list.co.uk/music Previews | MUSIC
COSMIC JAZZ KONSTRUKT Glad Café, Glasgow, Wed 14 Sep
Istanbul’s cosmic jazz stars, Konstrukt, unite lo-fi electronics, space rock and free jazz to create their utterly unique sound. Guitarist Umut Çağlar is modest, if bluntly realistic, about the mass appeal of the band’s music. ‘Curiosity helps, but we don’t believe in educated ears. You either like it or you don’t.’
The group – completed by Korhan Futacı on sax, bassist Barlas Tan Özemek and Ediz Hafızoğlu on drums – bring their psychedelic world sounds to Glasgow’s Glad Café in September, with special guest bass saxophonist and improv innovator Tony Bevan. Bevan’s name was a new one to them, Çağlar says, ‘but we always get excited to meet new musicians and discover new possibilities.’
Konstrukt are hardly strangers to tenacious collaborations. Over the years, their
gravitational pull has drawn in jazz and improv greats such as Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, Akira Sakata and Thurston Moore. ‘The experimental music scene and audience was very immature when we started to play back in 2008. As we played more and more with those names, we discovered that it taught us to be more flexible, musically, so we’ve never stopped. ‘Anything can happen,’ he says of their Glasgow gig. ‘Considering that this is
our first show in Glasgow, excitement and curiosity will shape the music a lot. The place and the audience play a huge role in the music, so it would be appropriate to say that the gig will reflect the fresh energy of performing in Glasgow for the first time. You should come with an open mind and heart.’ (Kirstyn Smith)
POP CLASSICS DR JOHN COOPER CLARKE AND HUGH CORNWELL: THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL Out Fri 14 Oct on Sony Music
‘No one knew he could sing,’ says Hugh Cornwell of John Cooper Clarke, who’s taking to the mic as lead vocalist for the first time in his 67 years. ‘When you tell people, they go: “are you kidding me?”’ It’s an understandable reaction to JCC, snarling, motor-mouthed
performance poet that he is. An awkward collaboration with the Invisible Girls a few decades ago is the closest we’ve come to anything remotely related to music from Cooper Clarke, but Cornwell, singer-songwriter and founding member of the Stranglers, has brought him round. ‘I was drunk and listening to “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris, and I thought: “Wouldn’t it be weird, John, with his very distinctive voice, doing this song?”’ Weird, perhaps, but it works. After mastering ‘MacArthur Park’, the duo
decided to go the whole hog and banged out ten hand-picked songs for an album, This Time It’s Personal, a celebration of the classic British and American pop songs the pair grew up with. Think, alongside Harris, the likes of Lieber & Stoller, Richie Valens, Ricky Nelson and Conway Twitty, all given a new aural aesthetic by these most likely of admirers. Their shared influences might raise a few eyebrows, but it’s not like the duo could give a shit. ‘These are great tunes,’ says Cooper Clarke, ‘and we’ve done our very best
to respect them and bring them back to life.’ (Kirstyn Smith)
MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS JOHN CARPENTER Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Sat 22 Oct
At the age of 68, with only one feature-directing credit to his name in the last decade and a half (the unheralded, Amber Heard-starring 2010 horror The Ward, the follow-up to 2001’s Ghosts of Mars), John Carpenter has stepped into the unexpected position of being one of the most exciting musical draws of 2016. And nobody will grudge him that, for the New York-born film director turned electronic music pioneer has a career which is truly remarkable, both in terms of the range of cult classic films he’s made and the enduring legacy of the electronic scores he wrote for them himself.
Back then, these scores were budget-saving devices, but now they’re remembered as vital components of synthesised music’s early days. His greatest hits came throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a run of films which began with the humorous, low-budget 1974 sci-fi epic Dark Star (although the short film The Resurrection of Bronco Billy had already won an Academy Award in 1970, with Carpenter as composer, editor and co-writer) and ended with the anti-establishment action thriller They Live in 1988, after which his edge softened somewhat.
His golden period of directing did, however, encompass classics like edgy siege thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), the definitive slasher flick Halloween (1978), dystopian actioner Escape from New York, and the sci-fi horror The Thing (1982). That last film is one of the few that you won’t hear anything from at this show, as Carpenter didn’t compose the score, but reports from early US dates suggest we can expect a five- piece band which includes his son Cody to recreate the driving tension of most of the above, alongside music from his recent original albums Lost Themes (2015) and Lost Themes II (2016). (David Pollock)
1 Sep–3 Nov 2016 THE LIST 69
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