John Shand Posts

January 14, 2018 / Theatre Reviews - Archive

What were they thinking? STC’s production of Jonathan Biggins’s Talk, a play partially about truth in the media, arrived just as the Trump regime had opened the sluices on its deluge of lies. Good timing! But the play, about a lunar-right shock-jock (John Waters), felt like an extravagantly extended sketch…

December 26, 2017 / Album Reviews - Archive

 BLUE MAQAMS (ECM) 9.5/10 Is this the year’s finest release? It is two decades since the great Tunisian oud player Anouar Brahem last collaborated with jazz musicians on the timeless Thimar. That was with John Surman and Dave Holland, and now Holland returns to the fold in company with drummer…

December 25, 2017 / Album Reviews - Archive

All artists are poachers, thieves and cannibals. They pinch ideas, polish up different facets and call them their own. The malaise into which music of all stripes has been sliding for 30 years is that cannibalising what has gone before is now just about all that happens, with precious few…