Today was the first day of the Life is good Festival, and it was a lot of fun. Life is Good founders Bert and John Jacobs announced from the stage that the festival had exceeded last year’s totals and is close to reaching the goal of $1 million to help children in crisis. But close isn’t good enough. Perhaps you can help with a donation? You can learn more about the cause and make a donation on this page. You can also just come out to the festival!
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Category Archives: Recommendations
Blame it on the Dave Matthews Band and their Caravan!
This post is slow in coming because I’ve been lethargic, tired and just feeling kind of blah since this weekend. Now that I am sitting down to write it, and though it pains me greatly to do so, I am publicly accusing an outfit that heretofore has been a positive force in my life: The Dave Matthews Band. The Dave Matthews Band is responsible for the DMB Caravan, a three day music festival visiting four cities this summer. This past weekend, June 24-26 was the first of the four at Bader Field in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I was there, and it took it’s toll. To understand why, let me tell you a little about me.
Most people don’t see me as an addict, but in fact I am. It just that the things I am addicted to are not illegal or even controlled, and music is my most powerful addiction by far. If music is an addiction live music is it’s purest, most potent, addictive form, and this festival served up something like 40 amazing acts over the course of three days! The schedule was pretty well planned out with three stages scheduled to have performances on them from around 1:30 pm to 10:00 or 11:00 pm, but staggered so that you usually only had to choose between two acts at any given time. The tickets were not cheap, just under $200 for three days, but once you were in you had 10 hours at an open bar of music, an addict’s dream! Someone like me should never have been let in the door!
Mariachi El Bronx
More than that, this musical bar was packed with top shelf brands. The variety of musical styles represented was impressive. If you are a Dave Matthews fan, you wouldn’t have been disappointed. The band plays each night, there’s a Dave and Tim Reynolds, and solo projects of band members are also featured. Of course they all sound great. The members of DMB set standards for musicianship whether you like their music or not. On the other hand, if you had gone expecting to hear three days of bands that sound like the Dave Matthews Band, you would have left deeply disappointed. To cite just a few examples, Mariachi El Bronx are, fundamentally, a Mariachi band cross-pollinated with hard core rock and roll. The Carolina Chocolate Drops play music that is, at its foundation, pure bluegrass, even if they are covering a Beyonce tune. Damian Marley, one of Bob Marley’s sons, plays reggae based music as might be expected. Lisa Hannigan is contemporary singer-songwriter from Ireland in what I suppose we could call the contemporary folk style. Thievery Corporation play music that incorporates everything but the kitchen sink. One of the things they all share with the Dave Matthews Band is that they are innovative and not afraid to stretch their wings. Consequently, none of them are easily classifiable and none of them sound very much like the other.
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If There's a Rock & Roll Heaven, They Have a New Saxophonist!
I still can’t believe that Clarence Clemon’s has died! The sky should be darker! We have had so many grey days, how dare the sun shine today!
Clarence was the saxophonist in The E Street Band with Bruce Springsteen and a personal hero. Some of you will be interested to know that he was as saxaphonist on Lady Gaga’s Born this Way, seen in the video below, but I grew up idolizing him as “the Big Man” in the E Street Band. A post on Bruce Springsteen’s site today reads simply:
It is with overwhelming sadness that we inform our friends and fans that at 7:00 tonight, Saturday, June 18, our beloved friend and bandmate, Clarence Clemons passed away. The cause was complications from his stroke of last Sunday, June 12th.
Bruce Springsteen said of Clarence: Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.
Below is a 1978 performance of “10th Avenue Freeze Out,” the song that gave him his nickname, followed by the new video of Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory.” After that are a few other random videos of Clarence at work. Enjoy!
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Hooked, but It's OK! Andy Grammer's "Keep Your Head Up"
This is an interactive video for “Keep Your Head Up” by singer-songwriter and fellow Binghamton University alumn Andy Grammer. (I’m not sure what Grammer studied and SUNY Binghamton, but according to this bio he was there two years active in the theater program. I did my PhD there.) At various points in the video you will have an opportunity to change the scenario by selecting options. And if you do the whole thing again, you’ll get different choices.
This guy knows how to load a song with melodic hooks and they do their job. The song snagged in the netting of my muddled brain the first time I heard it and it’s been stuck there since. Usually at least one or two songs from the beginning of summer crop has such a hook, but usually it drives me crazy. That’s because I usually don’t even like the song, but the hook is effective, so it snags and won’t pull lose. And because the artists is often backed by the full marketing budget of a giant record label, the single is ubiquitous. You hear it on the radio, in the mall, in your favorite tv shows and movies, over television commercials, as a Starbucks Download of the Week, etc. The artists appears on daytime and late night talk shows, as a guest performer or mentor on reality competition shows, in cameos on episodic television, on radio talk shows, in public service announcements… So every time the song fades from memory, its planted again. I’ll find myself singing it in the car, the shower, on the street, deliberately preventing myself from learning the whole thing, annoyed at the banality of the lyrics, the derivative nature of the music, or some other aspect of the song.
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Yes, Ke$ha is Crap. No, I Don't Care
Ke$ha at European MTV Awards. She's rather silly, and definitely seems to know it
I’d be surprised if she were to say she takes her music seriously. Branded medicines are expensive cheap viagra from usa but you can save money by buying cheaper Kamagra. order levitra online Following the various quality properties of this medicine, and we recommend consultancy of your doctor, before you start using them. There are various negative consequences brought by this tadalafil online uk use this link health problem? Erectile dysfunction is a condition when a man does not achieve erection during intercourse, but he can achieve them at some point in their lives. Very first cialis viagra canada is the ProSolution Capsules, and second may be the Volume Supplements. If she takes her career seriously at all, she probably thinks of herself as a performance artist. But I think she is just laughing all the way to the bank! I’m not defending her, but I’m not condemning her, either. I just think she pretty innocuous in the larger landscape of what is American music today. Plenty of people do like her music, but I’ve yet to hear anyone claim she is important as a musician or particularly talented. Other, equally crappy artists, on the other hand, do get praised as such, and that is what is really sad.
New Orleans, Jazzology and Mardi Gras
(This entry was originally written on March 8, 2011. It is only now that I have finished the editing and gotten it posted.)
It’s Mardi Gras today, Fat Tuesday in English, though that lacks a certain je ne sais quois that makes it interesting. It’s the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the 40 days of atonement, fasting and sacrifice to honor the the great sacrifice made by Jesus. Some pretty heavy stuff, in fact. Back in the day when people took Lent really seriously, Lent was a was an intense season. People didn’t just give up chocolate for 40 days or abstain from meat on Fridays by ordering a large mushroom pizza. They might entirely abstain from food and drink for days, pray for hours on end or whip themselves with leather. In such austere times, Mardi Gras was the last opportunity committ all the sins you’d neglected since the end of Lent the year before, an opportunity to really go wild. Quite a few cities in the United States have some sort of Mardi Gras festivities, but New Orleans is first among them. No city’s celebrations are bigger or better.
Another thing New Orleans is known for is Jazz. It is called the Birthplace of Jazz for good reason. Like everywhere else in America, the area was originally inhabited by Native Americans, then colonized by the French, ceded to the Spanish as the result of war, returned to the French, and then sold to the Americans as part of the Louisiana purchase. Throughout all of this the mighty Mississippi took goods from the northern part of the continent to the Gulf of Mexico, and goods from all parts of the world in the other direction. Though in the heart of the South, New Orleans had both slaves and free blacks that lived there or that passed through regularly. They played drums and sang, free of the prohibitions against these things in most other parts of the South. This was the fertile, culturally diverse environment that allowed for the germination of the a musical genre we now know as Jazz. It could only have happened there.
The George H. Buck, Jr. Foundation and the Jazzology group of record labels in New Orleans were founded to preserve the heritage of Jazz and to foster its continued development. They have become an essential part of the New Orleans cultural landscape, preserving not only New Orleans Jazz, but Jazz and related genres in all their variety. Some of the new releases are well worth checking out.
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Revolution in the Arab World: Why We Can't Just Stand Aside
Rhapsody playlist: Democratic Revolutions in the Middle East
It is amazing and inspiring to watch these demonstrations! It has been horrifying and shocking to watch the response of the Libyan regime!
It is considered naive to suggest that foreign policy should be based on principle. We are told it is necessary to be Machiavellian in safeguarding our national interest, and in the realm of foreign policy, realpolitik often trumps principle. I disagree. Perhaps I am, indeed, naive, but I believe that democracy, with protection for the rights of the minorities, is a principle that trumps almost all, and our policy ought to reflect that.
In the current wave of peaceful democratic revolutions sweeping the Arab world, US support of the citizen demonstrators has been slow and tepid. This in spite of the fact that sticking to our principles and unequivocally supporting the pro-democracy demonstrators is what is in our best economic and strategic interest. To do otherwise is a risky strategy, a strategy that, should it not go the way proponents believe, will have grave consequences.
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New Albums by Todd Snider and Hayes Carll
KMAG YOYO releases February 15th
If you’re one of those people who enjoys songs that tell stories, the first couple weeks of February, roughly, are a good time for you. There are two new releases by artists that are among our greatest musical storytellers coming out during the first half of the month.
On February 5 Todd Snider released a CD and DVD called “Live: The Storyteller,” and on Tuesday Hayes Carll releases his first album since 2008’s Trouble in Mind. Both artists are part of the tradition of America great singer-songwriters. But they also hail from an older tradition, going back centuries and transcending cultures, that of the troubadour who set their tales to music and, as Snider puts it, travel the land “playing them to whoever will listen.”
If you are not familiar with Todd Snider, his live albums are an excellent introduction. His studio albums give a good sense of his witty lyrics and catchy tunes, but his live shows are what really intrigues. To quote the Blurt review by John B. Moore, Snider is “an Americana poet, storyteller and barstool comedian.”
An Oregon native and East Nashville resident, he’s definitely a bit of a hippy folk singer. After all, most of the time he comes out on stage with an acoustic guitar, barefoot, in loose fitting old jeans and shirt or sweater, to sing about traveling across America and the people you meet along the way, with a fair amount of pacifist politics thrown in for good measure.
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Artists to Check Out: Cory Branan and River City Extension
I checked out Cory Branan playing at Paradise Saturday. He was one of the acts that played before headliners Dashboard Confessional, and so the set was disappointingly short, only about short, 1/2 hour. Branan took to the stage before a rather quiet audience. Dashboard sometimes do a version of his song “Tall Green Grass” when they play live, but clearly this audience didn’t know who he was. Once he started though, he had their attention.
He has an impressive stage presence. He was last in Boston in October at Great Scott where he played a similar but longer set opening for Drag the River. John Snodgrass helping out on some vocals. But in both cases he followed a similar pattern. Branan’s genuinely a humble guy. He comes out, acoustic guitar in hand, looking the part of the humble singer/songwriter, folk artist. He apologizes to the audience for taking their time, and then proceeds to deliver a set that rocks like you would never expect an acoustic set to do. His fingers slide up and down his guitar, he strums or picks hard and fast, and his voice wails. It’s powerful and masculine, a real rock and rollers voice.
He’s a hell of a performer. He whips through songs like “A Girl Named Go” steadily picking up pitch and speed. volume as the girl name Go picks up speed in her car. “Tall Green Grass” he plays with with a humor and mirth. He played a new song from a forthcoming album, but gave no sense when it might be released.
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12 Days of (War 0n?) Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas
It’s 12 Days of Christmas Season. That’s the time of marketing extravaganza’s referencing that very well known carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which the the suitor gives his true love strange things like turtle doves, golden rings enough for each finger of one hand, ladies dancing, pipers and, of course, that partridge in the pear tree.
Share The 12 Days Of Christmas by Gregg Smith SingersManufacturers, retailers and companies and service providers promote their businesses by sponsoring talk show giveaways for 12 days on Ellen or Oprah or by special giveaways and sales each day for 12 days at their stores or online as is being done by Starbucks and AT&T. It comes anytime before Christmas, depending on the broadcast schedule of the show and when the company needs sales.
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