MUSIC PREVIEW
v LISN! I
T he
owe their label, My Dark Star to MIST.
I The Music In Scotland Trust has launched an appeal to Scottish industry and commerce to give its financial support to young Scots musicians. The Trust has already been able to secure £160,000 through the Prince‘s Youth Business Trust. but the target of£500,000 was announced on 15 August. with the hope that a Scottish Music Business infrastructure could eventually develop. ‘Obviously. MIST is the starting point for this development .' said Donnie Munro, and Bruce Findlay praised the funds and encouragement the organisation has already given to musicians and people in music-related businesses. Building an I infrastructure as a means of safeguarding and creating jobs. while finding the money to help
the top of MIST‘s agenda.
Miss Solfridgo's woman of the 90': (colour only available In somorrv regions).
I We've heard plain tripe before, but Miss Selfridge‘s autumn cosmetics collection takes the ruminant‘s paunch. ‘Glamrock‘ is the name. and the ‘musical shades of colour‘ have. for some reason unknown to anyone living any closer than Saturn. been linked up with renowned names from the early 705. Hence. one can perk up those eyebrows with Clapton Cream or Grey Marley (what'?); or draw attention to those all-important lips and nails with Brick Jagger, Alice Copper. Ziggy Star Rust and. best of all, Red Zeppelin. lf.of course, one was mad enough to enter a shop
i
at the grass-roots IS now at g
7 Creeping up with
All About Eve, the band formed seven years ago by ex-Gene Loves Jezebel bassist and Coventry girl Julianne
Regan, would like to dispel some rumours. Contrary to popular opinion, states guitarist Andy Cousin, they ‘are not goths’. Neither, he insists, are they
? ‘pre-Raphaelite gypsies’. TheirTop
Ten hit, similarly, was ‘not a hippie
song’; that Julianne used to sing
backing vocals with The Mission is ‘not really relevant now’ and they’re ‘very
embarrassed. . . oh dear’ thattheir
ex-guitarist Tim Bricheno recently
; joined the Sisters Of Mercy. Bit of a . giveaway, that one though, hey, Andy?
‘Oh God, no. Tim’s a goth, he’s found
1 his roots and good luck to him. We want
to progress away from all that. I think
we’ve almost shaken off that j ‘hippie-goth’ tag, but it’s been hard work. We don’t sit around all day in a
commune taking drugs. Never have done. And I’ve had my hair cut. . .We’d like people to take us a bit more seriously nowadays. When you get pigeonholed as a hippie band, people aren’t prepared to view your music in a contemporary light. And that gets irritating.‘
The new (and third) All About Eve LP, ‘Touched By Jesus’, is certainly a lot more ‘contemporary’ sounding than some of the airy, acoustic doodlings the band have favoured on past outings. Whereas the last long-player, 1989’s “Scarlet And Other Stories’, nodded knowingly towards 705
Jesus
AllAbout Eve retro-rock, the new collection is an innovative, more ‘raunchy’ experience, the work of a band finally ploughing theirown lurrow, looking forward and not back to patchouli and henna. Dodgytitle though, ‘Touched By Jesus’?
‘Well, itwas originally “Hush”, but we changed it at the last minute. The ABR men had heart attacks. But it’s just meant to convey the idea of feeling good at certain times in your life, like we feel right now. Anyway, fuck the US Bible Belt, it’s justaboutleeling good. See, we can’t be goths — goths aren’t allowed to feel good.‘
Okay. All About Eve are ‘not goths’. Got you. (Paul Hullah)
GIGS guide
Anne Mason and Cheryl Barker in Scottish Opera’s La Clemenza Di Tito
The City of Glasgow Philharmonic Orchestra and its regularly lull houses at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall demonstrated that there is a seemingly insatiable demand for concerts of favourite popular classics in Glasgow. While not particularly intellectually challenging, programmes of Sousa, Suppe and Superman are certainly pleasing a lot of the public a lot more of the time than they used to. Starting on
I l
Friday 30, the first Glasgow International Gala Season— GIGS— presents a whole fortnight of crowd-pulling music. Popular-based it may be, but it is a series with plenty of meaty music which promises to have excellence of performance as its hallmark.
Aside lrom the City of Glasgow Philharmonic itself, which gives five of the fourteen concerts — one starring flautist James Galway—there are visits from the Czech Philharmonic, the Halle, SCO, BBC $80 and Scottish Opera. The Mozart Festival Orchestra gives two all-Mozart programmes in period costumes and forthe Last Night, the Glasgow Philharmonic is joined by the Scottish Massed Male Voice Choir, the CWS (Glasgow) Band and the City of Glasgow Pipes and Drums for ‘A Scottish Fantasia’. Among the highlights of the two weeks are Richard Rodney Bennett's ‘Percussion Concerto’, performed by the SCO with Evelyn Glennie as soloist, Cecille Ousset playing Rachmaninov’s ‘Piano Concerto No 2' with the Halle and Scottish Opera conducted by John Mauceri in Gershwin’s ‘Girl Crazy’. (Carol Main)
Glasgow International Gala Season is at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall from Fri 30 Aug-Sun 15 Sept.
V JAZZ
singular
woman
Kenny Mathieson traces the career ofcomposer and pianist Carla Bley.
The music of(‘arla Bley occupies a unique position in contemporary
; jazz. In the first instance. she is one
of a very small band of jazz artists who is best known for her work as a composer rather than as a virtuoso performer. And she is also a woman. These days. more women instrumentalists are trickling into jazz, but Bley emerged in the (TUS. when it remained very much a male bastion. Women had traditionally
been singers. and the few writers and ,
players who had slipped out of the strait-jacket merely served to prove the rule.
llcr idiosyncratic compositions (‘I decided when I was about five years old that I wanted to write music‘) attracted the attention of pianist Paul Bley. who became her first husband. and he still features them in his repertoire. ’l‘hey then caught the cztroerorge Russell. the pre-eminent example of a modern jazz composer. who also began to record them.
Bley is dismissive ol'the gender issue. arguing that. ‘I got where I did because I wrote better than the other guys. and that‘s all there is to it.’ Her music combines an acute ear for unusual. off-centre melodies and a trademark rhythmic sense which marks her out as distinct from the pack.
In 1964. she formed the Jazz Composer‘s (iuild with her second husband. trumpeter Michael Mantlcr. an organisation which metamorphosed into the Jazz Composer's Orchestra Association (and ultimately the vital but now collapsed New Music Distribution Service). and was responsible for some ofthe most striking music of its time. JCOA is now defunct. but Bley still runs her own Watt record label.
‘At that time. I couldn‘t get a record contract at all. I could have gone away and become a waitress. but instead I set up my own label. which is even more work now than it was then. and got involved with the JCOA. It was done out ofnecessity. but as soon as we did it. we found a lot ofother people in the same situation. The worst thing about the collapse ofthe NMDS it is that we owe the money to musicians and small companies. who were the very people we wanted to help.‘
Bley wrote a number ofacclaimed arrangements for Charlie Haden‘s Liberation Orchestra in the late ()()s
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32 The List 30 August — 12 September 1991