It was a twenty-something crowd – mainly – that was basking in the glow of Oysland’s klezmer music: Klezmer, a label roughly alluding to Eastern European or Balkan Jewish music, making Oysland a Yiddish folk act. Being both Balkan and Jewish, the band’s set was European with an unmistakable combination of Middle Eastern, Romani and…
| 08/10/2015
My time machine has landed in the swinging 60’s, bang-dot in the middle of a beatnik jazz-den, the 606 Club, near classy Chelsea Harbour. I’m slightly annoyed this little gem of a venue has been sitting under my nose for decades without my knowing it, but happy to be at the Anglo Hungarian Jazz Festival…
| 27/09/2015
Continuing its now well-established association with the Hungarian jazz scene, and the Budapest Jazz Club in particular, the 606 Club is excited to present this three-day festival featuring some of Hungary’s finest musicians joining with British stars to perform in an extraordinary Trans-European jazz collaboration. Liliana Chachian (vocals), Steve Fishwick (trumpet), Gareth Williams and Jim Watson (piano) and Winston Clifford and James Maddren (drums) are among the…
| 16/09/2015
The actual venue for this gig was rather hard to find but was located in a small, hot and rather muddied tent on a field not far from Barking Town Hall. About a dozen people were present in the audience as the four-piece band launched into their first song. Muha began in 2004 and play…
| 20/07/2015
Pasterze Kotów’s (Shepherds of Cats) improv music creeps up on you and steals your attention but not in a ghoulish sense. The ensemble start their set without introducing themselves or their tracks, and only a good few minutes into their playing does it dawn on you that what you thought was a process of tuning…
| 15/07/2015
It seemed a difficult task at first. A young band from the Czech Republic playing their first U.K. gig and trying to win over an audience – with an average age of about sixty – who’d almost certainly never heard their music before. Also, Mydy Rabycad are a dance band and this was an all-seater…
| 15/07/2015
Dressed down and defiantly scruffy, with piercing blue eyes and an unkempt mop of hair, Ada Milea is no one’s idea of a typical chanteuse. Nor are her subjects the conventional ones: she has written musicals (for want of a better word) about Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Gogol’s The Nose, and songs about anything from Ceausescu to…
| 11/06/2015
Mydy Rabycad are a four piece group from Prague who describe themselves as an electroswing dance band: a good way to encapsulate their sound. Nero Scartch on drums and keyboards is the mainstay of the band, co-writing the music for ten out of the eleven songs here, as well as writing the lyrics for three…
| 08/06/2015
‘It’s not pretty,’ says Ágnes Kőry, Hungarian-born musician, teacher and researcher in historical musicology, to open her talk marking Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Hungarian Cultural Centre. ‘It’s not a happy story but it must be told.’ The story in question relates to Jewish musicians during that uncertain, troubled and ultimately murderous period of Hungary’s…
| 25/04/2015The Romanian Cultural Institute London has just celebrated the International Week of the Francophonie, an organization that recognizes 57 countries affiliated with French culture, either through having French as mother tongue or through cultural and historical ties. Together with the newly born Rimbaud &Verlaine Foundation in London, the ICR put together an evening of poetry…
| 31/03/2015