Jazz

Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers: cascades of lights, shimmering and flickering in every hue that modern LED technology can supply. At first the effect is almost Zen – soothing washes of pinks and blues and ochres, with carousel horses rising and weaving among them. Then, as the action intensifies and the characters succumb to collective mania, they’re brighter, faster, more aggressive: a frantic sensory overload, flashing to the rave-derived backbeat of Mazzoli’s score. Lucy Carter’s lighting designs are meant to transfix you, and they really do. Hardly the point of an opera, you might say.

The title of the opening concert of the Edinburgh International Festival is also the thesis statement for this year’s entire EIF programme. All Rise is intended to be a celebration of integration, pluralism and collective acceptance, ‘togetherness and ascendance’, at a time when such notions could hardly be less in vogue. It takes a big work to live up to the billing. Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis’s 12-part symphony, which premièred in New York in 1999, certainly doesn’t lack scale or ambition. For this mammoth hybrid composition for jazz ensemble, symphony orchestra and choir, Marsalis and his Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra were joined at the Usher Hall by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers.

The prospect of the new Paul McCartney album does not set my pulses racing, still less that of the Beatles museum on Savile Row that’s opening next year. If I walk into a shop and hear a Beatles track playing, I might walk straight out again, because I know the song too well and resent being held in its grip for three minutes. The Rolling Stones also have a record in the pipeline. I used to love the Stones and probably would again if I revisited them after being denied access to their music for 20 years, but for now, they’re a cultural incubus, like Harry Potter. As for new stuff by new people, I’ve lost the thread.

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway.

The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off.

There’s nothing quite like the drama of a prodigal’s return. ‘I’ve been singing in this venue since I was ten years old,’ announces Shirley Manson, staring down nearly half a century of personal history at Edinburgh’s ornate Usher Hall. The fact that Garbage’s lead singer made the United States her primary residence many years ago lends this homecoming concert added potency. There are shout-outs to her dad, a ‘Happy Birthday’ serenade for her sister and what looks like a tear or two at the start of the encore. A ‘badass’ attitude is so sleekly applied it seems like a Che Guevara T-shirt in the racks at M&S For all the sentiment, it was obvious that Manson was right to leave not just Edinburgh, but the UK.

On Saturday 12 December 1964, Harold Wilson addressed his first Labour party conference as prime minister, George Harrison was photographed with his new girlfriend in the Bahamas, Pope Paul VI told Catholics they could drink alcohol ‘in moderation’ before Midnight Mass and, according to the Mirror, ‘two strip-tease girls fought in the nude in their dressing room after finishing their fan dance at a night club’. The station has become little more than a Spotify playlist interrupted by the disc-jockey burbling It was also the day that Record Review arrived in its Saturday morning slot on the BBC’s Third Programme, now Radio 3. And there it remained.

Teresa Mull, assistant editor A Cat in the Rain by the Turnpike Troubadours The Turnpike Troubadours are back with a new album that sounds a lot like their old ones, which is why I like it so much. A Cat in the Rain has been heralded as “a triumphant comeback,” and indeed, as a fan who’s followed (or tried to, anyway) the Red Dirt band’s ongoing drama, I was surprised and delighted to welcome the return of Evan Felker’s rustic voice singing some fresh, but still familiar-feeling, songs. The lyrics have a gentler, humbler feel to them — overcoming alcoholism by laboring on a cattle ranch and rekindling with the wife you divorced to produce two kids will do that to a man, apparently.