A new documentary follows the Chicagoan from child trumpet prodigy to Gabriel-singing icon and DIY maverick. ‘Not everybody wants to see musical genius’, he says

At We Out Here festival in Dorset in August, thousands of people could be heard singing a trumpet melody as if it was a giant brass-band karaoke session. On stage was Peven Everett, performing a rendition of Gabriel, one of the most celebrated anthems in dance-music history. Co-created with producer Roy Davis Jr, the best-known version, which blew up in UK clubs in the mid-90s, is a spiritual garage-house track about the “archangel of love” that can bring both punters and DJs to tears.

But Everett is much more than one song. Damon Albarn of Gorillaz tells me that “Peven has a once-in-a-generation voice … he’s a great inspiration to us all.” We Out Here founder, Gilles Peterson says that the Chicagoan is, alongside Detroit’s Moodymann and Amp Fiddler, “the closest thing dance music has to a Prince-type figure”. A prolific multi-instrumentalist and one-man cottage industry, Everett’s catalogue spans more than 500 tracks, across house, neo-soul, hip-hop, samba and more.

It’s a quarter of a century since the company celebrating black and Asian ballet dancers was founded. With an autumn tour in full swing, step back in time through their striking shows

Five hundred people turn up to adopt plants from conservatory that will reopen in 2030 after renovation project

Above the waxy monstera leaves and bright pink hibiscus flowers in the Barbican conservatory hangs a giant net to catch the panes of glass that are at risk of falling from the ceiling on the unwitting plant lovers below.

This precarious situation has caused the estate to shutter its greenhouse on the third and fourth floors for three years so a full refurbishment can take place. But the hiatus has a silver lining for many of those who visited on Wednesday to give the plants from the conservatory a new home.

Sorey/BBC Singers/Tines/Gibson/GBSR Duo
St Giles’ Cripplegate, London
The Pulitzer-winner’s sprawling amalgam of Morton Feldman and African American spiritual felt meandering, but the GBSR duo, the BBC Singers and Ruth Gibson’s viola were luminous and charismatic

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) by Pulitzer-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey demands patience. Subtitled “A meditation on Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel”, the work uses a similar ensemble – percussion, keyboards, a viola, a choir, a solo voice – and a similarly abstract dialogue of rhythms and pitches to Feldman’s 1971 tribute to the US painter. But where Feldman’s meditative soundscape lasts half an hour, Monochromatic Light sprawls across 80 minutes and discloses only in its final bars a second vital anchoring in the African American spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.

Such a score is not ideally experienced from a hard pew in a hot church during a week of record-breaking temperatures. There were moments between its opening, barely detectible murmur of tubular bells and its closing revelation of the bass-baritone soloist’s single line of text (pieced together syllable by syllable over 50 minutes) when I struggled to hold on to a sense of musical architecture, when the pinpricks of dissonance and slow-motion scatterings of instrumental lines began to feel meandering. Other details offered more rapid gratification: elemental rumbling on bass drum and timpani using sticks with heads like candyfloss; a glistening sheen of bowed marimba on a rare, mill-pond calm octave unison from the choir; wild bass-baritone melismas plunging acrobatically across the voice.

Exit of Devyani Saltzman, described as Barbican’s ‘driving force’, announced a few weeks after arrival of new CEO

Salman Rushdie, John Akomfrah and Pankaj Mishra are among more than 170 cultural figures who have signed an open letter to the Barbican expressing concern over the departure of its arts director, Devyani Saltzman.

Saltzman, who became director of arts and participation at the Barbican in February 2024, is leaving the institution amid a significant leadership change a few weeks after its new CEO joined.

The singer will reunite with her Wicked co-star in a revival of the musical inspired by artist Georges Seurat in summer 2027

Wicked co-stars Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey are to reunite on stage in Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park With George. The production, hotly rumoured and finally announced on Wednesday, will run at the Barbican Centre, London, in summer 2027.

Sunday in the Park With George, which has a book by Sondheim’s long-term collaborator James Lapine, is a tale of two artists. One is inspired by the pointillist Georges Seurat and the other is the character’s great-grandson. On Wednesday, Bailey and Grande shared a photo on Instagram of them sitting in front of the Seurat painting that inspired the production, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which is on display in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The brutalist arts-and-towers complex, where even great explorers get lost, is showing its age. Let’s hope the 50th anniversary upgrade is better than the ‘pointillist stippling’ tried in the 1990s

The Barbican is aptly named. From the Old French barbacane, it historically means a fortified gateway forming the outer line of defence to a city or castle. London’s Barbican marks the site of a medieval structure that would have defended an important access point. Its architecture was designed to repel. Some might argue, as they stumble out of Barbican tube station and gaze upwards, not much has changed in the interim.

The use of the word “barbican” was in decline in this country until the opening in 1982 of the Barbican Arts Centre. Taking 20 years to build, it completed the modernist megastructure of the Barbican Estate, grafted on to a huge tract of land devastated by wartime bombing. The aim was to bring life back to the City through swish new housing, energised by the presence of culture. Nonetheless, the arts centre, the elusive minotaur at the heart of the concrete labyrinth, was always farcically difficult to locate. To this day, visitors are obliged to trundle along the Ariadne’s thread of the famous yellow line, inscribed in what seemed like an act of institutional desperation, across concrete hill and dale.