The Sound of Freedom) was played on every TV, radio and satellite channel.
But Essam wasn’t the only one. Along with colleagues at a small magazine we edited, Bidoun, I was led to two rappers, Sadat and Amr Haha, performing in a corner of Tahrir Square, riffing on the streets about the revolution and what the people wanted – essentially, why they were there (“in search of a better life”). Sadat was just 18. To get to Tahrir Square he took several buses from the housing project where he lived, which had been built to house the refugees of the 1992 Cairo earthquake.
We had no sense at the time that this emerging genre would become so popular. But these young men, who had next to nothing, wove words and phrases with beats so brilliantly that they stuck in your head. Like other rappers, Sadat and his crew also sang about drugs and women, but their main theme was the lack of cash and its related problems, such as not having the means to start a family. These were the types of things one was hearing young people speak about in Tahrir Square, too. The majority of them weren’t really there for the downfall of a dictator – they were there because of the lack of basic needs.
The Canterbury scene (or Canterbury sound) was a musical scene centred on the city of Canterbury, Kent, England during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Associated with progressive rock, the term describes a loosely-defined, improvisational style that blended elements of jazz, rock, and psychedelia.
These musicians played together in numerous bands, with ever-changing and overlapping personnel, creating some similarities in their musical output. Many prominent British avant-garde or fusion musicians began their career in Canterbury bands, including Hugh Hopper, Steve Hillage, Dave Stewart (the keyboardist), Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen, and Mike Ratledge.
The real essence of ‘Canterbury Sound’ is the tension between complicated harmonies, extended improvisations, and the sincere desire to write catchy pop songs. In the very best Canterbury music…the musically silly and the musically serious are juxtaposed in an amusing and endearing way.
There is variation within the scene, for example from pop/rock like early Soft Machine and much Caravan to avant-garde composed pieces as with early National Health to improvised jazz as with later Soft Machine or In Cahoots. Didier Malherbe (of Gong) has defined the scene as having certain chord changes, in particular the use of minor second chords, certain harmonic combinations, and a great clarity in the aesthetics, and a way of improvising that is very different from what is done in jazz.
Poet, painter, and singer Lady June was regarded an “honorary member” of the Canterbury scene for having performed and recorded with some of the members, and being a “landlady” to many in her flat in Maida Vale, London.
Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56, her family has announced.
In a statement, the singer’s family said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad. Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”
The acclaimed Dublin performer released 10 studio albums, while her song Nothing Compares 2 U was named the number one world single in 1990 by the Billboard Music Awards. Her version of the ballad, written by musician Prince, topped the charts around the globe and earned her three Grammy nominations.
Jagger invented the idea of a frontman. Not a solo singer. Not a band member. A frontman. Everyone since has been imitating him, one way or another.
Everything about You Can’t Always Get What You Want is perfect. The lyric, the music – and the moment Jagger comes in, wearily: “I saw her today at the reception …”
You can’t fault Jagger’s honesty. After appearing in Tony Richardson’s film Ned Kelly, in the title role, he pronounced: “That was a load of shit. I only made it because I had nothing else to do.”
The Stones’ 1972 tour of the US was legendarily decadent – they refused to release Robert Frank’s film documenting it, Cocksucker Blues – so much so that even the US TV host Dick Cavett was moved to ask Jagger what the plates of pills backstage were. “Vitamins A, B, C and salt,” he replied.
Goat’s Head Soup is the most underrated Stones album. Jagger’s performances on the ballads – Angie and Winter – are unimpeachable. He has never lacked commitment
People may view Keith as the spirit of the Stones, but for the vast majority of their career they simply would not have existed without Jagger’s drive and determination. Would you trust Richards to run a business?
Jagger calls the harmonica “my favourite instrument”. Listen to his fantastic playing of it across 2016’s Blue & Lonesome, especially I Gotta Go. An exciting harmonica solo!
Eva Jagger said of her son: “I always had the feeling that Mike would be something. He was a very adventurous boy when he was younger, but then later he became interested in money. It always struck [me] as odd. Money doesn’t usually interest little boys, but it did Mike.”
The Anglo-French singer and actor Jane Birkin has died at the age of 76, the French culture ministry has announced.
The singer had been forced to postpone several concerts in Paris scheduled for May after breaking her shoulder in March 2022. This followed another string of cancelled shows after Birkin had a stroke in September 2021.
“I’ve always been a big optimist, and I realise that it still takes me a little while to be able to be on stage again and with you. I love being with you so much,” she said in a statement at the time.
She was found dead at her home in Paris, French media reported.
Birkin was born in London on 14 December 1946 to an actor mother and naval officer father. At 17, she married the James Bond composer John Barry but the marriage lasted only three years.
She catapulted to fame after starring in the 1966 film Blow-Up – which featured a scene in which Birkin appeared nude before crossing the channel in 1968 at the age of 22 to star in a satirical romantic comedy Slogan alongside the pop-poet Serge Gainsbourg, who was 18 years her senior.
It was the start of a 13-year on- and off-screen relationship that made them France’s most famous couple, in the spotlight as much for their bohemian and hedonistic lifestyle as for their work.
Despite being banned on radio in several countries and condemned by the Vatican because of its overtly sexual lyrics, their 1968 song Je t’aime … moi non plus (“I love you … me neither”) achieved worldwide success and reached No 1 in the UK singles chart.
Their relationship has been frequently described as “tumultuous”, and Birkin reportedly wrote in her 2020 diaries that there had been violence between the couple. During one of their rows, Birkin launched herself into the River Seine after throwing a custard pie in Gainsbourg’s face.
But she frequently defended the man with whom she became so closely associated, including against charges by one singer that he was a “harasser”, in an interview in the Times in 2020.
« Just recently I have drifted into becoming a DJ, which I still can’t quite believe at this stage in my life. I’m playing techno clubs in Berlin . »
At times in Europe’s techno capital, it feels like everyone you meet is a DJ. But for someone to play their first set at the age of 67 is unusual.
“I can’t deal with Instagram at all,” he laughs. “My children have to show me and then I forget. But boy, I know my Ableton!” Robert Bennett aka Robot Bennett is open about his age – his Soundcloud encourages interested parties to “book me before I die” and a few nights before, the apartment we meet in hosted his 70th birthday party.
The concept behind FIP has scarcely changed since its founding: commercial-free music interrupted only briefly for occasional announcements about forthcoming cultural events (and, before 2020, traffic updates & short news bulletins). Currently, live broadcasts, from Paris, are from 7 am to 11 pm. During off-hours, a computer replays music programming from previous days.
All music programming is hand-picked by a small team of curators, who create three-hour blocks of music. They abide by a few rules, most notably paying close attention to how tracks transition from one to the other, across genres and styles, and especially making sure that a song is never played twice in a 48-hour window. FIP broadcasts around 16,000 artists and 44,000 different songs every year; 85% of its programming comes from independent labels.
The programming features all types of music genres including chanson, classical, film music, jazz, pop rock, world music and blues, but with careful attention paid to smooth and unobtrusive transition from one song to the other (for example, the rock and roll song Roll Over Beethoven can be preceded by a short sonata of Beethoven). FIP is one of the few stations in the world to transmit this type of programming around the clock. All of the songs are hand-picked by expert programmers.
In September 2017, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that he regularly listens to FIP and that he considers it to be the best radio in the world.
In December 2019, Radio France decided that the short news bulletins at 10 minutes before the hour would cease, and that the local studios in Bordeaux, Nantes, and Strasbourg would close in July 2020.
American singer and actress who was one of the best-selling musical performers of the 1980s and ’90s.
“She was the perfect combination of a vocalist with an incomparable timbre (yes, that’s subjective but I have yet to come across someone who didn’t like it) – rich and velvety with a slightly metallic and at times almost operatic-like sound to it; a large, even, well-supported and connected range; heaps of emotion and soul; a lot of power and a huge volume output; incredible vocal stamina; a well-controlled vibrato; strong and resonant belts and a full, piercing head register; and she had a host of technical skills and great musicianship that allowed her to do almost anything with her voice. And when she sang live, she was – unlike many others – able to replicate or surpass the same tone, power and range she displayed on record on stage as well. It’s no wonder she earned the simple yet self-explanatory nickname « The Voice ». From 1985 to 1991, Whitney was a force to be reckoned with, with very little in the way of a worthy contemporary rival – even Mariah Carey and Céline Dion, as brilliant as they are in their own right – could not match her in terms of power, the purity of tone, fluidity of lyrical phrasing or consistent live performances.”
“I am certainly not against plastic surgery. However, I am absolutely against having to discuss it.” Madonna
Madonna has spoken out against criticism of her appearance after presenting at the Grammy Awards. In her latest The multi-award-winning singer lamented being “caught in the glare of ageism and misogyny that permeates the world we live in,” after a close-up photo of her face went viral online and sparked a torrent of negative comments.
“Instead of focusing on what I said in my speech, many people chose to only talk about close-up photos of me taken with a long lens camera by a press photographer that would distort anyone’s face!” Madonna
GABI study (the Gender and Body Image) is a qualitative study of 1,849 women over age 50 trying to capture the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that women at middle age have about their bodies and the experience of aging. Via an open-ended question online survey, four primary themes emerged: 1) the physical and psychological experience of aging; 2) the injustices, inequities, and challenges of aging; 3) the importance of self-care; and 4) a plea for recognition of the need to maintain a contributory role in society. Results highlight the complexities of women’s psychological and physical aspects of aging and point toward important topics worthy of further study in this growing population.
Also known as leader of charting indie outfit Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis makes searching, twang-inflected indie pop/rock of her own as a soloist. Having had her first taste of stardom when she was a child, appearing in a series of television shows and in films, she grew disenchanted with acting and turned to music as she came of age, forming Rilo Kiley with Blake Sennett in 1998. Their work drew upon the seediness of her native San Fernando Valley and nearby Hollywood, but she began to expand her horizons in 2006 when she released a country-tinged solo debut called Rabbit Fur Coat. Rilo Kiley stuck around for another album, but Rabbit Fur Coat established Lewis as a formidable singer/songwriter in her own right, and her reputation only grew after the group split, thanks to the rustic Americana of 2008’s Acid Tongue and the slicker, retro-styled pop sheen apparent on 2014’s The Voyager. Following the hazier On the Line in 2019, part of 2023’s Joy’All consisted of songs written during a songwriting workshop led by Beck.
Born to a pair of entertainers in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 8, 1977, Lewis relocated to the San Fernando Valley as a child. Before she was ten years old she had appeared in a number of major commercials, and she wound up cast in Lucille Ball’s 1986 sitcom Life with Lucy. Guest spots in a variety of sitcoms followed in the next few years, culminating with prominent roles in two 1989 films: The Wizard and Troop Beverly Hills. Lewis acted into the mid-’90s — she wound up with recurring roles on the 1990 television show Shannon’s Deal and 1991’s Brooklyn Bridge — but after appearing in the 1998 feature film Pleasantville, she turned away from acting.
That year, Lewis formed Rilo Kiley with Sennett — the two were dating at the time — Pierre de Reeder, and Dave Rock. After releasing an eponymous EP in 1999, the group replaced Rock with Jason Boesel and released Take Offs and Landings in 2001 on Barsuk. Another indie record — The Execution of All Things, released on Saddle Creek — appeared in 2002 before the group inked a deal with Warner to distribute More Adventurous in 2004.
Just as Rilo Kiley was receiving a push from a major label, Lewis fielded an offer from Conor Oberst for his imprint Team Love. Lewis hired the Watson Twins as support for Rabbit Fur Coat, her 2006 solo debut. Greeted by positive reviews and a major media push, Rabbit Fur Coat overshadowed all previous Rilo Kiley albums, but it also wound up giving a boost to the band’s 2007 album, Under the Blacklight. Released on Warner proper, Under the Blacklight was Rilo Kiley’s most successful record — it wound up peaking at 22 on Billboard’s Top 200 — but the band splintered soon after its release. Although the official disbandment wasn’t announced until 2014, a year after the odds-and-ends collection Rkives appeared, Rilo Kiley never recorded together again.
Lewis quickly turned her attention to her solo career, recording the rousing Americana record Acid Tongue. Written in part with her new partner Johnathan Rice, Acid Tongue debuted at 24 upon its September 2008 release. Lewis next teamed with Rice for I’m Having Fun Now, a collaborative album released under the name Jenny and Johnny in 2010.
Lewis hired Ryan Adams to produce The Voyager, an album that evoked the heyday of classic AOR. The Voyager debuted at number nine upon its July 2014 release. In 2016, Lewis, Erika Forster, and Tennessee Thomas formed the trio Nice as Fuck, releasing an eponymous album in June. Lewis returned to her solo career in 2019 with the March release of On the Line, which featured co-productions by Adams, Beck, and Shawn Everett. It stalled at number 34 in the U.S. while becoming her first album to crack the Top 30 in the U.K. She next entered the studio with producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile) to record a group of songs written partly on the road, pre-pandemic, and partly at home in Nashville during a week-long virtual songwriting workshop hosted by Beck in early 2021. (The latter included prompts such as “write a song with only clichés” and “write in free-form style.”) With appearances from Jon Brion (Chamberlin), Greg Leisz (pedal steel, B-Bender guitar), and Lucius’ Jess Wolfe (backing vocals) in addition to a core backing band and headed by Cobb, Joy’All marked her debut on Blue Note/Capitol in June 2023. (Stephen Thomas Erlewine).
Singer Jean-Louis Murat died on Thursday May 25, Le Monde learned. He was 71 years old.
Born Jean-Louis Bergheaud on January 28, 1952, Jean-Louis Murat had recorded around twenty albums, including Dolorès, in 1996, Le Moujik et sa femme, in 2002 or A bird on a Pear in 2004. A best-of album by the artist, bringing together 20 of his most iconic tracks, is due out on Friday.
Recognizable by his blue eyes, his disheveled brown hair and his haunting voice, Jean-Louis Murat is inseparable from Puy-de-Dôme, where he has never stopped living. According to his former record company Pias, quoted by Agence France-Presse, it was at his home in Auvergne that he died.
“Sentiment Nouveau”, “Fort Alamo” “If I had to miss you”: his groove as well as his independence tinged with provocation made him a special artist in the French musical world.
Tina Turner, the raspy-voiced fireball who overcame domestic abuse and industry ambivalence to emerge as one of rock and soul’s brassiest, most rousing and most inspirational performers, died Wednesdayat age 83.
“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock & Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland,” her family said in a statement Wednesday. “With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model.”
Starting with her performances with her ex-husband Ike, Turner injected an uninhibited, volcanic stage presence into pop. Even with choreographed backup singers — both with Ike and during her own career — Turner never seemed reined in. Her influence on rock, R&B, and soul singing and performance was also immeasurable. Her delivery influenced everyone from Mick Jagger to Mary J. Blige, and her high-energy stage presence (topped with an array of gravity-defying wigs) was passed down to Janet Jackson and Beyoncé. Turner’s message — one that resounded with generations of women — was that she could hold her own onstage against any man.
But Turner’s other legacy was more personal and involved a far more complex man. During her time with Ike — a demanding and often drug-addled bandleader and guitarist — her husband often beat and humiliated her. Her subsequent rebirth, starting with her massively popular, Grammy-winning 1984 makeover Private Dancer, made her a symbol of survival and renewal.
Born Anna Mae Bullock on Nov. 26, 1939, Turner grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, a rural and unincorporated area in Haywood County chronicled in her song “Nutbush City Limits.”According to Turner, her family were “well-to-do farmers” who lived well off the business of sharecropping. Still, Turner and her older sister Ruby Aillene dealt with abandonment issues when their parents left to work elsewhere.
“My mother and father didn’t love each other, so they were always fighting,” Turner recalled in a 1986 Rolling Stone interview. Her mother first left when Tina was 10 to live in St. Louis; her father left three years later. Turner relocated to Brownsville, Tennessee, to live with her grandmother.
After high school, she began working as a nurse’s aide in hopes of entering that profession. Frequently, Turner and her sister would head to nightclubs in St. Louis and East St. Louis, where she first saw Ike Turner perform as the bandleader of Kings of Rhythm. The 18-year-old became enamored with the guitarist eight years her senior and his group’s music. One night, the drummer passed Turner the microphone while she was in the audience. Ike then invited Tina to be the group’s guest vocalist and instructed her on voice control and performance. As “Little Ann,” she sang alongside Carlson Oliver on Ike Turner’s “Box Top,” which was her first studio recording.
In 1958, the same year that “Box Top” was released, Turner gave birth to her first child, Raymond Craig, with Raymond Hill, the Kings of Rhythm’s saxophonist. Soon after, Tina moved in with Ike to help raise the musician’s two sons after he had broken up with their mother. A sexual relationship ensued, even though Turner told RS in 1984 that she wasn’t initially attracted to him: “I liked him as a brother,” she said. “I didn’t want a relationship. But it just sort of grew on me.” Inspired by the movie serial Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Turner changed her stage name per Ike’s request.
Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage Photograph by Reid Miles Recorded and released 1965
He preferred classical music over jazz but for Blue Note Records he created some of the finest jazz album covers, 500 from 1955 to 1967, to be precise: Reid Miles.
Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist
Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.
At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.
Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.
JISOO is the cover star of the March 2023 edition of Vogue France
Jisoo, a member of the South Korean girl group Blackpink, is a singer and actress who has been making waves in the K-Pop scene since her debut in 2016. As of 2021, Jisoo is 24 years old, born on January 3, 1995 in Seoul, South Korea. She has been an integral part of the group, delivering powerful vocals and strong stage presence. She has also ventured into acting, starring in South Korean dramas and movies such as Snowdrop and Arthdal Chronicles. As a result of her impressive career, Jisoo has become one of the most popular idols in the K-Pop world.
Jisoo has surpassed 1.24 million pre-orders for her 1st Single Album ‘ME’ as of March 28th, becoming the 1st Korean female solo artist to become a million-seller. This is the highest figure ever for a single album by a K-pop female solo artist.
Ryuichi Sakamoto, an award-winning composer and member of pioneering electronic act Yellow Magic Orchestra, has died. He was 71 years old.
Japanese publication Sponichi reported late Sunday that it had learned of Sakamoto’s March 28 passing, and the artist’s official Twitter account confirmed the news.
Sakamoto announced in June of last year that he was battling stage 4 cancer. He had previously been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and rectal cancer in 2021.
Born in Tokyo in 1952, Sakamoto studied music composition at the Tokyo University of the Arts during the early 1970s. It was during this period that he first began playing as a session musician and working as a writer for other musicians.
Through this work he connected with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, with whom he formed the synth-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra. Together, the trio became massive stars in Japan and a phenomenon abroad.
At around the same time YMO started, Sakamoto began releasing his own solo work, beginning with 1978’s “Thousand Knives of Ryuichi Sakamoto.” More experimental in nature, Sakamoto spent the late ’70s and much of the ’80s tinkering with electronic sounds and global traditions, with songs such as 1980’s “Riot In Lagos” influencing New York rappers, Detroit techno creators and many more. At the same time, he remained an in-demand pop producer in Japan, working with major performers.
Sylvester Stewart (born March 15, 1943), better known by his stage name Sly Stone, is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer who is most famous for his role as frontman for Sly and the Family Stone, playing a critical role in the development of funk with his pioneering fusion of soul, rock, psychedelia and gospel in the 1960s and 1970s. AllMusic stated that “James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it,” and credited him with “creating a series of euphoric yet politically charged records that proved a massive influence on artists of all musical and cultural backgrounds.
Sylvester Stewart (born March 15, 1943), better known by his stage name Sly Stone, is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer who is most famous for his role as frontman for Sly and the Family Stone, playing a critical role in the development of funk with his pioneering fusion of soul, rock, psychedelia and gospel in the 1960s and 1970s. AllMusic stated that “James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it,” and credited him with “creating a series of euphoric yet politically charged records that proved a massive influence on artists of all musical and cultural backgrounds.
The position of men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton has remained empty since the death of Virgil Abloh in 2021. Today, the house announced that his successor will be celebrity producer Pharrell Williams. His first collection will show this June during the Men’s Fashion week in Paris.
The highly awaited appointment comes as a surprise to many, given that the names of designers like Grace Wales Bonner, Martine Rose, and Telfar Clemens have been swirling for months. It’s one of Pietro Beccari’s first big moves as the new Louis Vuitton Chairman and CEO, a position he took just two weeks ago.
In a statement, Beccari described William’s appointment as a return, rather than a brand-new start: “I am glad to welcome Pharrell back home, after our collaborations in 2004 and 2008 for Louis Vuitton, as our new Men’s Creative Director. His creative vision beyond fashion will undoubtedly lead Louis Vuitton towards a new and very exciting chapter. “
Pharrell’s name has become somewhat synonymous with luxury collaborations, but his sunglasses collection with then-Louis Vuitton Creative Director Marc Jacobs in 2004 was his very first. Long time friend Abloh re-issued the colorful collection with gold details in 2018.
VMH’s priorities appear to be shifting, with an emphasis on creating major pop culture moments. Pharrell’s influence has actually already made a viral hit for Louis Vuitton indirectly. The most recent men’s show featured Spanish flamenco pop sensation Rosalía playing songs from her record-breaking album Motomami, which was produced in part by Pharrell. Her performance blew up, earning millions of views, likes, and comments on TikTok. Some critics have complained that there were more videos of the moment than of the actual clothing, but maybe that was the point: Everyone was talking about the show for days after models walked down the runway.As of this morning, Pharrell has wiped his Instagram clean. The appointment announcement from Louis Vuitton is the only post on his page. And if one thing is clear, it’s this: We’re entering a new era, for both the artist and the brand.
As of this morning, Pharrell has wiped his Instagram clean. The appointment announcement from Louis Vuitton is the only post on his page. And if one thing is clear, it’s this: We’re entering a new era, for both the artist and the brand.
The composer and bandleader whose elegant melodies dominated pop radio for several decades, has died at the age of 94.
Bacharach’s publicist, Tina Brausam, confirmed to the Associated Press that the songwriter died of natural causes on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles.
During his 1960s heyday, Bacharach — along with his earliest and most productive partner, lyricist Hal David — wrote songs that became hits and, later, timeless standards. Among their many classics were “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” “The Look of Love,” “Walk on By,” “Always Something There to Remind Me,” and “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
Raised on jazz and classical and not rock and roll, Bacharach brought a level of melodic sophistication and romanticism — unconventional 5/4 time signatures and melodies that didn’t stick to standard iambic pentameter — into the Top 40. “Odd bar lines, odd time signatures, things that musicians couldn’t play in the studio when we were recording,” Bacharach said in 1979. “I was always swimming upstream, breaking rules.”
Born May 12, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri, Bacharach was the son of newspaper columnist Bert Bacharach and artist and songwriter Irma Freeman.
Tom Verlaine, whose band Television was one of the most influential to emerge from the New York punk rock scene centered on the nightclub CBGB — but whose exploratory guitar improvisations and poetic songwriting were never easily categorizable as punk, or for that matter as any other genre — died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 73.
His death was announced by Jesse Paris Smith, the daughter of Mr. Verlaine’s former love interest (and occasional musical collaborator) Patti Smith, who said that he died “after a brief illness.”
Although Television achieved only minor commercial success and broke up after recording two albums, Mr. Verlaine had an enduring influence, especially on his fellow guitarists. (He was also Television’s singer, primary songwriter and co-producer.)
Tom Verlaine was born Thomas Joseph Miller on Dec. 13, 1949, in Denville, N.J., the son of Victor and Lillian Miller. The family relocated to Wilmington, Del., when Tom was a child.
He attended a boarding school in Delaware, where he studied classical music and played saxophone. He was equally influenced by rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones and free-jazz musicians like Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.
He ran away from school with a classmate, Richard Meyers (later known as Richard Hell). “Our plan was to become poets in Florida where the living was easy,” Mr. Hell said in an email. Camping in Alabama, they set a field on fire and were arrested and sent back home.
Mr. Hell soon went to New York and after graduating from high school, Mr. Verlaine joined him. They wrote and published poetry together; Mr. Miller renamed himself Tom Verlaine, in tribute to the 19th-century French poet Paul Verlaine.
In 1972, inspired by the New York Dolls, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell started a band called the Neon Boys. Mr. Verlaine bought an electric Fender Jazzmaster guitar for himself and picked out a $50 bass for Mr. Hell; their friend Billy Ficca joined them on drums.
In 1973 they added Richard Lloyd, a guitarist, and renamed themselves Television. They chose the name because they had a distaste for the medium and hoped to provide an alternative. Mr. Verlaine also enjoyed the resonance with his initials, T.V.
After seeing a performance by Television in 1974, David Bowie called the group “the most original band I’ve seen in New York.” However, Mr. Hell’s emotive, chaotic outlook on music clashed with Mr. Verlaine’s more controlled approach. Mr. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith in 1975 and later went on to form the punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Television signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 released its first album, “Marquee Moon,” which featured hypnotic guitar work that ranged from mournful to ecstatic.
In 1981, Mr. Verlaine told Rolling Stone: “I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes — it’s obvious what they’ve listened to and what they’re going for. When I was 16 I listened to Yardbirds records and thought ‘God, this is great.’ It’s gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.”
On 10 January 2016, English musician David Bowie died at his Lafayette Street home in New York City, having been diagnosed with liver cancer 18 months earlier. He died two days after the release of his twenty-sixth and final studio album, Blackstar, which coincided with his 69th birthday
On 12 January 2016, in accordance with his will, Bowie was cremated in New Jersey, and his ashes were scattered in accordance with Buddhist rituals in Bali, Indonesia. Bowie had vacationed in Bali in the 1980s and had written the song “Tumble and Twirl” about his exploits there.
The Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who was born in Reykjavík in 1984, was taught at an early age by his mother, a piano teacher, and continued his training in his native country with Erla Stefánsdóttir and Péter Máté. He was a student of Robert McDonald and Jerome Lowenthal at New York’s Juilliard School of Music, graduating with a master’s degree in 2008. In 2009 he founded his own record label, “Dirrindí,” on which he released his accounts of works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Schubert. From the start of his career, Víkingur Ólafsson has collaborated with numerous contemporary composers, including Philip Glass, and he released his interpretation of Glass’s piano works in 2017. This recording inaugurated his collaboration with the Deutsche Grammophon label, on which he has since also released two Bach CDs, a Debussy-Rameau album, and the Mozart & Contemporaries project. The New York Times pronounced him “Iceland’s Glenn Gould” in response to his Bach interpretations. Víkingur Ólafsson has worked with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. Un 2018 he premiered Sauli Zinovjev’s Piano Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Daníel Bjarnason’s Feast with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In the 2022-23 season, he will perform John Adams’s piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Berlin Philharmonic and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. He will also play Ravel’s G major Concerto with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, and New York Philharmonic; Mozart’s C minor Concerto with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal; and the Schumann Concerto with the Czech Philharmonic. Víkingur Ólafsson hosts his own television and radio programs; from 2012 to 2019, he directed Reykjavík Midsummer Music, a festival of chamber music he himself founded.
The Libertines is an English band that formed in London, England in 1997 and disbanded in 2004. They reformed in 2010 to play the Reading and Leeds festivals. The band released three full-length LPs, first two produced by Mick Jones of The Clash. Their third album was released after 11 years of silence – they reformed again in 2015. Centered around the song-writing partnership and chemistry between Peter Doherty (vocals/rhythm guitar) and Carl Barât(vocals/lead guitar), while backed by John Hassall (bass) and Gary Powell (drums), the band was one of the cornerstones of the English independent scene in the early 2000’s.
Championed by NME, the band’s first single What a Waster charted at number 37, despite being banned from Radio 1 and commercial radio due to an overabundance of foul language; this set the trend for steadily increasing returns, culminating in a #2 single and #1 album in the UK Charts. However, the band’s music was often eclipsed by its internal conflicts, many of which stemmed from Doherty’s considerable drug use, and it was mostly because of this that after a final show in Paris (without Pete) that the band was disbanded at the end of 2004.
Born in 1913, the former Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild spent her early life in a manner that passed for normal among the girls of her family – brought up in grand English country houses, educated by governesses, presented at court, barred by her gender from working in the family bank, then betrothed to a French nobleman – until a simmering attraction to jazz, already ignited before the war, turned into a blazing affair that would consume the rest of her life.
By her own account it was hearing a record by Thelonious Monk that inspired her to leave her husband, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, an aviator and diplomat with whom she had served in the Free French forces during the war, and their five children, and set herself up in New York. There she immersed herself in the jazz world and found what she wanted in the music and its society. Recognising that jazz musicians did their work largely in the face of public indifference, she devoted her resources to providing material assistance
The nature of her relationship with Monk, the principal beneficiary of her largesse, has long attracted speculation. She adored his iconoclastic genius and, with the acceptance and complicity of his wife, Nellie, became the protector of a great pianist and composer rendered vulnerable by mental instability. A heroin bust in 1951 had cost him his cabaret card (the police permit that allowed musicians to work in New York clubs), and she fought to get it restored. When they were apprehended by police while she was driving him to an out-of-town gig in 1958 and a small amount of marijuana was found, she claimed it was hers; she was sentenced to three years in prison, and it took a two-year battle and the Rothschild family’s legal muscle to get the case dismissed on a technicality in the appeal court. Monk spent the final, completely inactive years of his life in her house on the banks of the Hudson River, sharing the premises not just with Nica but with her scores of cats, which he destested.
Iconoclastic British designer rose to prominence by outfitting the Sex Pistols as punk took off in the 1970s
Dame Vivienne Westwood, the pioneering British fashion designer who played a key role in the punk movement, has died in London at the age of 81.
She met the band manager Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s while working as a primary school teacher after separating from her first husband, Derek Westwood. The pair opened a small shop on Kings Road in Chelsea in 1971 that became a haunt of many of the bands she outfitted, including the Sex Pistols, who were managed by McLaren.
Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs came to define the punk aesthetic, and Westwood would become one of Britain’s most celebrated fashion designers, blending historical references, classic tailoring and romantic flourishes with harder edged and sometimes overtly political messages.
Westwood and McLaren’s shop changed its name and focus several times, including rebranding as Sex, – the pair were fined in 1975 for an “indecent exhibition” there – as well as Worlds End and Seditionaries.
Westwood’s first catwalk show, in 1981, for her Pirates collection, was an important step in the punk rebel becoming one of the fashion world’s most celebrated stars. But she still found ways to shock: her Statue of Liberty corset in 1987 is credited as starting the “underwear as outerwear” trend.
Even as Westwood’s design empire grew into a multimillion-pound business, the designer never lost her activist streak. In 1989 she posed for the cover of Tatler magazine dressed as Margaret Thatcher, over a caption that read: “This woman was once a punk”. She later told Dazed Digital that “the suit I wore had been ordered by Margaret Thatcher from Aquascutum, but she had then cancelled it”.
The tragedy of du Pré’s brief career is still fresh in the public memory and can be summarised here. She was born in Oxford on 26 January 1945 into a middle-class family in which music was important: her mother was a fine pianist and a gifted teacher. The French-sounding name came from her father’s Channel Islands ancestry. Just before her fifth birthday, when she was already showing musical promise, she heard the sound of a cello on the radio and the course of her life was set. She studied at Herbert Walenn’s London Violoncello School and at ten became a pupil of William Pleeth, who had himself studied with Julius Klengel. Pleeth played with a good deal of uninhibited body movement and passed this trait on to du Pré, whose total physical involvement in her playing was to endear her to audiences. She made a successful London recital début in 1961, studied with Casals in Switzerland, Tortelier in Paris and Rostropovich in Moscow with varying degrees of success – one wonders what these players could have taught such a natural musician – and gradually consolidated her reputation at home. She began recording for EMI in 1962 and by 1965, when her famous disc of the Elgar Concerto was made, she was a star. That year she made her American début and in 1967 she married the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim.
In July 1971, when she shoud have been at her peak, she began suffering seriously from a mysterious ailment which had already intermittently affected her playing. Eventually multiple sclerosis was diagnosed and, after a cruel series of remissions and relapses typical of that illness, in 1973 she retired. Gradually her health deteriorated, and she died in London on 19 October 1987.
Though born in London and now based in Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr spent time living in various locations around the United States growing up. On her debut album, 2018’s Lake Tear of the Clouds, she drew inspiration from the landscapes she experienced in upstate New York, mirroring the cyclical journey of water as it moves down from the Adirondack Mountains. She produced the record with My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, relying on her evocative vocals, mellotron, Omnichord, pocket piano, guitars, and percussion to create a spectral, meditative soundworld. After releasing the standalone single ‘Hang Yr Hat’ in 2021, Murr has returned with Corridor, a six-track EP out today via Full Time Hobby. Though the process of making it was marked by solitude and uncertainty, the collection is enchanting as much for its delicately intimate portrait of past and fragile relationships as it is for the sonic pathways Murr traverses to explore them. It’s a plea for change as well as an opportunity to refocus, learning how to carry every place you’ve been along with the simple knowledge that growth happens naturally, without fail.
Wilko Johnson, the guitarist for Dr Feelgood and a formative influence on the British punk movement, has died aged 75. A statement posted to his official social media accounts said he died at home on 21 November.
Johnson was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer in 2013 and elected not to receive chemotherapy. That year, he was told he had nine to 10 months left to live.
Nevertheless, in 2014 he released the album Going Back Home, a collaboration with the Who’s Roger Daltrey. Later that year, he announced that he was cancer-free.
Bertrand Cantat is a French songwriter, singer, and musician known for being the former frontman of the rock band Noir Désir. In 2003, he was proven guilty without a doubt and convicted of the murder of French actress Marie Trintignant.
In October 2010, three months after his probational status of release was lifted and his sentence declared completed, Cantat resumed his musical career with a gig in Bordeaux. His re-entry into the public eye frustrated women’s rights campaigners and victim support groups.
“The challenge was not easy, we wanted to read dematerialized music as musical as possible. In fact, forget this sound that we considered too digital for a more analog sound, more in the spirit of vinyl.” Advance Paris
“ The disappearance of the object seems to be a fait accompli in recorded commercial music. Leaving aside the rare nostalgic, the format fetishist/fundamentalist, the minor industry of retro replicas, and also the no-industry of so-called underground experimental music, nobody cares anymore about the traditional physical carriers of audio when it comes to actually listening to music (whatever that might mean today).
Not only the shellac and vinyl records are gone; the “compact disc” – incarnation of the “digital music revolution” – is also gone. In pure techno-theological fashion, but well beyond the simple metaphor, one could think of the CD as the martyr who first brought the digital gospel and then sacrificed his body for the eternal salvation of the digital audio files dwelling in cloud-heaven today.
After a burgeoning century that saw a novel object-based music industry appear, rise and collapse, the process of digitization – so the story goes – has eventually dematerialized music, which now moves disembodied at lightning speed (or so they claim it does) among mythical servers, multiple personal devices and up and down “the cloud”.
The “broadcasting/streaming” dematerialization (both analog and digital; from classic radio to piped Muzak to online/“cloud” streaming) can be seen as a further degree of dematerialized ownership or accessibility. We do not even have the encoded information – whether analog or digital – but instead have (own, buy, get granted) the right to access it as a decoded physical perceptive manifestation (audible sound, in the case of music).
And somehow, with obvious telematic and portability twists of far-reaching consequences, we are thus back to the agelong situation of our hands (and our shelves) being empty of any imaginable materialized music. That is, back to an ethereal state of listening.” Francisco Lopez
Low’s Mimi Parker has died. The band announced the news on its official Twitter account this morning (November 6). “Friends, it’s hard to put the universe into language and into a short message, but she passed away last night, surrounded by family and love, including yours,” the message reads. “Keep her name close and sacred. Share this moment with someone who needs you. Love is indeed the most important thing.” Parker had been living with ovarian cancer since 2020. She was 55 years old, Low’s management told The Guardian.
Mimi Parker was from Minnesota; she spent her childhood in the Bemidji area and moved to Duluth for college. Her mother was an aspiring country singer and frequently played music around the house. “So she had a guitar and we would kind of just sit around and play music,” Parker said on Fresh Air in 2005. “And my role was always to come up with harmonies, because she and my sister would usually sing the lead, so from the beginning… I just learned how to listen and kind of draw and come up with harmonies.” Parker began drumming in middle school, performing the snare in marching band. Parker met her future husband and bandmate Alan Sparhawk in grade school. Parker and Sparhawk began dating in high school and were married several years later.
Low was born from Sparhawk’s experimentations in another project called Zen Identity. Sparhawk enlisted Parker to play drums, and, alongside bassist John Nichols, the trio formed Low in 1993. (Nichols would soon be replaced by Zak Sally.) Low released their debut album, I Could Live in Hope, the following year. Low were pioneers of a genre categorized as “slowcore,” defined by glacial tempos and quiet performances. Famously, their 1999 Christmas EP featured a cover of “Little Drummer Boy” that would appear in a Gap commercial. In 2004, Low released their first album on Sub Pop, The Great Destroyer, which moved toward a more dynamic rock sound.
Low experienced lineup changes over the years, but Parker and Sparhawk consistently remained. Over the years they worked with producers including Kramer, Steve Albini, Dave Friddman, and BJ Burton. In 2018, Low experienced a critical breakthrough with the Burton-produced Double Negative. In 2021, they released Hey What, Parker and Sparhawk’s first record as a duo.
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