This gallery contains 48 photos.
On May 1 the Boston show of a long awaited reunion tour of Nickel Creek at the House of Blues and The Secret Sisters opened. It’s not my intention to review the show, but I’d like to make three quick … Continue reading
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I had a chance to chat with Dean Fields before his show at Club Passim last Friday, opening for Ari Hest. I was excited to hear about his upcoming tour with Eliot Bronson, Jason Myles Goss, and Andy Zipf. All … Continue reading
Here’s a good song for Halloween, “Raise the Dead” by Caravan of Thieves.
Caravan of Thieves are a fun band to play at your Halloween party because of songs like Monster, Ghostwriter and Butcher’s Wife that treat appropriately macabre Halloween type themes, but that’s not the only reason. They’re also a band that celebrates the things that really make a holiday like Halloween fun, dressing up in costume, and letting it bring out your wild side. To be sure they do their fair share of songs about kind of creepy, macabre themes, but there’s a playfulness to it. Think more Dia de los Muertos or even Carnival, Mardi Gras or a Gypsy Fair, than crass commercialism, blood and gore! It’s a party for one and all! Continue reading
This gallery contains 68 photos.
This is just a collection of randomly selected and arranged photos from Saturday and Sunday, July 27 and J8 at the Newport Folk Festival at Fort Adams State Park in Newport, RI. The Newport Jazz Festival was this weekend. I … Continue reading
Ask someone who goes to a lot of concerts what the organization HeadCount is, or what it does, and they’ll probably say it’s a voter registration organization. Ask HeadCount co-Founder and Executive Director Andy Bernstein the same question, and you’ll get a very different answer. He’ll also tell you about voter registration, of course, but in almost in the same breath he’ll make sure you understand that’s not all they do.
He’s understandably very proud of HeadCount’s success with voter registration, registering over 250,000 people in their short history. That’s an incredible accomplishment, but it is only part of their mission. He’s equally very proud of the organization’s role as the “grassroots organizing arm of the live music community.” He believes passionately in the potential of music to affect positive change through grassroots efforts and effective use of the political system. That, to my mind, is the new and innovative aspect of HeadCount’s vision.
Hayes Carll fronts the Warren Hood Band at Johnny D’s in Cambridge, MA on June 11
Known for his clever lyrics and turn of a phrase, I didn’t know what to expect when I interviewed Texas singer-songwriter Hayes Carll. The man writes incredibly clever lyrics that can be awfully sharp-witted at times. And I had given him reason to be annoyed with me. I live in Boston, MA; he in Austin, TX and we set up a time on my lunch break from my real job for a phone interview. I called as scheduled, only in spite of working for nearly a decade for a national non-profit that had one of it’s primary offices just north of Austin, it slipped my mind the city is in the Central Time Zone, so I called an hour early. I sent a contrite text and nervously awaited a reply. Over the next couple hours and a business like exchange, we set up another interview the next day. I expected some sort of reprimand, a demand to keep the interview short, or at least a snide remark. I got none of that, only a gracious acceptance of my apology. It struck me that Hayes might be a nice guy. What a relief! I really needed this interview! Continue reading
Ryan Bingham and the Dead Horses in Boston MA. Always a great show!
If you have ever been to a concert with me, I need your help! I’ve been trying to come up with complete list of every musical act I’ve seen in concert, from the cradle to now. Well, not every act. They have to be nationally or internationally known, because if I list every band I’ve seen at a local event, I’d never stop listing. I’d also never be able to do it. I’m also not including choruses, orchestras, musicals or theatrical events. Let’s take Harry Connick Jr. or Bernadette Peters for example. Both of these people have done concerts on Broadway and been in shows. Harry Connick Jr. I list because I have seen him in concert. I have not seen him in a musical, but even if I had, I wouldn’t list him unless I had also seen him in concert. I have seen Bernadette Peters in musicals, but I have yet to see her in concert, except recorded. So she is not on my list.
Anyway, I can’t remember them all. I know I am missing some. One act came back to me today since I originally developed this list and posted in on Facebook last night. Something brought them to mind. It was a good show, too! It’s just hard to bring all acts to mind in a list like this.
So if you’ve been to a show or festival with me, could you look at this list and make sure all the artists we saw are included here. The band has to have made enough of an impression on my that I remember seeing them of course. If I don;t remember them, I’m not going to add them, but I know the list should be longer than this. Plus I keep finding duplicates, so it isn’t even really this long!
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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
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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The Newport Folk Festival dates back to 1959, but has always adhered to a somewhat loose definition of “folk.” Among the people who played there in the early days of the festival and early in their careers were Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Howlin’ Wolf. More recently people as diverse as Jakob Dylan, The Decemberists, The Low Anthem, Jimmy Buffett, Nickel Creek, the Allman Brothers Band, Agenlique Kidjo, and Emmylou Harris have played the festival that now takes place annually at Fort Adams State Park.
This year’s festival was impressive, as usual. We got there just in time to see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. As usual they were brilliant. Sharon Jones interacts with her audience more than any other performer I have seen live, and if you get a chance to see her in a small club, do. She’ll bring folks on stage to sing to them, or even to have them sing and dance with her. She singles people in the audience out for recognition when they show affection, and she handles unruliness with particular dexterity. I wasn’t sure how that would play out in the noonday sun on the highly elevated stage in Fort Adams State Park.
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