John Shand | Music & Other Spheres Posts

Riverside Theatre, May 7 8/10 The three Shakespeare plays that can work modern readers and audience members in ideological lathers are The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew, with the latter containing one of the most polarising speeches in the entire canon. Yet to approach…

Foundry 616, April 25 7.5/10 Blokes in boaters with banjos and clarinets were so ubiquitous in Australian pubs decades after the so-called trad-jazz revival of the 1960s that, for many people, the term jazz still primarily conjures up that music. These days classic jazz is the preferred name for the…

May 4, 2016 / Album Reviews - Archive

MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY/M:FANS (Domino) 7.5/10 Bleak is one of the things art does best. Usually starkness is a key tool in creating it (think Beckett), but it can also be done more gothically, as artists like Mervyn Peake have shown. In 1982 John Cale, whose body of work…