Frank Brooker’s Happy Chappies: Playing at the Cross Keys on January 2 2020
“GET jazzing done!”, says Alan Bramley, organiser of a new season of Thursday
afternoon jazz sessions at the Cross Keys pub, in Tadcaster Road, York.
“Those weekly sessions have become increasingly popular since their
inauguration in 2017,” says Alan, who not only makes the bookings but also plays
trombone with some of the bands.
“For the start of 2020, I’ve booked a programme of jazz in varying
styles, all highly entertaining.”
Frank Brooker’s Happy Chappies kick off the New Year on January 2, followed
by the Cross Keys Jazz Band on January 9; Tim New Jazz Band on January 16; 7th City
Jazz Band on January 23 and the Nicki Allan Five, finishing off the month, on
January 30.
These traditional jazz afternoons run from 1pm to 3.30pm each Thursday.
Admission and parking are free, food is available and the pub is both dog and
child friendly.
More details can be found on Facebook at Crosskeysjazz.
Hello? Play Scarborough as well as York, you say? Why not, says Lionel Richie
LIONEL
Richie will play two North Yorkshire shows within a fortnight next summer after
adding Scarborough Open Air Theatre on June 9 to his York Festival appearance on
June 21.
Tickets go
on sale for his Scarborough return on Wednesday at 9am, Richie having made his
sold-out debut there in June 2018 on his All The Hits, All Night Long tour.
“It was a truly wonderful night on the Yorkshire coast in 2018 and I
cannot wait to return to this beautiful part of the UK again,” says the Alabama
soul singer, songwriter and producer. “It’s going to be another night to
remember, so bring you’re dancing shoes.”
Richie, 70, will play Scarborough as part of his Hello!, Hits tour, performing
songs from his Commodores days to the present day, taking in Three Times
A Lady,
Truly, Dancing On The Ceiling, Say You Say Me, Hello and All
Night Long.
Honoured last year with the Ivor Novello PRS for Music Special International
Award, to go with an Oscar, Golden Globe and four Grammy awards and 100 million
album sales, Richie released his latest album, Live From Las Vegas, in the
summer.
Heading East: Westlife: to play Scarborough in the same week as their York Festival headline show next June
York
Festival can be added to such Richie festival headline sets as Bonnaroo, Outside
Lands and Glastonbury, where he drew more than 200,000 to main stage in 2015.
Cuffe and Taylor are promoting both his Scarborough and York gigs. “Lionel
Richie is an undoubted global superstar and we are delighted to be able to
bring him back here to Scarborough,” says director Peter Taylor.
“His 2018 sold-out show was the stuff of legend. It was a brilliant
night in the presence of one of the most successful and celebrated music
artists of all time.”
As well as Richie, Cuffe and Taylor have booked Irish boy band Westlife
to play both locations, Scarborough OAT on June 17 and York Festival, at York Sports
Club, Clifton Park, Shipton Road, on June 20.
Tickets for Scarborough OAT concerts are on sale at scarboroughopenairtheatre,com, on 01723 818111 or 01723 383636, or in person from the venue, in Burniston Road, or the Discover Yorkshire Tourism Bureau, ScarboroughTown Hall, St Nicholas Street.
For York Festival tickets, go to york-festival.com.
York Early Music Christmas Festival:Yorkshire Bach Choir/Baroque Soloists, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, December 14
THE York Early Music Christmas Festival finished brightly on Saturday with Handel’s Messiah before a packed house. Tempos were rapid, but that comes with the territory when Peter Seymour is at the helm (he sat at the harpsichord and even fingered it from time to time).
Nothing wrong with speed: it is widely thought to deliver excitement. But audiences, like electorates, are not easily fooled and Messiah is not really about excitement. Although traditionally wheeled out at Yuletide, its true focus is the message of Easter.
Mezzo soprano soloist Helen Charlston. Picture: Matthew Badham
One of Seymour’s soloists, mezzo Helen Charlston, appeared to realise this and took him on. He raced into her aria, He Was Despised – and she managed to slow him down. Thus her unaccompanied voicing of “despised” and “rejected”, with a little sob in the latter word, unexpectedly became the evening’s most telling moment.
The choir of 36 voices was impeccably on the ball, its diction superb and its staccato runs unimpeachably clear. Six tenors were not enough in this company and the bass line lacked its usual authority, but the upper voices – several countertenors included – were exemplary.
York soprano soloist Bethany Seymour. Picture: Jim PoynerJim Poyner
The best of the soloists was the bass Gareth Brynmor John, relaxed and forthright in equal measure and especially stirring in Why Do The Nations. In contrast, Gwilym Bowen’s increasingly effortful tenor verged on the operatic, although perfectly suited to Thou Shalt Break Them. Apart from her smooth I Know That My Redeemer Liveth, Bethany Seymour’s soprano arias were shrieky, with dodgy breath control.
No such problems with the tireless orchestra. Led by the spritely Lucy Russell, the strings laid a consistently stylish foundation. Yet relentless speed is only one of countless ways to treat this work. It would be nice to hear some of them occasionally.
York Early Music Christmas Festival: Fieri Consort, National Centre for Early Music, York, December 11
SORRY to pour cold water on your show, chaps, but this was not the oratorio it was billed to be. Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, an Italian with Austrian forebears, described his theatrical piece of 1629, The Shepherds of Bethlehem, as a “dialogo recitativo” – a dialogue in musical speech – a forerunner of oratorio certainly, but not the real McCoy. That was still to come.
Now that’s cleared up, Kapsperger certainly made a hefty stab at dramatising the Christmas story and the five singers and four players of Fieri put up a pretty good case for it. So we had the shepherds and the angels battling for the spotlight, while the librettist – a pope-in-waiting – delivered unctuous praise of the present pope, Urban VIII, via a narrator.
What the work lacked in arias was pleasingly filled in with motets and other madrigal-style commentaries, mainly from an earlier generation of composers. So Hassler hinted at the Annunciation, Michael Praetorius’s rose bloomed again, Marenzio admired the Christ-child and Victoria evoked the mystery of it all.
Fieri bring plenty of meat to the table in this repertory. These are strong, modern voices quite without the preciousness once so treasured by early-music buffs, but smooth at the edges as well, so that their blend is exceptionally polished. Shading was less prevalent here. There was even some splendid coloratura from Hannah Ely and Helen Charlston, courtesy of Carissimi, and the instruments kept up tasty chatter behind it all.
Up in lights: Northern Ballet dancer Martha Leebolt in David Nixon’s Cinderella. at Leeds Grand Theatre from December 17. All pictures: Emma Kauldhar
NORTHERN Ballet return home from December 17 for the festive season in Leeds with artistic director David Nixon’s enchanting adaptation of Cinderella at the Grand Theatre.
In the Canadian-born choreographer’s
account of “the world’s most famous rags-to-riches fairy tale”, he combines
dance with magic and circus skills, as seen on tour already at Nottingham Theatre
Royal and Norwich Theatre Royal last month.
Puff the magic! Ashley Dixon as The Magician in Northern Ballet’s Cinderella
In Northern Ballet’s Cinderella,a tragic end to a perfect summer’s day leaves Cinderella with no choice but
to accept a desolate life of servitude. At the mercy of her wicked Stepmother,
Cinderella seeks joy where she can but, after encountering the handsome
carefree Prince skating on a glistening lake of ice, she yearns for another
life.
Despite her sadness,
Cinderella never forgets to be kind and her generosity is repaid when a chance
encounter with a mysterious magician changes her destiny forever.
Touching moment: Javier Torrres as Prince Mikhail and Minju Kang as Cinderella
Cinderella is not
only choreographed and directed by Nixon, but he has designed the opulent
costumes too. The ballet is performed to an original score by Philip Feeney, played
live each performance by Northern Ballet Sinfonia. Duncan Hayler has designed the
transformative sets, complemented by Tim Mitchell’s lighting design.
Nixon says: “This
production of Cinderella, while being immediately recognisable as the famous
fairy tale, offers something different to other traditional ballet adaptations.
Point of order: Minju Kang and Rachael Gillespie in Cinderella
“We have staged our
ballet in the winter wonderland of Imperial Russia, opening up the
possibilities of this colourful world as a new setting for Cinderella to make
her journey. “Audiences will see the dancers skate on a glistening lake of ice,
stilt walkers entertaining in a marketplace and the fateful Ball held in a
Fabergé-inspired ballroom.”
He concludes: “Cinderellais ultimately the story of a young woman who must travel a challenging road
to achieve happiness and our ballet is a joyful adaptation filled with action,
magic and fun.”
You will go to the Ball: Minju Kang’s Cinderella in Northern Ballet’s Cinderella
Northern Ballet’s Cinderella runs at Leeds Grand Theatre, December 17 to January 2 2020, 7pm (not December 24 or 31); 2pm matinees, December 18, 21, 24, 27, 28 and 31, January 2; Sunday shows at 4pm, December 22 and 29; no Sunday evening shows. No performances on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. Box office: 0844 848 2700 or at leedsgrandtheatre.com.
Cinderella production credits
Choreography, Direction and Costume
Design: David
Nixon
Here come the Citizens Of Boomtown: Bob Geldof, second from right, and The Boomtown Rats are to play York Barbican next spring
BOB Geldof’s punk old guard, The Boomtown Rats, are on their way to York
Barbican on April 25 2020 on their Citizens Of Boomtown tour.
Tickets go on sale at 11am on Friday (December 13) on 0203 356 5441, at
yorkbarbican.co.uk or in person from the Barbican box office.
Next spring’s tour will complement the release of a new album, Citizens
Of Boomtown, the Rats’ first studio work
since In The Long Grass in May 1984. Full details will be announced “very soon”.
Irishman Geldof, now 68, formed The Boomtown Rats in Dublin in 1975, touring
in their early days with The Ramones and Talking Heads en route to achieving
BRIT, Ivor Novello and Grammy awards.
Lanky, lippy frontman Geldof, pianist Johnny Fingers and co became the
first Irish band to top the UK charts with Rat Trap in 1978 and made number one
in 32 countries with I Don’t Like Mondays in 1979.
The Boomtown Rats recorded six albums, The Boomtown Rats in 1977; A
Tonic For The Troops in 1978;The Fine Art Of Surfacing, 1979; Mondo Bongo,
1980; V Deep, 1982, and the aforementioned In The Long Grass two years later.
That year, Geldof formed the Band Aid charity supergroup, co-writing the
chart-topping single Do They Know It’s Christmas (Feed The World) with Ultravox’s
Midge Ure and later organising the Live Aid and Live8 fund-raising concerts in
aid of Ethiopian famine relief in 1985 and 2005.
He played solo gigs at the Grand Opera House, York, in November 2002 to
promote his Sex, Age & Death album, and at Harrogate Royal Hall in May 2012
after releasing How To Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell in 2011. It didn’t
sell, ironically, peaking at number 87 in the British album charts.
His last stage appearance in York should have taken place in a line-up alongside
Alan Johnson MP, Nicky Morgan MP and David Dimbleby in June 2016 at Central
Hall, University of York. He was to have spoken on behalf of the Remain
campaign on the last Question Time before the EU Referendum, but recording of the
BBC1 show was cancelled after the death of Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox.
It would have marked the Irish knight, famine relief crusader, dot.com
entrepreneur and rock veteran’s return to the Central Hall stage for the first
time since 1986. That year Geldof had encouraged the audience to dance at a Boomtown Rats
show despite a no-dancing rule in the contract.
“Since that day, only students have
been allowed to attend York university gigs,” he recalled in an interview in
2002. “I only invited them to dance! We were a ******* dance band, for
Christ’s sake.The student union sued us, but it was sorted out.”
How? “We ignored it! But I better not
remind them – though they would have to sue the Rats, not me!”
“I found it to be a good place for seeing the forest through the trees,” says Gill Landry, who wrote Skeleton At The Banquet while staying in a French village
GILL Landry, the two-time Grammy-winning American singer, songwriter and
guitarist, is booked into The Crescent in York for February 12 2020 on his
ten-date British tour.
The Old Crow Medicine Show alumnus and founder
member of The Kitchen Syncopators will be promoting his fifth solo album, Skeleton
At The Banquet.
Released on Loose Music on January 24 2020, Landry’s follow-up to 2017’s Love Rides A Dark Horse was preceded by his November single, I Love You Too.
Recorded and produced in Los Angeles by Landry and Seth Ford-Young, who has worked previously with Tom Waits and Edward Sharpe, Skeleton At The Banquet features Landry on vocals, guitars, pedal steel, keys and harmonica, Ford-Young on bass, Josh Collazo on drums, Stewart Cole on trumpet and Odessa Jorgensen on violin.
The album artwork for Gill Landry’s new album, Skeleton At The Banquet, to be released next month
“This album is a series of reflections and thoughts on the collective
hallucination that is America, with a love song or two thrown in for good
measure,” says Landry. who also uses the stage name of Frank Lemon, by the way.
“I wrote it from within the refuge of a small flat in a small village in
western France, where I spent last summer. I found it to be a good place for
seeing the forest through the trees, so to speak.”
Landry, originally from Lake Charles, Louisiana, will open his British
dates at the Americana Music Association UK’s festival in London on January 28.
Tickets for February 12 are on sale at £12 at Earworm Records, Powells Yard, Goodramgate, York, from The Crescent or online via the crescentyork.com.
Landry will play a further Yorkshire gig at The Lantern, Halifax, on February 16. Box office: 01422 341003 or thelanternhalifax.co.uk.
Rainbow chasers: Shed Seven on the road again for December
Shed Seven, Shedcember Tour 2019, Leeds First Direct Arena, December 7
SHED Seven, December 7, and they must be in heaven. Sixteen
years after York’s only ever Top Ten band split – a case of Britpop crackle,
then snap – they are at a maximum high, playing to their biggest ever indoor
crowd down the A64 in Leeds, where Manchester’s Happy Mondays had to settle for
the smaller Leeds O2 Academy. You’re twisting their lemon, man.
First re-forming in 2007, going for concert gold again, the
Sheds have since made their Shedcember winter tours a regular fixture, this
year playing their record run of 23 shows between November 21 and December 21,
with Leeds Arena at the epicentre.
This has been the year when “Britpop’s meat and potatoes band”
had their Going For Gold compilation dipped in molten gold for a 20th
anniversary deluxe vinyl reissue, and frontman Rick Witter enjoyed a November
natter and a tipple-tasting session on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch. Overdue
respect of sorts, first from their former major label, Polydor, who had jettisoned
them while the hits were still flowing, High Hopes dashed, and then a
long-running chat-and-chomp show.
However, the Shed renaissance is built on their raucous, beer-swilling,
body-still-willing, terrace-chant live shows, peaking across the Pennines in
Summer 2018 when 8,000 gathered at Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl one June
night.
By now, their set lists have been bolstered by 2017’s
“comeback” album, Instant Pleasures, their first since 2001’s Artful work,
Truth Be Told (a record entirely absent from Saturday’s 19-song setlist).
These Shedcember shows are bigger, brighter in their
lighting, filmed up close on the video screens, and bolstered in Leeds by
boisterous support slots from Birmingham’s The Twang and Sheffield’s Reverend
And The Makers.
Shout-out: Shed Seven had a message for Mrs Craig Lilley at Saturday’s gig
Striding on to The Magnificent Seven theme tune, it was T-shirts
for Witter and guitarist Paul Banks, Breton-striped top for guitarist and
keyboards player Joe Johnson, shirts for bassist Tom Gladwin and high-rise
drummer Alan Leach. There is still nothing flash about the Sheds, save for the
lightning bolt on Banks’s T and the glistening sheen of the regularly employed
brass trio.
They started with the swaggering Room In My House, the
instant pleasure from Instant Pleasures, later represented by Enemies &
Friends (the night’s one lull), Better Days, an even better It’s Not Easy and knock-out
first encore Invincible.
The Shedlist was dominated by fan favourites, from debut
single Mark, through exhilarating versions of She Left Me On Friday, Dolphin
and Bully Boy, before the one surprise as Going For Gold segued into its distant
third cousin, U2’s Angel Of Harlem, on a suitably cold and wet December day, where
by now no-one’s feet were touching the ground in the standing zone.
Parallel Lines, a cautionary tale as viewed today from the
distance of fatherhood and “day jobs” in the Sheds’ latter forties, assumed its
rightful place as the set’s extended closer. The night ended, as it always must,
with the riotous Disco Down and all-our-yesterdays Chasing Rainbows, matching
the multi-colour lighting chosen to cloak the Arena’s chameleon reptile skin.
Oh, and Mrs Craig Lilley, should you by a miracle be reading
this, you were roundly booed after Witter revealed you had made your husband stay
in, despite his ticket in his pocket. Rather than the room in your house, here’s
where you should have been tonight, both of you.
Double bill: The tour poster for Go West and Paul Young’s 2020 show at York Barbican
EIGHTIES chart heavyweights Go West and Paul Young will hit the road
next year as a double bill that will visit York Barbican on September 13.
Formed in 1982 by Peter Cox and
Richard Drummie, Go West scored such hits as We Close Our Eyes, Call Me and Don’t
Look Down and were voted Best Newcomer at the 1986 BRIT Awards. In 1990, their
song King Of Wishful Thinking featured on the soundtrack for Pretty
Woman, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere’s romantic hit.
After fronting Streetband and Q-Tips, Paul Young
went solo, his career taking off with the 1983 album No Parlez and such singles
as the chart-topping Wherever I Lay My Hat, Love Of The Common People, Everytime
You Go Away and Everything Must Change. He won a BRIT Award for Best Male
Vocalist and sung the opening lines on the original 1984 Band Aid single, Do
They Know It’s Christmas? (Feed The World), also performing at Live Aid at
Wembley Stadium in July 1985.
Young, 63, is a keen chef, biker and fan of all
things Mexicana, not least touring with his Tex Mex/Americana band Los
Pacaminos.
Tickets for Go West and Paul Young’s co-headline gig are on sale on 0203 356 5441, at yorkbarbican.co.uk or in person from the Barbican box office.
Wainwright times three: Loudon Wainwright III with Suzzy Roche and their daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche, playing Pockington next autumn
LOUDON Wainwright III, the North Carolina songwriter, folk musician,
humorist and actor, will play Pocklington Arts Centre on October 3 next year.
Tickets will go on sale at 10am on Wednesday (December 11), as indeed they
will for Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of authors turned musicians, making their
Pock debut on May 30.
Grammy Award-winning Wainwright, 73, will be joined by Suzzy Roche and their daughter Lucy Wainwright Roche at next autumn’s gig, the smallest venue of his 2020 British tour.
They will perform their own songs, complemented by a
selection by songwriters they admire, such as Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty,
Stevie Nicks and Baker Knight.
Over the course of 23 albums of acerbic, wry writing, Wainwright’s
songs have been covered by Johnny Cash, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Scruggs, Mose Allison,
Big Star, Freakwater, Norma Waterson, [late former wife] Kate and Anna
McGarrigle and son Rufus Wainwright.
Arts centre director Janet Farmer says: “Our auditorium is no stranger to welcoming music legends to the stage and Loudon Wainwright III is certainly no exception. We’ve previously welcomed his daughter Martha to Pocklington in August 2013, so we’re delighted to be featuring in Loudon’s forthcoming tour.
“This will be a very rare opportunity to see such a big name from the music world perform within the intimate surroundings of our auditorium.
“But with only a handful of UK dates lined up and Pocklington
Arts Centre being the smallest venue, this is likely to sell out fast, so I
would recommend you get your tickets as early as possible.”
Three Wainwright albums have been nominated for Grammy awards: 1985’s I’m Alright, 1986’s More Love Songs and 2009’s High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, winner of the Best Traditional Folk Album prize in January 2010. Wainwright also has appeared in such films as The Aviator, Big Fish, Elizabethtown, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, for which he composed the score with Joe Henry.
Read the riot act: Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers could murder a good tune at Pocklington Arts Centre next May
Meanwhile, prepare for a different form of murder on the
dancefloor next spring, committed by fiction supergroup Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers.
Harrogate Theakston Old
Peculier Crime Writing Festival stalwarts Mark Billingham and Val McDermid, together
with Chris Brookmyre, Luca
Veste, Doug Johnstone and Stuart Neville, will put down their pens and pick up guitars to “happily murder”
much-loved songs by The Clash, Elvis Costello, Hank Williams, The Beatles,
Talking Heads, The Jam, Johnny Cash
and many others “considering legal action”, apparently.
Between them, the writers have
sold more than 20 million books worldwide and won every major crime-writing
award. Now they swap page for stage to discover if the sword/axe is
mightier than the pen after all.
So far, their set list of
killer tunes has survived in tact at Glastonbury Festival, Cornbury
Festival and the Edinburgh Festival. Now
they must rock in Pock.
“The very concept of crime
writers putting their own killer spin on well-known songs is simply brilliant,
so we can’t wait to bring them to Pocklington for what promises to be a
thrilling night of live music literally like no other,” says Janet Farmer.
Last month, the arts
centre played host to a sold-out evening of poetry readings, questions and
answers and book signings by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, when Pocklington School
students were among the audience.
Tickets cost £44 for Wainwright, £23 for The Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, on 01759 301547 or at pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
