January - First Top Five...

Having been locked up for the past fortnight with only the internet for company - there seemed to be some kind of celebration going on with my family in the adjourning room, but I was trawling for essays on the political traditions of puppetry - I am glad to see that at least some performance is happening in January. It used to be the case that July - as the Fringe approached - and January were dead months in the arts, but programmers realised that they had to provide critics with something to write about before we all became disillusioned and start making our own productions.

Celtic Connections will dominate Glasgow for most of the month - even the Tron is filled with folk song - but the SSO is doing a favour to fans of a more experimental bent. I know him best for his blistering interpretations of Ornette Coleman (Spy Vs Spy redoes free jazz through the filter of hardcore punk), but John Zorn has become one of the most important contemporary classical composers who isn't in the minimalist or squeaky gate schools.

It's difficult to believe he has hit sixty, or that the BBC are offering a portrait of his orchestral works - there's even a new commission, Suppôts et Suppliciations. I picture him as that slightly geeky looking hard bop saxophonist, a contemporary of Sonic Youth and full of that bad-ass attitude that was the interesting legacy of punk. The SSO have got in their principal guest conductor, Ilan Volkov - himself no stranger to the more intriguing end of classical music - to throw down with his wordless opera La Machine de l’être and the strings only special Kol Nidre.

Zorn will be present, although he is not down to play. I suggest that a chant ought to go up at the end, to get him to honk a number out on his saxophone. Maybe that wild solo he scattered over Black Girls  by The Violent Femmes. 

City Halls, 12 January

I've banged on about the Lyceum's revival of A Taste of Honey and The Maids at the Citizens before, but I am still excited by both. Being a bit of a curmudgeon, I complain about most things that aren't brand new, except when they are pieces that my random sense of aesthetics has decided are "important." A Taste of Honey is obviously a crucial jewel in the threaded necklace of contemporary scripted drama - tersely political, confrontational, it predicted a social engagement that is a key theme of modern drama. The Maids is an example of how Genet was experimenting so radically with theatre that half a century later, it still has a forbidden exoticism.

A Taste of Honey fits in with the emergence of Britain's "Angry Young Men" playwrights (only the author was a woman, indicating how even the twentieth century was falling foul of a certain gender blindness): The Maids jumbles up sexuality and sex, murder and manipulation into a queer mixture that predates the celebratory adoption of the word. As I prepare for a few months of Live Art and Object Manipulation (Buzzcut and manipulate are on their way to my heart), here's a couple of reminders that I probably ought not to ignore the script.

The Maids, Citizens Theatre, 17 January - 2 February

A Taste of Honey, Lyceum, 18 January - 9 February

At the risk of being Glasgow-centric, my last two choices have got to be part of Celtic Connections. I'd give a shout for the whole festival - before it was instituted, January was a moribund month. Not only did it find new audiences, it has livened up the city after Christmas and probably encouraged the theatres to programme earlier in the year. However, a few specific choices would bring this list up to five...

I am going to be vaguely sentimental in picking an  All Will be Well - The Life and Songs of Michael Marra. To be honest, I don't really want to hear Hue and Cry do Mother Glasgow, but there are a few other names that are less tainted by my youthful prejudices against polished pop. Michael Marra came from Dundee and wrote not a few songs that dealt with contemporary life in an idiom that was as much Tom Waits as it was folk.

His recent death was a loss to Scottish music - I liked him the best for his compositions in Plan B's A Wee Home From Home and this tribute is an appropriate way to remember his song-writing brilliance.

Royal Concert Hall, 28 January

The final choice is too easy. Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares: described as "magnificent, otherworldly soundscapes of dissonant diaphonic harmonies," I was one of the trendy indie kicks who loved this in the 1990s and so "helped kick-start the whole world music movement." Admittedly, there's a few problems with that whole category, but there's few things more astonishing than a Bulgarian choir in full assault mode.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery, 24 January