He was 75 when he finally did it. That’s an age at which most singers’ breath-control is declining, their range diminishing and their tone becoming clouded with rasps and wheezes. No one told Tony Bennett. He walked into a New York studio in 2001, four weeks after 9/11, and delivered…
Category: Features
Graeme Thompson SMALL HOURS – THE LONG NIGHT OF JOHN MARTYN (Omnibus) 8.5/10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the performances of great early-19th-century actor Edmund Kean as “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning”. Something similar could be said of listening to John Martyn’s most compelling music, with his lyrics carrying…
You’re 16 years old and a wannabe concert promoter. Amid extreme racial tensions in 1968, the year both Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, you’ve booked the Thelonious Monk Quartet to play at your very white Californian high school, with two local black support acts. But tickets…