Drummer helped to define the sound of roots reggae and dancehall, and worked with stars including the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Grace Jones
Sly Dunbar, the Jamaican musician and producer who created generations of global hits as one half of production duo Sly and Robbie, has died aged 73.
His wife, Thelma, told Jamaican newspaper the Gleaner that she found him unresponsive on Monday morning, with doctors later pronouncing him dead. Other sources close to Dunbar confirmed the news to the Guardian, adding that Dunbar had been unwell for some months.
Rapper, now known as Ye, apologises to his family and to the Black community and says he loves Jews, blaming his bipolar disorder for his ‘poor judgment and reckless behaviour’
Kanye West has taken out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal apologising for his antisemitic behaviour. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.”
In a letter titled “To Those I’ve Hurt”, he attributed his inflammatory actions, including making profoundly offensive statements and selling T-shirts bearing swastikas, to his bipolar-1 disorder, which he said he developed as a result of medical oversight failing to diagnose a frontal-lobe injury sustained in a car crash in 2002.
To Those I’ve Hurt:
Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage – the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.
‘I couldn’t think of a line for the chorus – but we had just been to France. I got Baudelaire into the lyrics somewhere, too’
This song was an ode to glam rock. My older sister was really into Marc Bolan and her passion for him and his sound really rubbed off on me. I love the vocal effects and drum sounds on those old records.
Victoria Beckham reunites with Spice Girls bandmates to celebrate Emma Bunton's 50th birthday party, sharing heartwarming photos amid ongoing family drama with estranged son Brooklyn Peltz Beckham.
Why do we focus on the bad news stories about cuts and crises in classical music ? Musicians are doing incredible things to engage, support and sustain us; we should tell those stories too
When did you last read a good news story about classical music?
The producers who helped define the sound of pop music in the 90s and 00s are in dispute over earnings from their final album as NERD
Chad Hugo is suing Pharrell Williams, his production partner in the Neptunes, over claims that Williams owes Hugo up to $1m from their final album as NERD, 2017’s No One Ever Really Dies.
The Neptunes defined the sound of pop music in the late 90s and early 00s, producing for artists including Kelis, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Clipse and Justin Timberlake. As NERD, they released five albums.
Singer-songwriter Sam Amidon had just three weeks to make the two stars sound like seasoned balladeers. He recalls their charged harmonies in the little shed at the bottom of his garden
I was brought into The History of Sound as the music adviser, my main job being singing coach for the cast, especially Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
My parents were folk educators. I grew up in New England, singing and playing all kinds of different folk including Appalachian fiddle tunes, as well as songs from the British Isles. My parents’ favourites were legendary Yorkshire singing family the Watersons. I now live in London and it was amazing how close History of Sound’s musical world matched my own. Ben Shattuck – who wrote the original short stories and the screenplay – made a playlist of all these different types of musicso everybody could get a sense of the film’s world.
Le service YouTube Music synchronise désormais automatiquement la file d’attente de lecture entre les appareils connectés au même compte, rendant plus facile la reprise de l’écoute lorsqu’on passe de l’un à l’autre.
Rejoignez-nous de 17 à 19h, un mercredi sur deux, pour l’émission UNLOCK produite par Frandroid et Numerama ! Actus tech, interviews, astuces et analyses… On se retrouve en direct sur Twitch ou en rediffusion sur YouTube !
Royal Festival Hall, London Rudolf Barshai’s audacious completion of Mahler’s final unfinished symphony slathers on the colour, and its diverse timbral details came over loud and clear thanks to the LPO’s playing and Vladimir Jurowski’s textural lucidity
For decades following his premature death at the age of 50, it was believed that the fragments of Gustav Mahler’s 10th symphony were just that: skeletal ideas impossible to flesh out into anything worth hearing. It was British musicologist Deryck Cooke who first took a proper look, discovering that crucial melodic lines were intact throughout the entire work. His subsequent lithe-limbed “performing version” has been embraced by many – but some have adopted a more interventionist approach, the most popular being Russian conductor Rudolf Barshai, whose audacious completion Vladimir Jurowski presented here.
As Jurowski admits, Barshai’s orchestrations bring the music closer to Shostakovich and perhaps Britten – both huge fans of Mahler. On its own terms it succeeds, though for those familiar with Cooke’s version it’s a bit of a culture shock. Where the Englishman deployed restraint and a scrupulously Mahlerian palette, in the movements the composer left most incomplete – the second, fourth and fifth – Barshai slathers on the colour. There’s a clattering xylophone, a guitar (miraculously audible amid the orchestral melee), a Wagner tuba, a cornet, a second tuba to beef up the most terrifying passages, a second harp, celesta, woodblocks, tubular bells and a trio of tiny gongs. That these diverse timbral details came over loud and clear was a testament to Jurowski’s textural lucidity and the outstanding playing of the LPO.
The singer-songwriter and actor on depression, becoming a sex symbol and rebelling in his 30s in his ‘middle-finger phase’
Born in Los Angeles in 1981, Josh Groban is a singer-songwriter and actor. His self-titled classical-crossover debut went five-times platinum in 2001, and he has since sold more than 25m albums. As an actor, he has appeared in films such as Crazy Stupid Love and TV shows The Office and The Simpsons. Groban made his Broadway debut in 2016 in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 – a role that earned him a Tony award nomination. Groban performs his first UK show in six years at a one-off O2 event in London on 1 April.
I went through a lot of phases when I was five – astronaut, firefighter, and, in this photo, cowboy. The look was inspired by the old country and western films I was watching, a kind of homemade blend of gunslinger and headband-wearing guitarist. And it wasn’t just for the back yard – I wore it everywhere. If I dropped something on the street, my mum would say, “Josh, cowboys don’t litter.” She was great at using whatever character I’d invented to teach me a lesson.
These records serve as statements of intent and have the power to change or reshape the industry, inspire fellow musicians, and drive essential conversation about our understanding of music. Roisin O'Connor picks the best of the bunch
Signed at 13 and dropped by 16, Beer’s path to stardom has not been easy. Now 26, she says she’s finally making music for herself and happy to wear her heart on her sleeve
Madison Beer may only be 26, but she is something of a veteran in the pop industry. She got her start at 13, after Justin Bieber tweeted a link to a YouTube video of her covering Etta James’s At Last, and has spent the intervening decade-plus toiling away in mainstream pop, amassing a huge gen Z fanbase in the process – including more than 60 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. It’s an understatement to say that her career has been a slow burn: the day before we speak, it’s announced that her single Bittersweet, released in October, has become her first song to reach the US Hot 100 chart, entering at No 98. When I suggest congratulations are in order, she shrugs off the achievement. “I’m obviously super excited and thankful whenever a song performs well, but I think I’m at the point where I love what I make, and I’m proud of it regardless,” she says amiably, before laughing. “Only took me like, 15 years! But it’s cool.”
Beer’s attitude is indicative of someone whose career has progressed in fits and starts, a far cry from the kind of meteoric rise that fans and onlookers sometimes expect to see in aspirant pop stars. As she prepares for the release of her third album, Locket, she is in prime position to break through to pop’s upper echelon: Her 2023 album Silence Between Songs featured the sleeper hits Reckless and Home to Another One, the latter a sorely underrated Tame Impala-inspired cut, and in 2024 she released Make You Mine, a Top 50 single in the UK which was nominated for a best dance pop recording Grammy.
Listening to Brian May’s multi-tracked epic on a battered cassette player when I lived in repressive Havana inspired lit a spark of rebellion inside me
Throughout my childhood and teenage years growing up in 80s Cuba, Fidel Castro’s presence, and the overt influence of politics, was everywhere – on posters, on walls, in speeches that could last four hours at a stretch. The sense of being hemmed in, politically and personally, was hard to escape.
I had been raised to believe in communism, and for a long time I did. I even applied twice to join the Young Communist League, only to be rejected for not being “combative” enough: code for not informing on others. Friends were expelled from university or jailed for speaking too freely and my family included people in the military and police, so I had to be careful not to endanger them. But amid that stifling conformity, something else had begun to take hold.
Connexion
