Celebrating Community
The biggest surprise about Patrick Higgins’ 2015 record Bachanalia was how straight he played it. Maybe best known as a guitarist for the experimental trance group Zs, Higgins approached a variety of Bach’s works for solo strings and keyboard on their own terms, adapting them to his instrument without trying to repurpose or contextualize. It’s that part of Higgins’ head […]
Otis Gibb’s album, “Hoosier National” released officially on Sept 18th, 2020 and he has some thoughts on his timing here “I think it’s safe to say, this is the absolute worst possible time to release a record. Most people would give up at this point, but I’m not most people. “ Well, to hell with the pandemic, I’m glad this […]
Beethoven was born 250 years ago this year. What this fact has to do with jazz, in the musical sense, is very little. But it does have to do with the formation of a body of work that represents the aesthetic virtues and values of an art—in other words, what the academies and institutions call a canon. Classical music did […]
The Stooges set at the 1970 Goose Lake Festiival has gone down in their rarified corner of rock history as a turning point for the band, maybe even the beginning of the end. According to legend, bassist Dave Alexander—out of his mind on whatever he was out of his mind on—stood on the stage without playing and was promptly fired […]
From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so […]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy Give me everything you got for this wet-ass pussy “WAP,” it’s the song of the summer, even though summer was cancelled by the coronavirus. So, not much of a summer, and truth be told not much of a song. Once […]
For download or limited edition 2-CD set https://redmeatcountry.bandcamp.com/releases By Jack Grace If you understand legitimate rootsy country music, listening to the band, Red Meat is satisfying in a way not unlike scratching that hard to reach itch way in the middle of your back. They have a deep groove all their own that only a truly committed band with years […]
It’s easy to think of Lonnie Holley as a bluesman. He fits the type: rural, Southern, self-educated, quick with folksy wisdom and deep, dark truth. But Holley is a philosopher poet, more like Son House when he put his guitar down, more like Van Morrison casting ruminations over flowing, nebulous music. Van Morrison had his blues, too, of course. The […]
Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, too The flowers are dyin’ like all things do Follow me close, I’m going to Bally-Na-Lee I’ll lose my mind if you don’t come with me I fuss with my hair, and I fight blood feuds I contain multitudes So go the first lines of Bob Dylan’s first album of new songs in eight years. He […]
MTV launched in 1981 with a video for the Buggles song “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and the medium of music has never been the same. Most music that is. Music at the edges and in the niches that line mass, popular culture has been little affected by music videos. Opera and experimental Western art music have been working with […]