Tame Impala, On tour
Despite being a live band who work in a field that traditionally lends itself to collective improvisation, Tame Impala are a more contradictory proposition: they look as if they should sound like Cream, but are in their way as orderly as the Beach Boys. That certainly hasn’t prevented them making very good records, such as 2012’s Lonerism, which stacked phased harmonies on top of what you’d maybe call “chamber grunge”. Duly, Tame Impala’s new one, Currents, with its move towards Daft Punk-style grooves, feels more a logical development than outright shock. As with Unknown Mortal Orchestra, you start off liking a guitar band and end up just liking the band, without any qualification.
Barrowland, Glasgow, Tue; Liverpool Olympia, Wed; Bestival, Isle of Wight, Fri
JR
King Crimson, On tour
King Crimson are a band but their story is essentially the vision and whim of one man: Robert Fripp. An extraordinary guitarist and collaborator with some of the most recognisable names in pop music (David Bowie, say, on whose “Heroes” album his playing is a cornerstone), Fripp’s reactivation of King Crimson marks a return to the band’s bracing – at times scarifying – jazz-rock-prog fusion. People feel the same way about King Crimson as they do about the Grateful Dead; it’s more about the journey, the improvisations and variations, than the finite song. Having settled a long-running rights dispute, Fripp isn’t just the band’s driving force, he is its supervising archivist. Side-projects develop other possibilities, while the current main band work on “reconfigured” material. Live, you’ll find three drummers out front, with the fireworks of Fripp and his fellow guitarists at the rear.
JR
Dave Gilmour, Brighton
The story of Pink Floyd can be told in terms of head and heart, harsh and mellow, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. While Waters carves out new iterations of his angry and isolationist epic The Wall, Gilmour has plotted a less argumentative course since the partnership’s demise 33 years ago. He hasn’t achieved much, arguably, but what little Gilmour has done hasn’t harmed his legacy either: jamming with the Orb in 2010, and successfully piloting 2014’s final Pink Floyd album, Endless River. Now he’s picking up that momentum with another solo album, Rattle That Lock. While the songs seem a little slight (compared to 2006’s very good On An Island), Gilmour’s singing voice and instantly identifiable guitar playing remain undimmed.
Brighton Centre, Sat, touring to 18 Oct
JR
Senyawa, Bristol & London
Engaging equally with traditional Javanese music and western improv, Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi hail from Yogyakarta in Indonesia. Suryadi plays a trunk of bamboo strung with metal and bamboo strings, a sort of hybrid amplified zither he has named the bambu wukir. He plays it a little like a guitar, with a rhythmic off-kilter twang and drum-like plock. Shabara’s vocals twist around it in guttural deliveries that are all mystery and doom; part death metal, part throat singing. With an album out this year, they have become the unmissable act on any experimental festival bill. Shabara will also host a vocal workshop at Glasgow’s Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (Thu).
Old Market music festival, The Exchange, Bristol, Sat; Cafe Oto, E8, Mon; touring to 12 Sep
JA
John Taylor Jazz Piano Summit, London
John Taylor, one of the most creative individuals to emerge from the British jazz scene, died suddenly on tour in July. It’s a loss that fans, students, fellow players and friends are still coming to terms with, and one that has spawned this all-star South Bank piano summit in his memory. Taylor could be a performer of fastidious elegance, a jazz swinger of irrepressible fluency and a composer of sophisticated contemporary music, in which the earthiness of the blues or the chord-voicings of his early hero Bill Evans would flit in and out. Britain’s Gwilym Simcock, Germany’s Michael Wollny and Taylor’s regular duet partner Fairhurst spearhead the performances on this unique gig. Also at the keyboards are Taylor’s former students Liam Noble, Tom Cawley, Kit Downes, John Turville and Tom Hewson, while the appropriately eclectic Trish Clowes makes a guest appearance on saxes.
Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall, SE1, Wed
JF
Macbeth, London
Turning Shakespeare into an opera is daunting for any composer, and there are plenty of examples of those who have failed to do justice to their ambitions. But Australia-born Luke Styles, who’s now based in the UK, clearly doesn’t worry about the precedents. As a former pupil of Wolfgang Rihm and George Benjamin he comes with pedigree, and he’s just finished a spell of three years as young-composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne. The final product of that is this 75-minute chamber opera – Styles’s fifth – which is based on Macbeth, and comes to the Linbury Studio for a single performance. Ted Huffmann, who is directing the production, has written the libretto, which, Styles says, concentrates on the human rather than supernatural aspects of the story. The cast is all male, with an orchestra of 12 players; according to the composer, the score draws on the recitative-and-aria tradition that stretches from Monteverdi to the present day.
Linbury Studio Theatre At Royal Opera House, WC2, Wed
AC
