Music
January 19, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Phil Everly — the younger of the Everly Brothers — turns 74 today; older brother Don Everly will turn 76 next month. In the Cosmic American Music the Everly Brothers have a constellation all to themselves. They brought the close harmony singing of traditional country music into the mainstream of American popular music. More than a few great musicians learned harmony singing by listening to their records. In his multimedia
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January 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Okay, this is one of those obscure posts about progressive rock that you’re best advised to skip over unless you’re a 70s prog-rock geek like me and Brad Birzer at Hillsdale. (See ProgArchy.com if you want a geek sample.) But if you are one of us, this one is really fun. I just yesterday stumbled across the obscure cultural fact that at the 2010 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
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January 1, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Pete Lee of Minneapolis community radio station KFAI FM is the proprietor of Bop Street, the weekly Monday afternoon drive-time radio show that he has presided over as an on-air volunteer for more than 20 years. I got to know Pete in 2003 when I helped KFAI raise money for its capital campaign. Pete hails from Red Bank, New Jersey, Count Basie’s home town. As a college freshman he fell
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December 29, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Tracy Nelson has been a favorite of mine for a long time. She celebrated her birthday on Thursday and I wanted to take the occasion to draw attention to her work. I first heard Tracy as the founder and vocalist of the San Francisco- and Memphis-based group Mother Earth in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Her signature song, “Down So Low,” dates from her time with the group. Thanks
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December 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
“Merry Christmas, Baby” is the kind of secular Christmas song to which Dave Marsh and Steve Propes devoted an entire book of the same title. (The subtitle of the book is Holiday Music From Bing to Sting.) “Merry Christmas, Baby” is a smoldering blues love song with a Christmas theme. Great line: “I haven’t had a drink this morning/But I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree.” The song was
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December 14, 2012 — Scott Johnson
I couldn’t find the time on Wednesday to note the anniversary of the birth of Frank Sinatra on 12/12/12. William Ruhlman provides an excellent overview of Sinatra’s long career. Twin Cities disc jockey Pete Lee calls Sinatra “Saint Francis of Hoboken,” an appellation that can serve to mark his place within a musical frame of reference. Below I offer only a few notes drawn from previous posts. “Angel Eyes” is
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December 13, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Jazz guitarist John Pizzarelli performed two shows with his quartet at the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant in Minneapolis last night. Pizzarelli and his crew return for two more shows tonight. Pizarelli provides an updated take on the Great American Songbook, uniting it seamlessly with the popular music of the more recent past, as on his recording Double Exposure. We attended the first of the two shows last night. St.
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December 12, 2012 — Scott Johnson
My friend Bill McClay writes: You might want to post something on PL about this. Ken Dryden is a friend and a solid jazz journalist, both on radio and in print. He’s written liner notes for literally hundreds of albums. (Joe Biden has not entirely ruined the word “literally” for me, not yet.) I haven’t heard this particular show yet, but I’ve heard other things Ken has done on Brubeck,
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December 5, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five” (video below, composition by saxophonist Paul Desmond) was certainly the first jazz tune I ever flipped over, and I suspect that for many folks like me Brubeck provided the entree to jazz. Hearing it again tonight in the context of Brubeck’s death is incredibly saddening, the joy of the song set against the finality of his death. He was such a vital artist that
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December 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Chris Hillman was a teenage bluegrass star on the Los Angeles music scene in the early ’60s. Within a few years he had moved from mandolin to bass and become one of the founding members of the Byrds together with Roger (then Jim) McGuinn, David Crosby and Gene Clark. The Byrds brought McGuinn’s jangly 12-string guitar and their brilliant Beatles harmonies to the music of Bob Dylan, turning both themselves
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November 25, 2012 — Scott Johnson
If you were listening to AM radio in 1969, you felt the blast of fresh air provided by the unlikely gospel/pop hit “Oh Happy Day” by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Who were the Edwin Hawkins Singers and where did that song come from? The Wall Street Journal’s Marc Myers goes to the principals to get the story behind the single in “When he washed my sins away.” (The format of
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November 17, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Today is Gordon Lightfoot’s birthday. The guy is a wonderful songwriter, an old-fashioned carouser who is also an incurable romantic and a pensive kind of man’s man. I first saw Lightfoot perform live in 1970 at Dartmouth’s Spaulding Auditorium in the Hopkins Center for the Arts just after he had jumped to Warner Brothers from United Artists and released Sit Down, Young Stranger (the album was later renamed If You
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October 28, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Wilson Getchell’s “You’re Gonna Pay” was one of the highlights of the Power Line Prize competition. Now Getchell is back with “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” which looks back at the Obama administration’s four years of failure. It is very good, I think:
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October 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So we’ve noted here before the “Hey Girl, It’s Paul Ryan” Tumblr site, but now there’s a full-blown Paul Ryan music video. All I can say is if you like the theory that the coolest campaign wins, Romney-Ryan are indeed heading for a landslide:
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September 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
With the crush of news in recent days I missed my annual tribute to Mel Torme last week on the anniversary of his birth. Torme was born on September 13, 1925. I think Torme is simply one of the all-time great American artists, too little known and vastly underappreciated. Permit me this tardy salute in the hope that I might interest you in deepening your familiarity with his work. Torme
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September 1, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Hal David was the lyricist in the legendary songwriting partnership with Burt Bacharach. It was a partnership that originated in New York’s Brill Building and achieved sublimity through the voice of Dionne Warwick. David provided evocative lyrics that followed the twists and turns of Bacharach’s sinuous melodies. They made a great team. Today Hal David died in Los Angeles at the age of 91. The New York Times obituary is
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September 1, 2012 — Scott Johnson
The Washington Post looks into the politics of the musicians who performed at the RNC last week: The lineup of musicians scheduled for the big show or affiliated events include some of showbiz’s few vocal Republicans: Country star Trace Adkins and rock star Kid Rock, set to headline concerts at Tampa’s Liberty Plaza, have both endorsed Mitt Romney. Conventioneers inside the hall will hear from the likes of the Oak
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