Innehållsförteckning för December 2025 från UNCUT

Release the mags! We’re delighted to bring you the latest artist edition of our Ultimate Record Collection series, presenting the definitive timeline of Nick Cave. This first volume – the ‘Old Testament’, if you will – covers his work from The Boys Next Door via The Birthday Party to The Bad Seeds’ Let Love In. Expect journalist-baiting, the odd arrest and the startling arrival of a demonic talent. It’s in shops on October 17, or available to pre-order from shop.kelsey.co.uk/uncut… Available on October 24 from the same places, the new Ultimate Music Guide will address the enchanted world of Pavement and Stephen Malkmus. In the wake of a thrilling reunion, retrospective exhibitions and freewheeling documentaries, we bring you the last word on the band’s music via in-depth reviews and classic,…

What was your reaction to hearing this rediscovered recording? Do you think it captures the band at this moment? Listening back to this was a lot of fun, and going through the tapes of those performances was astonishing. The band was absolutely on fire during 1985. What are some of your favourite memories of the time? Did it feel like songs were coming together very quickly? I remember all the touring we did that year, like our first trip to England and later our first European tour. We had always been prolific, but everything was just hitting during that year. Do you think this set also captures the point at which the band was able to fuse the fury of hardcore punk with the pop songcraft that Bob and Grant…

It’s astonishing that “Heart Like A Wheel” was the first song you wrote. Kate had told me that the acts she had seen in New York City were singing their own songs. It was the singer-songwriter period. The next time I was at my mother’s, I sat down and wrote “Heart Like A Wheel”. My main influence is religious music we heard and sang as kids with the nuns. I never seem to have gotten past it! When Kate and Roma [Baran] came to town I played a very tentative version for them and they worked it up, piano and cello, and performed it in their sets. What do you recall of making these albums? Sometimes there were whole, or nearly whole, orchestras, as on “Tell My Sister”. Or Kate…

“I left my wallet in El Segundo/I left my true love in a West Lafayette escape room” REGRETS, he’s had a few. Right now, Ryan Davis is regretting having worn a thick twill work jacket onstage at London’s tiny Shacklewell Arms, whose tropical murals are providing a fair reflection of the sweltering heat inside the jam-packed venue. Davis’s dilemma is that whenever his terrific backing group – a gang of loveable misfits known as The Roadhouse Band – kick into a new song, the crowd go absolutely doolally, thus raising the temperature even further. The more ignominious the lyric, the louder they whoop and sing along. It’s a scene of joyous collective catharsis that appears to confirm that, just as he’s entering his forties, Ryan Davis is suddenly becoming a…

IN a breezeblock-lined room in a nondescript building near Cardiff Bay, Super Furry Animals have convened in secret. This is the band’s old studio – now used by their electronics wizard Cian Ciaran and his brother, drummer Dafydd Ieuan – and they’re here for their first interview as a five-piece in over 10 years. Sensibly, they’ve taken the opportunity to get some photos done. “We generally don’t do anything by half-measures,” laughs guitarist and vocalist Gruff Rhys. “I’m delirious from getting up at 4am. We met at 6am. Then we went to a rooftop, then to some allotments and then the park and then Cardiff City Stadium where they do the press conferences – but it’s heavily branded so the photos were a bit weird – then we went on…

JOHN Foxx has spent 50 years living in the future and, at 77, shows few signs of slowing down. The English synthpop pioneer recently performed new solo piano pieces at an outdoor event in Milan to promote his latest album Wherever You Are and has spent part of the summer in Cornwall recording the seventh record by The Maths with his co-conspirator Benge. By any measure, Foxx – born Dennis Leigh in September 1948, in Chorley, Manchester – is a prolific artist whose body of work touches on glam, post-punk, new wave, synthpop, techno, ambient and neoclassical composition. The self-styled quiet man or hidden man of British electronics found fame as the driving force in Ultravox in the late 1970s before casting himself as the Ballardian flâneur of Metamatic in…

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn Certificate 15 Opened September 269/10 A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Willa Fitzgerald Certificate 15 Opened October 3 8/10 THE MASTERMIND Directed by Kelly Reichardt Starring Josh O’Connor, Gaby Hoffmann, Alana Haim Certificate 12A Opens October 24 8/10 THE THING WITH FEATHERS Directed by Dylan Southern Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, David Thewlis, Vinette Robinson Certificate To be confirmed Opens November 7 6/10 KONTINENTAL ’25 Directed by Radu Jude Starring Eszter Tompa, Gabriel Spahiu, Adonis Tanța Certificate 15 Opens October 31 7/10…

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER Unclouded DOMINO Kaleidoscopic psych-pop epiphany, with Ms Prochet using some of the best arrangers in the game – Sven Wunder, Josefin Runsteen, Leon Michels – as her own personal sample library. JULIANNA BARWICK & MARY LATTIMORE “Perpetual Adoration” INFINÉ Inspired by witnessing a mass at NALA SINEPHRO The Smashing Machine OST WARP/A24 Benny Safdie’s bruising new drama about an MMA fighter gets a surprisingly soothing soundtrack from the Caribbean-Belgian synth/harp prodigy and London jazz allies. TYLER BALLGAME For The First Time, Again ROUGH TRADE The charismatic crooner’s debut album offers solid retro-soul moves, with added vulnerability and glam weirdness. Game on! DON WAS AND THE PAN-DETROIT ENSEMBLE Groove In The Face Of Adversity MACK AVENUE Acka-lacka-lacka boom! Blue Note boss Don Was oversees an elite-level soul-jazz jam,…

“It’s important to remember that this is a fun job” HAVING just embarked on her biggest Self Esteem tour to date, Rebecca Lucy Taylor is outlining what it takes to keep her spectacular all-singing, all-dancing show on the road. “It’s quite disciplined: we warm up, we warm down, we do a fitness thing in the middle of the day. We do yoga, not boozing. It could not be more different from when I was in bands, and to look after yourself was sort of frowned upon. Although we had a few drinks last night, in a car park…” There’s no time off, either: as soon as the tour finishes, she’ll be taking up a new role as co-curator of the London Literature Festival – she’s about to publish the companion…

ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER Endless Rooms SUB POP, 2022 Australia’s strict pandemic lockdown may have forced a more siloed writing approach than Joe White and his bandmates had been used to, but the quintet’s third album fizzes with the excitement of a long-awaited reunion. “The Way It Shatters” bursts with pent-up energy, its insistent, jangly riff a template for White’s protégés at their most infectious. 8/10 ALEX LAHEY The Answer Is Always Yes LIBERATION, 2023 From pop-punk beginnings to her more recent earnest indierock, the Melburnian packs her songs with witty detail and deconstructs past relationships with her heart on her sleeve. The optimistic outlook that informed her 2023 release gets a namecheck from Maisie Everett, who Lahey told to “make her own luck” after leaving Clamm to concentrate on…

Is there a link between the new album and Music For Writers? When I was making the instrumental record, I began to understand what I wanted [the new album] to sound like. The residency where I recorded Music For Writers offered a space to explore the sounds I had in my head. That time, and the more abstract approach of the instrumental work, deeply informed the tone and shape of Daylight Daylight. James [Elkington] was crucial in bringing the ideas to life. When you first approached James, what was in your mind? I wanted to strip things down a bit more than previous projects – the goal was something more direct. We both wanted to recapture a bit of the spirit from our earlier work on Way Out Weather, but…

It’s a bold move for a veteran band to name their new album All Washed Up… I wanted to call it ‘Cheap Trick: Too Dumb To Quit’. That derogatory title wasn’t mean enough. But I was outvoted. You say this album features “the good, the bad and the ugly” of Cheap Trick – how do these qualities manifest? There’s always parts, licks, lyrics, melodies, harmonies and performances where we could’ve made changes if we’d taken more time in polishing these selections, but that might’ve been how perfectionism enters the workplace. That’s clearly not us. Maybe we should start over and really focus and borrow a time machine from 1976, do it all over. You are playing at the Budokan again in October – what does that venue mean to you?…

Many of your songs weave small, prosaic details into something transcendent. Does this come from meditation? When I was 19 I was seeking transcendence and philosophical extremity, so when I took acid for the first and only time, I listened to music that explores extremes of emotion, intensity and boundaries. That experience gave me an appreciation of what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche calls “ordinary magic”: that by contacting the world through the raw senses, there can be an experience of nowness which lies beyond our cocoon. The way to access that layer of awareness is through meditation. A lot of the lyrics are just metaphors that I’m stretching, twisting and tossing around. In the past I held them tightly and tried too hard to force a meaning. These days it feels…

Only A Pawn In Their Game DISC 6 In July 1963, Dylan made his first trip to America’s segregated Deep South to appear at the Freedom Festival in Greenwood, Mississippi. He delivered this song about recently assassinated Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers from the back of a flatbed truck. The recording is raw, but the circumstances make it exceptional. Boots Of Spanish Leather DISC 7 Dylan’s separation from Greenwich Village girlfriend Suze Rotolo inspired some of his most enduring love songs, including “One Too Many Mornings”, “Don’t Think Twice” and this sublime song about absence and loss. The Free wheel in’ outtake on Disc 6 is outstanding, but this Carnegie Hall version is the heartbreaker. Masters Of War DISC 8 Written in London in early 1963, when Dylan was in…

WILLIAM BASINSKI The Disintegration Loops TEMPORARY RESIDENCE 10/10 Landmark ambient album gets expansive boxset treatment In 2001, when William Basinski found some recordings he’d made 20 years earlier and began to transfer the magnetic tape to digital, he noticed that its poor condition meant the tape was eroding as it played. This added a woozy, crackling, fragile quality to the music that was being documented and lost at the same time. Factor in that Basinski was working on these ambient tape loops as the Twin Towers fell (hence the album’s artwork) and you have a record of remarkable poignancy – one that shifts between moments of profound melancholy and incredible beauty. The whole five-hour piece is captured here on eight LPs (or four CDs) with liner notes from Laurie Anderson,…

ETERNITY’S CHILDREN Eternity’s Children/Timeless HIGH MOON 8/10, 7/10 Two blasts of ’60s Southern sunshine IGNORING the heritage of the gutbucket blues around them, Eternity’s Children emerged from the Mississippi Delta in the mid-’60s as a bunch of white college kids making carefree sunshine pop, full of blissed-out Beach Boys harmonies laced with the sort of easylistening sophistication favoured by The Association and The 5th Dimension. Needless to say, they didn’t stay in the Deep South for long, and after being discovered by future Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen in a club in Biloxi, they hightailed it to Hollywood in 1967, where they recorded a self-titled debut album, which appeared a year later. It was co-produced by Curt Boetcher, fresh from helming The Association’s And Then… Along Comes The Association, and…

AKSAK MABOUL Before Aksak Maboul (Documents & Experiments 1969–1977) CRAMMED LAB 8/10 Veteran Belgian avant-rock explorers trace their prehistory on richly inventive archive anthology ONE of Belgium’s most consistently adventurous independent labels, Crammed Discs has made a virtue of its omnivorous and amorphous musical identity, releasing avant-rock, free jazz and electronica alongside African, Middle Eastern, South American and Balkan artists, plus multiple culture-clash fusions in between. When he launched Crammed in 1980, Marc Hollander envisaged it partly as an expansion of his experimental band Aksak Maboul, an ever-evolving collective who blend improvised jazz, electronics, classical music and artful ethnological forgeries. His main partner in both projects was Vincent Kenis, and the pair still run the label today. Before forming Aksak Maboul in 1977, Hollander laid the groundwork for their sonic…

STATE CHAMPION SEND FLOWERS SOPHOMORE LOUNGE, 2018 Fans of The Roadhouse Band will find much to love in the fourth and final album from Davis’s first group. Musically it’s a little more tentative, but his opening-line game is already unbeatable: “Dust on the Bible/Cocaine on the DVD/I spent the summer in a brickyard, babe/You spent the winter not calling me”. 7/10 EQUIPMENT POINTED ANKH WITHOUT HUMAN PERMISSION (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE, 2021) The freaky, experimental side of Davis’s psyche is represented by this gleefully uncategorisable, synth-heavy splurge, featuring fellow Roadhouse Band members Jim Marlowe and Dan Davis (among others). Amid the murky, Kraut-ish grooves are ecstatic noise freakouts with titles such as “Blue Folding Room” and “An Almost Completely Clear Hat”. 7/10 RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND DANCING ON THE EDGE…

GRUFF RHYS: That was pretty much the first proper song we started working on when we got together. We went to Gorwel Owen’s studio and recorded that, but it was a bit more freeform and electronic, it was less of a song. When we wanted to release it later, as the B-side of “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You”, both members of Steely Dan agreed with the sample and then Donald Fagen’s lawyer intervened saying he didn’t think Fagen was in his right mind to make decisions. So we had to take it off the B-side and emergency-record a song called “Guacamole”. Within a couple of months, the lawyer decided Fagen was in his right mind, so we put it out as a single. DAFYDD IEUAN: Didn’t Steely…

POLIO swept through Winnipeg in the early ’50s. Neil had it and I did too. So did my brothers. We all had it at the same time. But Neil was always very focused. It didn’t matter what obstacle was there, he overcame it. I felt the same. Neil and I were among a bunch of teenage guys who were learning how to play guitar and starting bands in Winnipeg. Every Sunday, there was a radio show called Hello Britain, where they’d play all the top hits from England. It might be Shane Fenton And The Fentones or Cliff Richard And The Shadows. Then it was just The Shadows or The Outlaws. We copied all this stuff and played it on stage. We’d get the bus to the community centre and…

THERE are few more distinctive profiles in live music than the one presented by Warren Ellis, back stooped, fiddle tucked beneath wild beard, one crooked leg raised off the ground. He looks like a cross between an Old Testament prophet and a flamingo as he dances intently across the stage. We see that version of Ellis several times in different settings during this absorbing documentary, but we also get to meet other sides of Ellis. There’s Ellis the son, Ellis the conservationist, Ellis the philosopher, Ellis the procurer of celebrity chewing gum and Ellis the adopted Parisian, riding a Vélib in a purple jacket, yellow shirt and sunglasses like a character from a comic book. The credit to drawing out and then tying together these different versions of Warren Ellis…

DANNY THOMPSON (1939–2025) The British bass titan saluted by his Pentangle bandmate Jacqui McShee TODAY, somebody sent me a clip of John Martyn and Danny playing “Sweet Little Mystery”, and I shed a little tear. Just a couple of weeks ago we were messaging each other, and Dan was joking. He’d been through such a lot, and had the constitution of an ox. I thought he was immortal. What became Pentangle had started with just John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and myself. We tried another bass player, who didn’t work out, then John said to Dan, “We’re going to start this club up, do you fancy having a bit of a play?” When I first met Dan at the Horseshoe Hotel on TottenhamCourtRoad inJanuary’67, hewas loud, boisterous and larger than life,…

PERVERSELY, Robert Redford believed that his handsomeness often served to diminish his opportunities on screen. “The notion that you’re not so much of an actor, you’re just somebody that looks well. That was always hard for me,” he told Fresh Air in 1998. Director Mike Nichols rejected him for The Graduate because he didn’t resemble a loser. Dismissed as a mere pretty boy by the studio execs casting 1969’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Redford only landed the part through the insistence of co-star Paul Newman. It proved an international breakthrough for the 33-year-old Redford, who’d spent the first half of the ’60s playing occasional characters on TV shows like Perry Mason, The Virginian and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, followed by turns in Inside Daisy Clover and Barefoot In…

ELTON JOHN Goodbye Yellow Brick Road DJM/MCA, 1973 This is the first album I ever felt any individual ownership over. I got it on cassette for Christmas when I was 12 years old, after my obsession with Elton John had taken hold. The songs were alive! Each one was like a movie full of colour, drama and humour. I had a Walkman and I would listen to it around the clock. I memorised the liner notes and lyrics, and the artwork was almost as important to me as the songs. Some mean boys noticed my fixation on it and brought a magnet to school to ruin my tape. Even though it wouldn’t play any more, I carried that tape everywhere until I was grown enough to buy it again. I…

HI, Jonathan! On the title track of your new album, you sing: “I was only just frozen sky anyway”. Can you explain this metaphor for us in a little more detail? Yes. It is from the poetry of Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote: “I am the vast blue ocean of sky, I am a little drop of the sky… frozen sky…” It seems a friend of his had just died and he offered this verse to suggest that death is only a change from one way of being in the universe to another. Were you prompted to write about mortality by anything specific? I had no idea what themes would be on the record until we were halfway through it. There was no song called “Just A Piece Of Frozen Sky Anyway”…

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AMADOU & MARIAM L’Amour À La Folie BECAUSE 8/10 Farewell album from fêted Malian duo Amadou Bagayoko’s death in April robbed us of one of Africa’s finest guitarists, and this farewell set is a poignant reminder of the potency of the thrilling, psyched-up Afro-bluesrock he forged in partnership with his wife, Mariam Doumbia. From the desert blues of “Sonfo” to the banging Afro-house of “Nakan” via the tinkling “Mogolu” (featuring longtime collaborator Manu Chao), and the Afro-pop loveliness of “La Vie Est Belle”, it’s a boldly eclectic collection. The title track, meanwhile, rocks as hard as anything in their canon. With Doumbia’s keening, passionate voice unstilled, the good news is that she plans an imminent return with a show paying tribute to her late husband. NIGEL WILLIAMSON THE APARTMENTS That’s…

How did you recruit Marcelo Maita to play on the record? I was after this real samba-jazz stabby piano sound that you find on Dom Salvador and Tenório Jr records. I was researching and researching, and it actually came up at the end-of-the-year party at the daycare in my kids’ school. Décio 7 from the group Bixiga 70, he has a daughter the same age as my son. I was like, “Décio, I need this piano player, who’s the piano player?” and he said, “You gotta talk to Maita.” We had one of those recording sessions that you walk out and you’re floating, it was so magical. He really has the touch – that killer, Brazilian jazz nightclub sound. How would you describe the sense of vertigo you refer to…

WHILE archival releases tend to take over at this time of year, there are still a heap of promising new albums on the way: there’s Juana Molina’s first in eight years, returns from Stella Donnelly, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Anthony Moore, The Saints, JimWhite and Antibalas, and an intriguing collaboration between Horse Lords and Arnold Dreyblatt. In that bulging reissues and archival section, meanwhile, there’ll be releases from Pink Floyd, Drive-By Truckers, The Beatles, The Durutti Column, The Rolling Stones, Quicksilver Messenger Service and many more. EMAIL TOM.PINNOCK@KELSEY.CO.UK…

PAIN IN MY HEART STAX/VOLT, 1964 Two years after he released his first 45 on Stax, the 22-year-old Georgia native recorded his first album, a covers-heavy collection that shows his boldness right out of the gate. He’s already a commanding performer, but originals like “These Arms Of Mine” and “Security” portray him as a deft, witty songwriter as well. 8/10 OTIS BLUE: OTIS REDDING SINGS SOUL STAX/VOLT, 1965 Everything clicks on his visionary third full-length. Redding chooses some great covers (“A Change Is Gonna Come”) and devises some of his best originals (“Respect”). For the first time he looks outside R&B for inspiration: the Stones had just covered “That’s How Strong My Love Is”, so Redding returns the favour by putting his stamp on “Satisfaction”. 10/10 THE SOUL ALBUM…

EVEN at 79, Donovan cuts a striking figure. With long grey hair and a purple shirt, he holds court from the corner of a Notting Hill hotel, remembering the route that took him to “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, a song he started in the West Indies and completed at the ashram in India where he stayed with The Beatles in early 1968. “We’d meditate, then sit around for breakfast chasing monkeys off the table,” he recalls. “Then one night I was in the cottage at home in Berkhamsted. I was laying on the bed and began to play the song I’d been working on with George [Harrison] in India. The trick with a guitar is if you want to play it like a drone, you lower the strings, and the strings…

FUZZY LOGIC CREATION, 1996 Their debut – not quite the sophisticated SFA we know, but still packed with classic singles, from the riotous “God! Show Me Magic” to the sultry “If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You”. 7/10 RADIATOR CREATION, 1997 Where the band hit their stride, incorporating Fender Rhodes, instrumental interludes, piano ballads and techno: in the case of “Mountain People”, all at once. 9/10 OUT SPACED CREATION, 1998 Rarities from early EPs and B-sides, this contains a few of their absolute top tracks, including “The Man Don’t Give A Fuck” and the closing, epic “Blerwytirhwng”. 8/10 GUERRILLA CREATION, 1999 The kaleidoscopic pop confection, with steel drums, samplers, Smile esque epics, drum’n’bass and a punk song about Bunf’s time as a teacher. 9/10 MWNG PLACID CASUAL, 2000 A lo-fi left-turn, with…

SIDE ONE GLORIA “The way Horses opens, with just Richard’s piano, then Patti saying, ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’, is like: this is who we are. It’s us declaring that we are responsible for our artistic directions.” REDONDO BEACH “The lyrics came from Patti’s poem about her sister disappearing after an argument, during a storm. It was written before Ivan joined the group, so it was me doing the reggae chicka-chickas and Richard doing the off beats on the piano.” BIRDLAND “‘Birdland’ started out as a three-minute poem with Richard Sohl’s accompaniment, then got longer and assumed its full magnificent form. At the end of recording it, all of us were like, ‘Where did we go?’” FREE MONEY “It’s the closest song to the loud, fast punk…

CSNY were four kids. We were decent musicians and songwriters and singers. Most of the time, it was magic. Going back to Déjà Vu [1970], Neil didn’t play anything on “Our House” or “Teach Your Children”, but with stuff like “Helpless” we were all there at the same time, making music together the best way we could. It was the same thing with “Find The Cost Of Freedom”, with all four of us sitting around in a circle, facing each other. That was one of Stephen’s, recorded as the B-side of “Ohio”. Neil had written “Ohio” very quickly, while he and David were up at a friend’s cabin in Northern California. David had shown him the magazine with the image of one of the slain students of Kent State on…

THE first time I met Neil would’ve been in early ’91, when Sonic Youth were invited to open for him. I was a huge enthusiast, but Lee [Ranaldo] and Steve [Shelley] were quite forensic in their Neil Young knowledge. Neil was their mountaintop. When we first got on the tour, I’d confer with Neil’s manager, Elliot Roberts: “Why did you ask us? Nobody in Neil’s audience likes us.” But I realised that Neil wanted to kind of forcibly radicalise his audience. At first it was Sonic Youth and Social Distortion. Then, when they were leaving the tour, Elliot was considering some other act to replace them. I’d given him a cassette of Bleach by Nirvana: “This band would be really cool as a first band.” Elliot gave me back the…

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER OPENS OCTOBER 17 Colin Farrell stars as a dissolute aristocrat hooked on drinking and gambling, pursued through Macau by private investigator Tilda Swinton. BLACK PHONE 2 OPENS OCTOBER 17 Ethan Hawke reprises his role as the child-abducting Grabber in this sequel to the 2022 hit horror film. GOOD FORTUNE OPENED OCTOBER 3 Keanu Reeves earns his wings as an angel trading the places of gig worker Aziz Ansari and tech bro Seth Rogen in this would-be Capra-esque comedy. FRANKENSTEIN OPENS OCTOBER 17 Ahead of playing Heathcliffe in the upcoming Wuthering Heights, Jacob Elordi brings Mary Shelley’s gothic monster to the screen in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation, with Oscar Isaac as the doctor and Mia Goth as the love interest. BLUE MOON OPENS OCTOBER Ethan Hawke…

TOM Doyle bookends A Fab Life, his entertaining biography of Ringo Starr, with reflections on the interviews he has done with the Beatles drummer. These were brief interlocutions, light on self-examination. Ringo, it seems, is aware of the value of his own time, and limits promotional conversations to 20 minutes. You could link this professional reticence to Starr’s 2008 declaration that fanmail would henceforth go unread and he would be signing no more autographs. Or, you might conclude that Starr is the least reflective member of The Beatles. That isn’t to say that the drummer is lacking in self-regard. In one of those brisk chats, he explains his lack of interest in writing an autobiography. Readers, he suggests, would only be interested in the years between 1962–70. “There’d be nine…

“You never just worked with Danny. You also worked with his double bass that he called Victoria. The two of them were joined at the hip and together they were the most fascinating storytellers – earthy and of the wild. “Danny was the sweetest, dearest man and a real character. A rare and special treasure. I remember seeing him play live many times with the brilliant John Martyn and I never dreamed that I would get to work with such an incredible talent. Thank you Danny for setting the work on fire with Victoria. I’m going to miss you so much.”…

HERMETO Pascoal bristled at the idea of being categorised as a jazz musician, preferring the term “universal music” to describe his creative endeavours. Entirely self-taught, he combined elements of classical music and improvised noise with the rhythms of his native Brazil, from chorinho to samba to vigorous frevo. “When people hear my music they find it very hard to pinpoint and to pigeonhole it,” he told Jazzwise in 2022. “When they think I’m doing one thing I’m already doing something else… It’s very liquid.” Lauded by the likes of Caetano Veloso, Chick Corea and sometime collaborator Miles Davis (who supposedly called him “the most impressive musician in the world”), Pascoal mastered accordion and flute as a young child. His range quickly expanded to include piano, guitar and percussion. By 1960,…