Everyone has their "what-if" moments. But the “Sliding Doors” inflection points in the life of Guadeloupe-born, Montreal-based Malika Tirolien, after which everything that happened afterwards could been very different, are truly extraordinary.
Ever since she broke through in her teens, Leicestershire singer Mahalia Burkmar’s music has often been referred to as retro or revivalist R&B. But that framing is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the genre operates for young 21st century music lovers. For fans and artists of Mahalia’s generation – she’s 25 – the Nineties and early Noughties classics of Mariah, TLC, Destinys Child and co aren’t really retro in the way that Seventies and Eighties music were back then.
“One night I had a vision of this,” says a visibly emotional Damon Albarn as he looks out to the mass of the crowd at Wembley. Despite closing the London Olympics in 2012, selling millions of albums and headlining Glastonbury, there is the sense that even in their prime, performing two nights at the 90,000 Stadium was one step out of reach.
So, the unadulterated elation – shock even that Blur feels to be here now pumps this reunion. All these years later they’ve done it, and you bet that they’re going to enjoy it.
On December 8th 1957 there was a heavy snowstorm in New York. Ten elderly jazz musicians struggled to make their way through the drifts to a television studio on 10th Avenue. One of them – the bass player – collapsed in the street, and died in hospital three weeks later. But the others got through because they needed to be there, they wanted to be there to support Billie Holiday, who’d been their close friend and inspiration for more than 30 years.
The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (FIJM), the largest in the world, is genuinely on a roll. The head of programming of the huge event, which takes place all around the Quartier des Spectacles in the centre of the city, says in this year's wrap-up press release that “a new wind is blowing through our beloved jazz world, and we can be proud today to see the public rallying around. A booming new scene with legends leading the way: Vive le jazz!”
The farewell for KISS has lasted so long that this Glasgow show, their final ever UK gig, came four years after the End of the Road tour first stopped off in the city. Admittedly that is partly down to the coronavirus scuppering touring plans for a couple of years, but even without that there is a suspicion a group who have monetised themselves so effectively over the years might have found a reason for another trip back here.
First things first. The support acts at events like this usually get completely overlooked, but it would be frankly criminal not to give a mention to a superb set by the Chicks. They dropped the “Dixie” from their original name because of its now “problematic” political connotations, and their critical comments about Dubya Bush provoked a career-changing backlash, but they’ve bounced back feistier than ever.
One of the most striking scenes in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 outer-space allegory Solaris is psychologist Kris Kelvin’s first encounter with a being which seems to be his wife, who had died a decade earlier. The unsettling incident’s inherent tension is heightened by its sonic backdrop: rumbling, a peculiarly musical pink noise, lightning-like bolts of sound. This was created on the ANS synthesiser (AHC in Russian script), a device invented in Soviet-era Russia.
Forty years ago, the songs of New Jersey’s Kool and the Gang formed an essential soundtrack to many a suburban lothario’s weekend. “Celebration”, “Ladies’ Night” and “Get Down on It” were undisputed chart classics of the time – laying down slick grooves that focused wholly on having a good time and not having a care in the world.