Music
December 21, 2007
December 13, 2007
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December 04, 2007
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Peters sat Martin back in his chair as she belted out 'There's No Business Like Show Business' from 'Annie Get Your Gun' (Peters performed that show on the Marquis stage a few years back). The fridge opened again, and (almost) all of Broadway poured forth, including cast members from 'A Chorus Line,' 'Rock 'n' Roll,' 'Spamalot,' 'Young Frankenstein,' 'Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas,' 'Chicago,' 'Jersey Boys,' 'Hairspray,' 'The Phantom of the Opera,' 'Avenue Q,' 'Rent,' 'The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,' 'Mamma Mia!,' 'The Seafarer,' 'Xanadu, Grease,' 'The Drowsy Chaperone,' 'Spring Awakening,' 'Les Misérables,' 'Legally Blonde' and 'Wicked.'[via Blogway Baby]
[via Boing Boing]
November 26, 2007
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November 15, 2007
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November 08, 2007
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November 02, 2007
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October 24, 2007
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October 17, 2007
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Billboard: Disc 1 kind of re-introduces the band and then Disc 2 has these massive powerhouse cuts that really take you on a journey. When you hear the whole thing at once, you really get that effect that it's a cohesive work.Frey: Thank you for being an astute listener. I spent two days sequencing the record, and like you said I wanted to reintroduce everyone to the Eagles right away. Therefore, we put some of what I would call typical or classic Eagle's (sic) material right out of the box. And then slowly as the album plays along, we sort of get into some of the meatier lyrics. I felt that was the way we wanted to go. I didn't think you could come right out and have "Long Road Out of Eden" and "Frail Grasp" be the first songs on the record.
October 09, 2007
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October 04, 2007
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September 26, 2007
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September 20, 2007
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September 14, 2007
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[Barrington-Coupe] had not merely pinched or polished a few, mostly marginal, recordings. With his collection of more than a hundred Joyce Hatto CDs, Barry had created the most diversely prolific and gifted pianist to emerge in decades, with a corresponding narrative that aroused the esteem and good will of music lovers around the world. Since early in his checkered career, he had deftly manipulated musical identities. What he confected on his wife's behalf, in her twilight, was vastly more audacious than anything he had pulled off during his "super-bargain" years. The alchemy that transformed Joyce Hatto into "Joyce Hatto" was, in its twisted way, a tour de force, a dazzling work of art, literally the performance of a lifetime.
September 07, 2007
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"Something just got into me. I wrote 18 songs last summer. When it rains it pours and I put my buckets out and caught everything I could. You want song titles? Well, one's called 'Mexican Girl' and one's called 'Oxygen to the Brain'. One's called 'California Roll' and another one's called 'The Good Kind of Love'. It's crazy lyrics and crazy narration, just little stories about my day. You remember Smile? When you hear the new song cycle it's a teeny bit like that."
September 05, 2007
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August 27, 2007
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"As far as I'm concerned, Brian Epstein was the man who destroyed Mersey Beat," [says former Liverpool bandleader Ted Taylor]. "He made London groups out of Liverpool bands. When you see the Beatles, their first TV appearance, all dressed up like tailors, well that wasn't Liverpool." Others were more sympathetic. "The whole of British popular culture at the time was controlled by people more than a generation older than us," says Bill Harry. "And, quite frankly, the Beatles as they were, the black leather and rough look, would never have made it in Britain. What he was doing was processing them and making them conform to the establishment." John, the self-styled rebel, performed with the top button of his dress shirt unfastened and his tie loosened as a protest.The Beatles Story museum in Liverpool notes the anniversary of Epstein's death with an exhibition.
August 21, 2007
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Endrik Wottrich, a popular fixture at the annual Bayreuth festival in Germany, has revealed opera singers are turning to drugs and other stimulants to cope with the pressure from the increasing commercial demands on them. 'No one talks about it, but doping has long been the norm in the music world,' he said in an interview with music critic Axel Bruggemann in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 'Soloists are taking betablockers in an attempt to control their angst, some tenors take cortisone to ensure their voices reach a high pitch, and alcohol is standard practice.'
August 13, 2007
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"I've loved this type of music for years and have literally hundreds of CDs," Caine said of the mellow, generally slow-tempo genre. "I've been buying them for about 15 years and really know my way around."
August 06, 2007
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July 27, 2007
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[via Sounds & Fury and The Rest Is Noise]
Both Salsa and Latin Jazz share common roots in Caribbean dance rhythms, but the two traditions diverge in their musical function. Salsa prioritizes the dancer and musicians perform dance floor-ready consistent creations. Salsa exists within the popular realm, so musicians aim recordings at commercial consumption. Although Latin Jazz contains danceable qualities as well, musicians create it as a means of expression. Latin Jazz artists want to sell records too, but new releases serve as snapshots of their current artistic development. The two styles serve different functions and the intention behind their creation follows divergent paths.
July 20, 2007
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It would be so easy for an event like this to become portentous and preachy, but that was never going to happen: the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek, founded by two dancers who trained in mime, circus and acrobatics as well as ballet, offered such quirky imagination, from orange frock coats to pillow fights to a ballerina in a false nose tossing glitter over the tenor, that joyousness remained uppermost for its own sake. Then in came their secret weapon: a cherubic, curly-haired little boy, who we reckoned couldn't be more than 4 years old yet performed with the assurance of all the adult dancers on the stage with him. Imagine the noise in the RAH [Royal Albert Hall]!
July 11, 2007
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July 06, 2007
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June 29, 2007
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June 28, 2007
Many Happy Returns
Notice a marked increase in the number of "reunion" acts and new albums by groups you thought had disappeared into the mists of time? So has Forbes.com, whose Tuesday piece titled "Old Stars, New Music, New Money" discusses major labels betting that acts like Peter Frampton, Styx, KRS-One, Chaka Khan, and Donna Summer will sell albums to people who, well, still buy albums:
Moreover, most of their fans are older consumers who are less likely to be satisfied with a single-song download from Apple's... iTunes Store, says John Kellogg, an entertainment attorney who teaches at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "These older artists' fans are CD or album-buying fans and that's one reason why record companies like them,'' Kellogg says.
They aren't selling in the several hundred thousands as in their glory days, however. Peter Frampton's recent Fingerprints has sold 52,000 copies, while America's Here & Now sold 46,000 copies in the US. These numbers explain why you often find these acts touring a lot more than they might have before.
Meanwhile, Led Zeppelin's members are making noises about touring in 2008 with Jason Bonham, son of deceased drummer John Bonham, after performing at a memorial concert for the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. Could a record deal with Starbucks' Hear Music be far behind?... Neil Young, on the other hand, is apparently in no hurry to release the first volume of his decades-in-preparation Archives box set, which has been moved to 2008 from its 2007 release date, the latest in a string of dashed hopes for fans going all the way back to 2000.
June 22, 2007
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June 12, 2007
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Britain's leading studio engineers are starting a campaign against a widespread technique that removes the dynamic range of a recording, making everything sound "loud".'Peak limiting' squeezes the sound range to one level, removing the peaks and troughs that would normally separate a quieter verse from a pumping chorus....
Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: 'Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the 'loudest'. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.'
June 06, 2007
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May 30, 2007
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May 25, 2007
Blasts From the Past
Friendly spirits haunt sixty-four-year-old Paul McCartney as he sings "Dance Tonight" (from his upcoming Memory Almost Full) in this bittersweet video directed by Michael Gondry. Natalie Portman plays a ghost delivered to McCartney in a mandolin box. Consisting mainly of the phrases "everybody's gonna dance tonight, everybody's gonna feel alright tonight" repeated over a jaunty folk riff, "Dance" could easily have been recorded for the former Wings bassist's homemade 1971 solo debut, McCartney. Without alluding to anyone in particular, Gondry's video suggests that McCartney is carrying around a lot of emotional baggage. In other news, for example, he's postponing his world tour until his divorce from Heather Mills is done.
Bassist Jack Bruce will set aside his well-documented differences with drummer Ginger Baker for at least a couple more Cream reunion shows this year. Eric Clapton, meanwhile, reunited with former Blind Faith bandmate Steve Winwood at the latter's May 19 show at the Countryside Rocks Festival at Highclere Castle near Newbury, England. You can watch them perform "Presence of the Lord," "Can't Find My Way Home," "Crossroads," and "Had to Cry Today" here (Clapton appears about fifteen minutes in). Compare and contrast with how the original superdupergroup looked and sounded in 1971.
Art Garfunkel joined Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo to perform "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" Wednesday in Washington D.C. The occasion was the Library of Congress's presentation of its first Gershwin Award (recognizing a major contribution to the popular song as an art form) to Simon. Seems like only yesterday they were trading quips with David Letterman prior to performing "The Boxer."
Clark Terry, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Mulgrew Miller, Jimmy Heath, and Marian McPartland, are among the cast of dozens who will pay tribute to eighty-one-year-old piano giant Oscar Peterson at Carnegie Hall on July 8. If you won't be in town, check out Swiss Radio Days, Vol. 16, which finds him in excellent company (Barney Kessel! Ray Brown! Lester Young! Gene Krupa!) in Switzerland in 1953.
May 21, 2007
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May 11, 2007
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May 02, 2007
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April 18, 2007
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April 04, 2007
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March 30, 2007
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March 21, 2007
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March 08, 2007
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March 05, 2007
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- "Sound waves don't prove anything," complained William Barrington-Coupe when accused of plagiarizing other pianists' recordings for releases on his record label attributed to his late wife, Joyce Hatto. Barrington-Coupe recently changed his tune, however, admitting to the fakes in a letter to BIS Records head Robert von Bahr.
- The Festival Internationale de Louisiane, the state's other great music extravaganza, will take place April 25-29 in the streets of downtown Lafayette. This terrific fest focuses on local and international French music, and this year's highlights will include Angélique Kidjo (Benin), Balkan Beat Box (Israel/Morocco), Les Yeux Noirs (France), Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas (Louisiana), Vieux Farka Touré (Mali), Beausoleil (Louisiana), and Salif Keita (Mali). The complete schedule is here.
- Country Music Today's Chet Flippo finds hope for country music in a handful of upcoming releases by Tim McGraw; Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard (who will actually have three albums out at once), and Ray Price; Alison Krauss; and others.
- Time Out New York ranks the 50 greatest New York musicians of all time. Duke Ellington is not number one.
February 27, 2007
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- DreamWorks film studio too out ads in Hollywood trade papers Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter in order to apologize to Motown Records for "any confusion" caused by the label's shady portrayal in the movie Dreamgirls.
- Buffalo Springfield and Poco's Richie Furay has a new album call The Heartbeat of Love, which CMN's Chet Flippo finds "simply striking." Was "Kind Woman" from the 1966 debut Buffalo Springfield the world's first official country-rock song?
- VH1 News asked a bunch of people what Kurt Cobain would be doing if he were still alive. Nirvana producer Butch Vig reckoned he might become a blogger and "just throw something up whenever he felt like talking":
"But that would also probably be tough for him, because I know he wasn't a very tech-savvy guy. I remember him having a really difficult time trying to figure out how to use a cell phone, and he had no idea how to turn on the coffeepot in the studio."
- Pete Townshend played an unannounced show at Joe's Pub last week with pals Lou Reed, Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis, blues singer Amos Lee, and girlfriend Rachel Fuller. His four-song acoustic set included reportedly inspired versions of "The Acid Queen" and "Won't Get Fooled Again." Reed joined him for "I'm Waiting for the Man," and you can watch the whole thing here.
- Steely Dan begin their spring tour May 6 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
- Joyously troubled Canadian band Arcade Fire, who got all prayed up in Manhattan's Judson Church last week, is streaming its entire upcoming album, Neon Bible, for a week at NME.com.
February 20, 2007
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February 19, 2007
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- Carlos Santana and his wife, Deborah, will open Maria Maria, a chain of Mexican restaurants kicking off with three Northern California locations. The March 26 release of the short-lived Carlos Santana/Wayne Shorter Band's Live at the 1988 Montreux Jazz Festival should provide more immediate nourishment.
- Roger Waters will tour the United States for a couple of months beginning May 18 in West Palm Beach, Florida. Oh, and he'll perform The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety at each show.
- The excellent youngish bluegrass band Nickel Creek declares its upcoming tour (beginning April 12 in Savannah, Georgia) will be possibly its last, as the group disperses without acrimony to work on various solo projects. Check The Reunion Watch in 2010 or so for update.
- Festivals are becoming an increasingly robust way of both consuming and marketing music. Plan on taking the last couple of weeks of June off for Manchester, Tennessee's June 14-17 Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival (featuring the Police, Bob Weir, Gillian Welch, Ralph Stanley, etc.,) and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival (Alison Krauss, Sam Bush, Emmylou Harris, Bela Fleck, etc.), June 21-24 in Colorado.




