Rashaan Carter
March 25th, 2009
just saw an incredibly talented bass player last night from Maryland, Rashaan Carter.
Archive
Posts Tagged ‘music’
Jazz at the Apollo
March 20th, 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
JAZZ FOR CURIOUS LISTENERS
Jazz at the Apollo
7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The Apollo Theater
(253 W 125th Street)
FREE | Seating is limited. Please call to reserve a seat.
The world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem is a testament to the great African-American musical performers of the 20th century, regardless of genre. Yet the connection between this landmark venue and jazz is special. Rare if ever does a month go by during the various public programs at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem when senior music lovers and musicians don’t recall witnessing, for instance, the great Ellington and Basie big bands swinging with down-home majesty and emotive grace. The Apollo Theater is essential to the living history of jazz, and to the careers of legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Gloria Lynne, each of whom won the Amateur Night competition, launching their illustrious careers. Tonight’s Jazz on Film will take place at the Apollo Theater, FREE. See you there. (Seating is limited. Please call to reserve a seat.)
Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, ydig
Pop music economics
March 19th, 2009
If you only subscribe to two magazines, make it The New Yorker and The Week. The New Yorker consistently has the best writing in the English language, and The Week will keep you abreast of what is going on in the world, with distillations of the best articles in newspapers worldwide. $2 a week should see you right.
Critic’s Notebook
Pay Scale
by Sasha Frere-Jones March 23, 2009
- Keywords
- Economic Crisis;
- Pop Music;
- Concerts;
- No Doubt;
- Tickets;
- Prince;
- Bria Valentine
The pop-music business has turned out to be the canary in the economic coal mine, a small example of the enormous financial buckling that is now global. The numbers are still dropping for musicians, but their responses to this problem have become more creative, sometimes to the point of desperation. If you buy a top-price ticket to one of No Doubt’s upcoming shows (between $50 and $150, roughly), you will receive a free download of the band’s entire catalogue. This makes sense, as touring is the one verifiably healthy part of the music business. Prince will release a new three-CD bundle on March 29, available exclusively at Target for $11.98. That may seem like a rollback to bargain prices of yesteryear (even though one of the CDs is by Prince’s protégée Bria Valente), but it’s more likely that Prince is seeing into the future—again. In 2004, he gave away a copy of his “Musicology” CD to everyone who attended one of his concerts, making concrete what is now almost axiomatic: recordings have become advertisements for shows. ♦
A real music fan? Wolfgang’s Vault is a must
March 19th, 2009
Bird digs, moves and grooves to Ray Charles
March 13th, 2009
http://www.maniacworld.com/bird-loves-ray-charles.html
and why not – cool old bird
Dylan records surprise Modern Times follow up
March 10th, 2009
Dark new disc with a bluesy border-town feel arrives in April
Courtesy David Fricke: Rolling Stone Magazine
I‘m listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I’m reading James Joyce/Some people tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice,” Bob Dylan sings in a leathery growl, capturing the essence of his forthcoming studio album — raw-country love songs, sly wordplay and the wounded state of the nation — in “I Feel a Change Coming On,” one of the record’s 10 new originals.
Set for late April, the as-yet-untitled album arrives a few months after Dylan’s outtakes collection Tell Tale Signs, and it “came as a surprise,” says a source close to Dylan’s camp. Last year, filmmaker Olivier Dahan, who directed the 2007 Edith Piaf biopic, La Vie en Rose, approached Dylan about writing a song for his next feature. Dylan responded with “Life Is Hard,” a bleak ballad with mandolin, pedal steel and him singing in a dark, clear voice, “The evening winds are still/I’ve lost the way and will.” (The song appears in the film My Own Love Song, starring Renée Zellweger.)
Inspired, Dylan kept writing and recording songs with his road band and guests, with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo rumored on accordion. Dylan produced the album under his usual pseudonym, Jack Frost.
The disc has the live-in-the-studio feel of Dylan’s last two studio records, 2001′s Love and Theft and 2006′s Modern Times, but with a seductive border-cafe feel (courtesy of the accordion on every track) and an emphasis on struggling-love songs. The effect — in the opening shuffle, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” the Texas-dancehall jump of “If You Ever Go to Houston” and the waltz “This Dream of You” — is a gnarly turn on early-1970s records like New Morning and Planet Waves.
Dylan makes references to the national chaos, as on the viciously funny slow blues “My Wife’s Home Town” (“State gone broke, the county’s dry/Don’t be lookin’ at me with that evil eye”), culminating in the deceptive rolling rock of “It’s All Good.” Against East L.A. accordion and a snake’s nest of guitars, Dylan tells you how bad things are — “Brick by brick, they tear you down/A teacup of water is enough to drown” — then ices each verse with the title line, a pithy shot of sneering irony and calming promise. “You would never expect the record after Modern Times to sound like this,” the source says. “Bob takes all of those disparate elements you hear and puts them into a track. But you can’t put your finger on it — ‘It sounds exactly like that.’ That’s why he’s so original.”
[From Issue 1074 — March 19, 2009]
the cool fire
February 14th, 2009
just seen a great new band, the cool fire. see them if you get the chance.
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