Hot weather and cool sounds combined to make the 2017 Swansea International Jazz Festival the biggest and best yet. The temperature soared in South Wales for the fourth annual festival, again based in the city’s maritime quarter. Continue reading
Category Archives: Wales
Crime / Drama / Television / Uncategorized / Wales
Countrycide: Midsomer smiles while Hinterland snarls
Murder in the countryside is a peculiar type of entertainment, and ITV’s Midsomer Murders is perhaps the most entertaining example. Continue reading
Swansea gets all fired up for summer jazz festival
Swansea International Jazz Festival gets all fired up this summer with the music of Earth Wind and Fire, soul star Ruby Turner, and the jazz of Dudley Moore among the highlights. Continue reading
Swansea Jazz Festival – far from average
Founders of the Average White Band may have provided the big headline act on the final night, but Swansea Jazz Festival 2016 was far from average. The event’s third edition was widely regarded as its biggest and best yet – again organised by Swansea Jazzland’s Dave Cottle at venues in and around the city’s attractive … Continue reading
Maritime music – Swansea International Jazz Festival
Swansea International Jazz Festival returns for its third year this summer, with some 50 events at 12 venues in the city’s Maritime Quarter. The Dylan Thomas Theatre will host the ticketed concerts with a diverse programme of jazz featuring artists from USA, Europe and Australia. Continue reading
animation / Cardiff / Comedy / Comedy / Crime / Film / Music / Romance / Songwriting / Television
Saucy Horsey gallops through Cardiff with a song in his heart
My adopted home city of Cardiff has an interesting and sometimes surprising history on film (remember the Wolf Man?), but a new project, Saucy Horsey, is perhaps the most surprising. Continue reading
Cardiff / Crime / Drama / Fantasy / Film / Horror / Science fiction / Television
Attractive government agents, and creatures on the streets: it’s Cops and Monsters
Remember Torchwood? A Doctor Who TV spin-off for grown-ups – dark, but often fun, and containing those post-9pm ‘adult themes’. Torchwood was a specialist government unit of attractive people, led by a Scot with an American accent (or is John Barrowman an American with a Scottish accent?), dealing with various alien creatures on the streets … Continue reading
‘Kinky’ and funky acts add to jazz festival line-ups
The founder of legendary rock band The Kinks, and the DJs of Funky Sensation are among the names that have been added to the line-ups at two of the summer’s big jazz festivals. Continue reading
Cardiff / Design / Victoriana / Wales
Exploring pictures from the past
Faversham! Bicycle! False teeth! No, it’s not a strange word game, but some of the searches I randomly carried out at a major arts-meets-tech launch in Cardiff this week (March 31, 2015). The Illustration Archive is the world’s largest searchable archive of book illustrations, making more than a million old images from books freely available … Continue reading
Tributes worth hearing – the Brecon Jazz line-up is announced
‘Tribute’ acts don’t often cause much excitement, or top the bill at a serious festival. But what if the tributes are performed by multi-Grammy winner Dr John and Britain’s own Jazz FM award-winning Neil Cowley? Continue reading
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