The News Review:
- Blues leading players will face the music
- Briggs Festival celebrates 10 years of relaxed blues.
- Corky Siegel still creating originals with Chamber Blues band
- ILLUSTRATIN BY RAFFI ANDERIAN / TRNT STAR
- Damon Albarn: World champion
Blues leading players will face the music
Fiji Times – Jun 30, 2007
Junior who was part of Lautoka’s 2005 Inter District Championship winning team and Senibuli the Fiji under-20 rep were cited for breaking an alcohol ban five days before the second major tournament. The duo were automatically suspended from all levels of soccer. Blues coach Dennis Singh said lack of discipline has been the main factor which has been the down fall of the district in the last two decades. Singh said Lautoka’s strike rate at winning major titles in the last 20 years really boils down to the part of the officials.
Briggs Festival celebrates 10 years of relaxed blues.
Free with registration – Morning Call – AccessMyLibrary.com – Jun 30, 2007
30–Like many teenagers in 1969 Richard Briggs then 16 lusted after the thought of attending Woodstock. But instead of partying in a farm field with free-loving hippies he was picking tomatoes with his family in their own farm field in Nescopeck Township Luzerne County. Since then Briggs always wanted to hold his own music festival and 29 years later he did. In 1998 he hosted the first Briggs Farm Blues Festival on his family farm. The summertime tradition which arrives Friday and next Saturday is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. The 363 days that the land is not a concert ground Briggs 54 uses its 350 acres to raise sheep and grow soybeans strawberries and corn. The farm has been in his family since the 1760s and today houses four generations of Briggses (Briggs lives there with his parents his wife his son and daughter-in-law and his two grandsons).
Corky Siegel still creating originals with Chamber Blues band
Summit Daily News – Jun 30, 2007
“The Chamber compositions are a juxtaposition of blues and classical flavors all originals” Siegel said. Usually called crossover music he’d said he’d rather coin it as “crossunder. “”Crossover music tends to focus on instrumentation. ” or on a blues performer playing classical or a classical performer playing blues. Yet with the Chamber Blues “the classical remains in its tradition and the blues is still in a blues mode… ” or on a blues performer playing classical or a classical performer playing blues. Yet with the Chamber Blues “the classical remains in its tradition and the blues is still in a blues mode. I find ways of the two working together simultaneously. “Although he’s just finished composing his fourth symphonic piece (to be debuted in Pennsylvania in August) he says he’s now focused on the Chamber Blues band. He said with this crew the whole group can fit on the bus.
ILLUSTRATIN BY RAFFI ANDERIAN / TRNT STAR
Toronto Star – Jun 30, 2007
GREG QUILL ENTERTAINMENT CLUMNIST It was like a trip to Mecca or some other holy shrine recalls Larry LeBlanc music publisher longtime Canadian editor of the American music industry magazine Billboard and the custodian of perhaps the largest private music library in Canada. "If you loved music and you were a serious record collector Sam the Record Man was the only game in town from the time it opened in 1961 ’til. " ‘Til today that is… We’ve seen missives from customers who work as local writers to high-profile patrons such as renowned crime author Ian Rankin lamenting “the end of an institution” and “the end of an era. `For Toronto music lovers for whom Sam the Record Man was the centre of the universe the world will be an emptier place after today’ Jun 30 2007 04:30 AM Be the first to comment on this article.
Damon Albarn: World champion
Independent – Jun 30, 2007
Albarn’s artistic impulses derive directly from his parents both culturally inclined ex-hippies. His father Keith has lectured on art designed furniture been involved in television arts programmes and even managed pioneering art-rockers Soft Machine for a time while his mother Hazel worked as a stage designer for Joan Littlewood’s company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East near the family’s Whitechapel home. Although their musical diet of jazz and underground music initially failed to win him over Damon did eventually develop enough of an interest in the performing arts to be considered “posh” by churlish schoolmates at Stanway Comprehensive in Essex. Studies at the East 15 Drama School in Debden led to a place at Goldsmith’s College but he soon realised that he was not a natural thespian. “I’m not really committed enough to do it properly” he acknowledged and so undertook the soul-sapping round of service-sector McJobs undertaken by scuffling musicians with more ideas than money. It was during this time that he formed the group that would become Blur with his childhood chum Graham Coxon on guitar and Dave Rowntree on drums with Alex James joining later on bass. At their very first jam together according to James it was obvious the chemistry was right… Africa Express is his response – an attempt to bring Africa to people’s attention as a successful cultural entity to balance the incessant presentation of it in terms of failure – to convey something other than the constant images of poverty illness famine and corruption with which the media define the continent. And last Saturday in Glastonbury’s new Park area came the broadest realisation yet of this multicultural notion as African and European musicians performed a series of spontaneous jams that bore out the true Glastonbury spirit far more than the empty stadium rock of The Killers or the cheap celebrity frisson of Pete’n'Kate. With no more information than a couple of chords Touareg desert-blues exponents Tinariwen played with nu-psychedelicists The Aliens; blind Malian popsters Amadou & Mariam were accompanied by The Magic Numbers; Somalian hip-hop sensation K’naan appeared alongside Algerian rebel-rocker Rachid Taha; Baaba Maal joined Fela Kuti’s esteemed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen. And that’s barely scratching the surface of an event that also included participants such as Hard-Fi Kano Don Letts and members of The Specials. Any musician would have been delighted to have pulled off either one of these ambitious multicultural events before going home to bask in the warm glow of achievement for a month or two. Particularly if as in Albarn’s case there is no shortage of doubters waiting to sneer at his failures. (ne is reminded of the contemptuous dismissal of his Gorillaz project as “kiddy music” by one or other of the Gallagher brothers still stuck fighting petty parochial battles from a decade ago but strangely silent since Demon Days outsold any of their own work throughout that decade.