Half The World is a new venture for London, an occasional season of live world music gigs being staged at Live On The Park below the Pizza On The Park on Knightsbridge (next to Hyde Park Corner tube station) in association with fRoots magazine.
With a capacity of just 100, an intimate atmosphere, excellent sound and lights, and good food at affordable prices, this is almost the perfect venue at which to see first class world music artists up close. We intend that this kind of season and other short residencies by associated artists will become a repeating feature here, and that audiences will enjoy coming back regularly.
In its first season from 11th to 19th August 2006 Half The World has programmed:
- Fri 11th August: from Senegal in West Africa, songwriter/ guitarist
Daby Balde with his band. - Sat 12th August: from Syria, qanun master Abdullah Chhadeh with his band Nara.
- Sun 13th August: from Brussels, Belgium, multicultural rootsters Jaune Toujours plus their North African project Arabanda.
- Mon 14th & Tues 15th August: from Marseille, France, the UK debut of Moussu T e lei Jovents, recently championed by Andy Kershaw and fRoots.
- Weds 16th August: Sephardic songs meet flamenco, tango and gypsy rhythms with
Los Desterrados. - Thurs 17th August: English multi-instrumentalist Andrew Cronshaw with Armenia’s Tigran Aleksanyan on duduk. Read the fRoots feature on Andrew Cronshaw here
- Fri 18th & Sat 19th August: Two nights of Natacha Atlas.
www.myspace.com/halftheworldconcerts
before it. Service is sensitive and unobtrusive, so eating doesn’t distract from the performance. The first set usually begins at 9pm, but most people arrive around 8pm so they can eat and chat before it).
Author: TJ Nelson
TJ Nelson is a regular CD reviewer and editor at World Music Central. She is also a fiction writer. Check out her latest book, Chasing Athena’s Shadow.
Set in Pineboro, North Carolina, Chasing Athena’s Shadow follows the adventures of Grace, an adult literacy teacher, as she seeks to solve a long forgotten family mystery. Her charmingly dysfunctional family is of little help in her quest. Along with her best friends, an attractive Mexican teacher and an amiable gay chef, Grace must find the one fading memory that holds the key to why Grace’s great-grandmother, Athena, shot her husband on the courthouse steps in 1931.
Traversing the line between the Old South and New South, Grace will have to dig into the past to uncover Athena’s true crime.
