Miscellany

Like a trickster or shapeshifter the bassist Mali Obomsawin slips easily between popular and jazzier forms. As a composer she can be fierce and incantatory, erecting songs that are defiant and accusatory while leaving the listener in their thrall. A citizen of Odanak First Nation, an Abenaki community located near the mouth of the Saint-François River in Quebec, on Sweet Tooth her debut as a bandleader she blended traditional music and indigenous mythology with contemporary chants and squalls of free improvisation...

Songs often seem to call out in the absence of a lover, whether that person is next...

'It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends'. Taking her title from the essay by Joan Didion which closed the author's debut collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, this week Jess Williamson introduces her new album A Mile South of Heaven by way of the single and record opener 'Goodbye to All That'. The singer duly notes: Didion's essay is about leaving New York after eight years and how 'it's distinctly possible...