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Winterreise
In the full-fat era of the record industry, Siggi Loch was a very big cheese. Starting out as a teenaged Sidney Bechet fan in Hannover in the early 1950s, he played drums with his own band, the Red...
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Allen Toussaint 1938-2015
When someone like Allen Toussaint dies, you go straight to your record collection. In this case the first disc I pulled out was Lee Dorsey’s “Freedom for the Stallion”, one of the most quietly moving...
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Julia Holter in Islington
When I told my friend Howard Thompson that I was going to see Julia Holter at the Islington Assembly Hall last night, he said: “You should listen to her cover of ‘Hello Stranger’.” Although Howard and...
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Nico in London, 1971
I’ve spent a lot of time in Berlin over the past year, and every time I walk past the giant KaDeWe department store on the Ku’damm, I think of Nico. It’s where in 1953 she hung around one of the...
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P.F. Sloan 1945-2015
The songwriter P.F. Sloan died this week, aged 70. More than 40 years ago, the record producer Lou Adler told me a story about him that still makes me smile, even though it had the polish of a tale...
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Turning Turtle
Of all the performances I was able to catch at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, the one that will probably stay with me longest was the evening at Cadogan Hall titled An Evocation of Kenny...
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Annette Peacock at Cafe Oto
“I live alone,” Annette Peacock told the audience as she settled at the piano stool on Monday evening. “So I talk to myself.” The sense of a continuous interior monologue is always present in the work...
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‘She’s Your Lover Now’
“What do you want to call this, for now?” Bob Johnston asks Bob Dylan, whose reply to his producer is punctuated by giggles. “This is called… yes… we’ll call it ‘Just a Little Glass of Water’.” And, on...
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