Charles “Natty Dread” Darwin

In what has to be one of the more unusual concepts for a concept album, the Genomic Dub Collective in Birmingham (UK) is using the text of Darwin’s The origin of species as lyrics in their reggae inspired drum and bass. They apparently premiered this last Friday as the closing event on Darwin Day at the University of Birmingham (where we spent a wonderful year on sabbatical 4.5 years ago). I wish I could have been there.

To quote Professor Pallen (one of the creators) from this article:

When I was thinking about this year’s celebrations, I was very keen not to just play to the creationist versus evolutionist thing.

I wanted to make it very broad.

Both Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus were profoundly affected by the slavery they witnessed in places like Brazil and wrote poetry speaking out against it. I invited the poet Benjamin Zephaniah to read the poems last year and that gave me the idea to do something different.

Kudos to WeatherGirl for pointing this out to me.

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A nice concert by Grace Doval

I just got back from a nice concert by Grace Doval at the Common Cup. I’m guessing that this was her first one-person show at a venue like that, and she did a really nice job. She’s got a wonderful voice and has some real potential as a song-writer. About 2/3 of the material was self-penned, and it held up well with the covers. The playlist had a heavy emphasis on relationship songs, which isn’t what I tend to buy at the record store, but I definitely enjoyed the evening and hope she does other shows.

Grace was one of the performers at the open mic night two weeks ago. At the time I was struck by the quality of many of the performers and thought that there several (including Grace) that were good enough to do something like this. It’s nice that some of them are heading that direction.

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