Maybe living in bucolic Woodstock, New York gives it that relaxed feel, but tonight’s performance is anything but fragile. Six non-descript, skinny young men take the stage, two of them on keyboards, and make little attempt at recreating the subtle nuances of the record they’re ostensibly here to promote. The annual World Press Photo Competition serves as a platform for international photo-journalism, and provides a whistle-stop tour of the world, documenting all major news events, including Tony Blair’s election campaign and Dolly, the first cloned sheep. This month, there’s the chance to see 200 award-winning images capturing the most powerful news events of 1997. Since its release in March, they’ve been on a constant touring schedule in Europe and the USA. November marks a short, celebratory tour of England for this magnificent band who are finally emerging from the media-imposed shadow of the likes of Massive Attack and Faithless.
Live, they’re a treat, with timely scratching from Paul Godfrey, dramatic incursions from multi-instrumentalist brother Ross; and, to cap it all, there’s the angelic voice of Skye Edwards.Waterfront, Norwich (01603 505401) 5 Nov; Colston Hall, Bristol (0117- 922 3686) 6 Nov; Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (0171-589 8212) 9 Nov; Pyramid Centre, Portsmouth (01705 358608) 11 Nov.

South London-based Morcheeba’s second album, the excellent Big Calm, is packed with diverse beats and rhythms, and spent almost six months in the Top 40. Miguel Algarin and Piri Thomas (right), founding fathers of Nuyorican (New York Puerto Rican) poetry team up with smouldering young Chicano Ruben Martinez and bluesy newcomer Garland Thompson to carouse down the mean streets of Spanish Harlem: “A world full of backyards, rooftops, and street sets, all kinds of people and acts, of hustles, rackets, and eyedropper drugs.”

Zap Club, Kings Rd Arches, Brighton (01273 325 440) tomorrow, 7.30pm, pounds 7;
Poetry International, Purcell Room, South Bank, London SE1, Mon 2 Nov, 8pm (0171 960 4242). Lithe and laid-back words are strung across a mutable mix of drum’n'bass ‘n’ brassy salsa to give the living spirit of Gil Scott Heron an up-tempo Nineties injection. Taking Crime on Goat Island by Ugo Betti as its inspiration, the piece explores the consequences of lust. It should help raise Betti’s profile over here; in Italy, the judge-turned-playwright is compared to Pirandello.

It should also give a boost to John Hegley’s guitar-playing sidekick, Nigel Piper, who has composed the score

Young Vic, London SE1 (0171-928 6363) 3-21 Nov. Ride the coolest new wave in American Spoken Word when the Latino Poets hit town with percussive groovesters Sidestepper. Following their successful, visually striking version of Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona, which they cheekily retitled Princess Sharon, the female-oriented Scarlet Theatre Company are back with Stranded. Both in Room 90, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1, until 10 January (0171-636 1555). In all these less finished works, we stand beside great technicians when they are at their least artful.`Claude Lorrain: Drawings from the British and Ashmolean Museums’; `Mantegna to Rubens: Drawings from Liverpool’s Weld-Blundell Collection’.

But drawings were not always preparatory: some were an artist’s record of a painting before it was sent off to a customer.
Drawings are timeless. Nothing else can make us feel so strongly that the sensibility of the human eye, brain and hand has hardly changed throughout the centuries. A student of Rembrandt’s, for instance, sketches in a greedy landlord in The Good Samaritan paying the innkeeper just as the great British illustrator Edward Ardizzone might have. Guercino draws a plump Bathsheba or a sensuous St Sebastian with all the sexy insouciance of a Picasso or a Hockney.Our taste for spontaneity is probably more attuned to the private aspirations of 17th-century artists than was the aesthetic of their patrons. It is easy to imagine that the highly impressionist style of some of Claude’s drawings was deliberate, an effect in itself, and not merely a shorthand.Our modern pleasure in accurate depictions of nature also helps us respond to Claude’s landscape drawings, in which trees, say, are far more realistic than the highly poeticised versions for which his paintings were adored at the time.