John Shand Posts
November 6, 2020 / Album Reviews - Archive

Damian Wright

SHIFTING SANDS (ABC) 8/10 The music’s flamenco core never wavers. Damian Wright’s glorious guitar playing is the spine, if you will, while his compositions allow other instruments to sing their own songs, like willowy limbs able to dance independently because of the spine’s solidity. Wright’s compositions could have been presented…

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November 5, 2020 / Features - Archive

Coaxed from plain white stage to silvery screen

I was 15 and as impressionable as a piece of dough when Peter Brook’s RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream burned itself into my memory. The play’s magic came to miraculous life on Brook’s famous “white box” stage, with trapezes, spinning plates, stilts and a giant ostrich feather contextualising…

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November 3, 2020 / Features - Archive

All the music, all the magic and the other Mr Bowie

As a young trumpeter he used to practice near an open window, just in case Louis Armstrong was wandering past and heard him. Not that Armstrong lived in St Louis, but Lester was an optimist. He’d always trot off and audition when Ray Charles came to town, again without luck.…

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