The News Review:
- Stars pay tribute to Mill Valley record shop owner
- Union Blues
- Iron & Wine: Soul of steel
- Music Review | Farm Aid
- Soul-Searching
- Regina Spektor Royal Festival Hall London
Stars pay tribute to Mill Valley record shop owner
San Francisco Chronicle – Sep 11, 2007
Lorrie Collins is a cowgirl queen with a big booming voice and killer smile. Her brother is a fleet-fingered master of the double-necked Mosrite guitar he learned to play when he was a 10-year-old cast member of “Town Hall Party. ” Followed by LaVette’s intensely wrought masterful blues singing the show returned to what Village Music is all about after the star turns by his famous clientele. E-mail Joel Selvin at.
Union Blues
Times nline – Sep 11, 2007
Almost no one stood up. Afterwards Colin Moses chairman of the Prison fficers’ Association said: “I never thought I would hear such a speech from a Labour prime minister. ” This should be music to Gordon Brown’s ears. He had come to the TUC annual conference with no choice but to confront growing union anger over below-inflation public sector pay deals and with every reason to want to show a wider national audience that the unions will not lead him to the left. Hence a speech that flatly rejected “unaffordable” pay deals in favour of the fiscal discipline and stability that he rightly maintains are the only long-term recipe for high employment and low inflation. But in trying to offer the unions some consolation Mr Brown stepped on to shaky ground. His pledge to create up to 500000 “British jobs for British workers” was calculated to please an audience alarmed by inward migration from inside and outside the EU.
Iron & Wine: Soul of steel
Independent – Sep 11, 2007
“Beam spent longer listening back to what he was doing so he realised for example that on “House By the Sea” he was unconsciously playing an African chord progression and he developed the song from there. When he learnt to play guitar in his early teens a friend gave him an album by the Malian artist Ali Farka Tour?That record continues to inspire him. “It’s all so connected – African music the blues James Brown – that’s some of the most African music you’re ever going to hear. I just wish I’d been a drummer because rhythms are so inherent in those guitar styles. “He agrees that “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog)” is reminiscent of a David Essex tune from the time that singer recorded with Jeff Wayne. “You have a beat and suddenly we were like it’s ‘Rock n’ but at the same time it’s a reggae song so we dubbed it out. We left out the [mimes choppy guitar playing] because that would be ridiculous but at least 75 per cent of the music I put on is reggae.
Music Review | Farm Aid
New York Times – Sep 11, 2007
” His speeches were calm pointed and pedagogic praising sustainable agriculture (“it lets the land renew itself just like our brothers did who were here before us”) and criticizing the methods by which America has taken on the role of feeding the world. By food standards nothing could touch the miracle of a fresh peach at a rock festival. But by music standards the Allman Brothers had it hands down. They played the first long set near dusk though it was only about an hour: short by their standards and therefore tremendously tight and intense with both the band’s guitarists Mr. Trucks and Warren Haynes reaching heights of improvisation faster and more powerfully than they often do in three-hour shows. Farm Aid has always emphasized American roots music at least the rock folk and country variations and somehow that has come to mean having a Hammond organ sound in the band. (There’s something vaguely Midwestern about that sound: reassuring but not sweet spiritual but not religious… ” Alone with an acoustic guitar he played “To Washington” a song based on an old rural American folk-blues form addressing new issues in the capital and in Iraq. And Dave Matthews hoarse but effectively so “I broke the bone in my throat that makes it sound prettier” is how he put it played his songs accompanied only by the virtuosic guitarist Tim Reynolds who put arcs of detail rising and falling in volume over the music. The exhortations didn’t come only between songs. Mellencamp’s “Troubled Land” was “bring peace to this troubled land”; the refrain of one of Mr.
Soul-Searching
Washington Post – Sep 11, 2007
I had long been a fan of Memphis soul and blues and its many distillations and I wanted to find out whether that music — which in its purest form tends to thrive best in the smallest dingiest and less-traveled places — was still being played in town whether those out-of-the-way places remained. I wondered if I could see the old Memphis through these changes. MEMPHIS IS THE CITY F CNVENIENCE BIRTHPLACE F THE FIRST SELF-SERVICE GRCERY STRE the Piggly Wiggly as well as the Holiday Inn which was founded in Memphis to provide a clean comfortable and consistent stay no matter where in the world you might find yourself. But consistency is not what I’m after: I want to know that I’m in Memphis. I check in to one of the cheapest places I can find a hotel in midtown whose dark lobby walls — and ceiling– are hung with Expressionist paintings and oil portraits of Moorish princes; whose sinks are silver bowls; whose excessively formal staff addresses me as "Madam" when I call the front desk to ask for a new bulb for the bedside lamp.
Regina Spektor Royal Festival Hall London
Independent – Sep 11, 2007
Her work is a mix of show tunes big ballads joyful eccentricity and kookily confrontational anti-folk city vignettes that seems well-suited to the age of the blog and MySpace filled as it is with the kind of microscopic semi-personal detail that used to stay firmly in one’s diary. Born in 1980 in Moscow to musical parents – her mother is a music professor her father a photographer and amateur violinist – she grew up on perestroika piano studies and smuggled Beatles Queen and Moody Blues cassettes that her dad picked up in Eastern Europe before they emigrated to America when she was nine. Spektor had to leave her piano behind but found another in the basement of her local synagogue in New York and by the age of 18 had started writing songs for voice and piano inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Ani DiFranco. She went on to study formal composition for four years then began playing New York clubs such as the Knitting Factory and the East Village Sidewalk Caf?where she sold self-recorded cassettes – 2001′s 11. and Songs from the following year – before her third release Soviet Kitsch landed her a record deal with Sire in 2003… Her work is a mix of show tunes big ballads joyful eccentricity and kookily confrontational anti-folk city vignettes that seems well-suited to the age of the blog and MySpace filled as it is with the kind of microscopic semi-personal detail that used to stay firmly in one’s diary. Born in 1980 in Moscow to musical parents – her mother is a music professor her father a photographer and amateur violinist – she grew up on perestroika piano studies and smuggled Beatles Queen and Moody Blues cassettes that her dad picked up in Eastern Europe before they emigrated to America when she was nine. Spektor had to leave her piano behind but found another in the basement of her local synagogue in New York and by the age of 18 had started writing songs for voice and piano inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Ani DiFranco. She went on to study formal composition for four years then began playing New York clubs such as the Knitting Factory and the East Village Sidewalk Caf?where she sold self-recorded cassettes – 2001′s 11. and Songs from the following year – before her third release Soviet Kitsch landed her a record deal with Sire in 2003.