"The State of Texas" by Brad Paisley feat. Jason Jones

C.W. Stoneking gets Zombified

"The Zombie" is off C.W. Stoneking's scary good Goin' Boogaloo album out now. 

Happy 75th Birthday Andy Bey!

Celebrating Andy's birthday with his stellar cover of Nick Drake's River Man and a CBC clip from 1965.

Biblical's US Tour Launch Party w/ BART @ Johnny Jackson, tonight

The show at 587 College is opened by BART (10pm) with Biblical on at 11pm. Watch the Quiet Crooks clip below.

Happy Birthday Philip Catherine!

Celebrating the 72nd birthday of jazz guitar great Philip Catherine with one of his Placebo classics.

AJ Davila y Terror Amor @ The Mod Club, Monday

Don't miss AJ Davila and his Terror Amor crew at this evening's Burger Records bash.

Wrong Hole @ Smiling Buddha, Sunday

Nick Flanagan, Andrew Gunn and Jon Schouten know more about Gary Busey than cars or HDTV. 

One For The Weekend: The Limiñanas

(I've Got) Trouble In Mind is the title track off the Limiñanas great new singles compilation out now.

Happy 70th Birthday Kati Kovács!

Celebrating the birthday of superstar Hungarian singer/actor Kati Kovács with a couple of vintage clips.

Reigning Sound @ The Horseshoe, Saturday

Check out Reigning Sound's stellar performance at Soda Bar in San Diego on July 2. 2014. 

Set List:
1. Stop and Think It Over (0:00)
2. North Cackalacky Girl (3:38)
3. Never Coming Home (6:46)
4. Debris (10:12)
5. Starting New (13:04)
6. My My (16:27)
7. Reptile Style (19:40)
8. I'm So Thankful (23:15)
9. Falling Rain (26:17)
10. Your Love is a Fine Thing (29:29)
11. I'll Cry (32:30)
12. We Repel Each Other (35:06)
13. Bound to Let Me Down (38:50)
14. Once More (41:42)
15. Drowning (44:53)
16. You Got Me Hummin (48:33)
17. Stormy Weather (51:22)
18. Bad Man (53:47)
19. You're So Strange (56:35)
20. I Don't Care(1:00:08)
21. Trash Talk (1:02:57)
22. Straight Shooter (1:05:30)
23. If You Can't Give Me Everything (1:07:25)
24. What Could I Do (1:10:31)

Black Milk w/ Nat Turner Band @ Tattoo tonight!

Black Milk's new album If There's A Hell Below is out Oct. 28. You can pre-order it on Bandcamp. 

Jazz in Copenhagen 1962 with Dexter Gordon & Sahib Shihab

Here's an ace German doc on the Danish jazz scene w/Dexter Gordon, Lars Gullin & Sahib Shihab at Club Montmartre.

The Stents intend to rock the Magpie Friday

Along with being well-read, The Stents are also Baltimore's top bowling alley show & dance band.

Happy Birthday Celia Cruz!

Remembering Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso aka Celia Cruz with an early Seeco classic. 

BBC's John Peel Lecture with Iggy Pop: Free Music In A Capitalist Society

Read the transcript of Iggy Pop's keynote below or download the MP3 audio right here.

Hi, I'm Iggy Pop. I've held a steady job at BBC 6 Music now for almost a year, which is a long time in my game. I always hated radio and the jerks who pushed that shit music into my tender mind, with rare exceptions. When I was a boy, I used to sit for hours suffering through the entire US radio top 40 waiting for that one song by The Beatles and the other one by The Kinks. Had there been anything like John Peel available in my Midwestern town I would have been thrilled. So it's an honor to be here. I understand that. I appreciate it.

Some months ago when the idea of this talk came up I thought it might be okay to talk about free music in a Capitalist society. So that's what I'm gonna try to talk about. A society in which the Capitalist system dominates all the others, and seeks their destruction when they get in its way. Since then, the shit has really hit the fan on the subject, thanks to U2 and Apple. I worked half of my life for free. I didn't really think about that one way or the other, until the masters of the record industry kept complaining that I wasn't making them any money. To tell you the truth, when it comes to art, money is an unimportant detail. It just happens to be a huge one unimportant detail. But, a good LP is a being, it's not a product. It has a life-force, a personality, and a history, just like you and me. It can be your friend. Try explaining that to a weasel.

As I learned when I hit 30 +, and realized I was penniless, and almost unable to get my music released, music had become an industrial art and it was the people who excelled at the industry who got to make the art. I had to sell most of my future rights to keep making records to keep going. And now, thanks to digital advances, we have a very large industry, which is laughably maybe almost entirely pirate so nobody can collect shit. Well, it was to be expected. Everybody made a lot of money reselling all of recorded musical history in CD form back in the 90s, but now the cat is out of the bag and the new electronic devices which estrange people from their morals also make it easier to steal music than to pay for it. So there's gonna be a correction.

When I started The Stooges we were organized as a group of Utopian communists. All the money was held communally and we lived together while we shared the pursuit of a radical ideal. We shared all song writing, publishing and royalty credits equally – didn’t matter who wrote it - because we'd seen it on the back of a Doors album and thought it was cool, at least I did. Yeah. I thought songwriting was

Hear the Budos Band live on Soundcheck

The Burnt Offering album is out on Daptone. Listen to the Budos Band on WNYC's Soundcheck below.

Whom dost thou calleth elite?

Old cronies Doug Ford and John Tory frolic on the cricket pitch just like the commoners they hope to represent. 

One For The Weekend: Zezé Gonzaga

Here's Brazilian chanteuse singing Cafuné backed by Orquestra de Lyrio Panicali from 1958.

Heavy Trash w/Bloodshot Bill @ The Horseshoe, tonight

Here's Heavy Trash doing James Brown's I Don't Mind followed by Bloodshot Bill's Halloween 7".

Midweek Mixdown: Ed Motta does yacht rock

Brazilian funkateer Ed Motta compiled his fave AOR rarities for a dope Wax Poetics mix you can check below.

Tracks:

1. Mark Radice “It’s You My Love” (1977)
2. Dwight Druick “Prends Ton Temps” (1980)
3. Altay Veloso “Débora” (1986)
4. Tatsuro Yamashita “Love Talkin’ (Honey It’s You)” (1982)
5. Arian “Your Love Makes Me a Winner” (1981)
6. Starbuck “A Fool in Line” (1977)
7. Valerie Carter “Crazy” (1978)
8. Shampoo “Fruta Maçã” (1983)
9. Renee Geyer “Two Sides” (1975)
10. Adrian Gurvitz “Untouchable and Free” (1979)
11. Rita Lee “Atlântida” (1981)
12. James Vincent “Space Traveler” (1976)
13. Pino Daniele “Notte Che Fai” (1995)
14. Chas Jankel “Just a Thought” (1980)
15. Noriyo Ikeda “Dream in the Street” (1980)
16. Jerry Corbetta “Caribbean Lady”
17. The Bee’s Knees “You and I” (1979)
18. Googie and Tom Coppola “Let This River Flow” (1980)
19. Raul Porchetto “El Vino Del Alma” (1979)
20. Rick Riso “Gotta Have the Real Thing”

Neil Young chats with Howard Stern

Steve Gunn @ The Drake Hotel, tonight

Steve Gunn's new album Way Out Weather was released on October 7. Watch his Tiny Desk Concert below.

Steve Gunn is a New York-based guitarist and songwriter. With a career spanning nearly fifteen years, Steve has produced volumes of critically acclaimed solo, duo, and ensemble recordings. His astounding solo albums, as well as his work with GHQ and longtime collaborating drummer John Truscinski, represent milestones of contemporary guitar-driven, forward music. A voracious schedule of international performances has cultivated a fervent fanbase for Gunn’s music throughout the world. These days you can find him playing with his band as well as sometimes serving as guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile’s band the Violators.

Mining the catalogs of Basho, Bull, Chapman, and Sharrock, among other titans of stringed-things and record-session royalty, Steve has steadily processed these inspirations into a singular, virtuosic stream. Friendships and collaborations with Jack Rose, Tom Carter, Meg Baird, Mike Cooper, and Michael Chapman colored the disciplined evolution of the discursive, deconstructed blues sound, at once transcendent and methodical, that is now Gunn’s signature.  Close listening reveals the influence of Delta and Piedmont country blues, ecstatic free jazz, and psych, as well as Gnawa and Carnatic music, on the continually unfolding compositions.

Gunn’s 2009 solo album, Boerum Palace (availble here), demonstrated a fully realized power for songcraft; Steve started to sing more and developed a commanding vocal style equal to his guitar practice. His acclaimed instrumental duo recordings with Truscinski, Sand City (2010) and Ocean Parkway (2012), cemented his place among the top of his peers, both present and past. These documents display Gunn’s compositional penchant for charting musical travelogues that ramble through city and wilderness alike. Dispatches home are not merely descriptive but corporeal; the evocative, rhythmic power of his writing and phrasing carries the listener along bodily. Steve builds songs as exploratory vessels, opens them up for mechanical tinkering, and lives in them through ceaseless improvisatory permutations.

In 2013 Paradise of Bachelors released Time Off, his first album as leader of a trio including longtime friends John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass, and a record on which Steve’s compelling singing features more prominently than ever before. The album features his oblique character sketches and story-songs about friends, acquaintances, and denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood, using the trio band format to launch his compositions into new, luminous strata. This is Gunn at the top of his game, writing his most memorable tunes and lyrics, utterly unique but steeped in traditions both vernacular and avant-garde.

A heady and elliptical travelogue, Gunn’s follow-up, Way Out Weather (available via Paradise Of Bachelors), demonstrates a radical widescreen evolution, featuring a larger band and lighting out for lusher, more expansive, and impressionistic territories than Time Off. This is the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter’s career-defining statement to date.

Replacements salute Billy Joe Shaver in Austin

The Replacements knocked out a reasonable facsimile of Shaver's Live Forever at ACL Fest.    Photo by Craig Laskey

JD McPherson vs Billy Boy Arnold

JD McPherson just covered Billy Boy Arnold's I Wish You Would for a limited-run 45.  I'll keep the original.

Happy Birthday Pharoah Sanders!

Celebrating the birthday of saxophone colossus Pharoah Sanders with a live version of Thembi.

Joe Meek documentary screens @ Royal Cinema, Wednesday

Reel Indie Film Fest presents A Life in the Death of Joe Meek on Oct 15.

RIP Lou Whitney III, 1943-2014

The Skeletons and Morells mainman Lou Whitney died earlier today after a battle with cancer. 

"If you can only have one electric guitar, better make it a Telecaster. Because you can make a Tele sound like a Gibson, but you can't make a Gibson sound like a Tele. And, you can fight your way out of a bar with one." – Lou Whitney





LINKS
Dave Hoekstra: Lou Whitney – Defender of the Song
Springfield News-Leader: Musician Lou Whitney dies in his Springfield home

Shawn Phillips @ Hugh's Room, Wednesday

Here's a well-sampled track from Shawn's 1977 Spaced album he won't be playing in Toronto. 

Bill Murray vs. Bob Dylan

Bill Murray does his own version of Bob Dylan's Shelter From the Storm in St. Vincent opening Oct. 24.

Dan'l Boone @ Double Double Land, Monday

Neil Hagerty wreaks havoc with Nate Young, Alex Moskos & Charles Ballas as Dan'l Boone.

Happy Birthday Alison O'Donnell!

Here's a couple of Alison's recordings with Mellow Candle including the A-side of their first single from '68.

Early Scientist dub recordings excavated

Who exactly didn't want you to hear this dubwise companion to Flick Wilson's School Days album isn't exactly clear – well, apart from the Scientist himself maybe – but the long unavailable Scientist sides created at King Tubby's Dromilly Road studio are well worth investigating for dub fans keen on tracing back the source of Hopeton Brown's mixing style.

The technically astute Brown, who developed his rep as a first class engineer while building transformers for King Tubby 4-track operation, would eventually find fame as a innovative mixer during the dancehall peak of the early 80s after he moved to Channel One and began working with Junjo Lawes and the Roots Radics. 

What we have on The Dub Album They Didn't Want You To Hear! (DKR) is an altogether more rudimentary roots-oriented selection which shows the Scientist's debt to King Tubby and Bunny Lee rather than the next-level sonic trickery for which he would later become known with albums like Scientist Meets The Space Invaders, Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, Scientist Encounters Pac-Man, etc. The 10 track LP, with nine Flick Wilson dubs and one from Wayne Jarrett's What's Wrong with the Youths, still makes for an enjoyable listen. 

Those with a taste for Scientist's earlier classics like Introducing Scientist: The Best Dub Album in the World, Heavyweight Dub Champion and Showdown At King Tubby's will find lots to like on this newly uncovered artifact but those expecting some mind-blowing revelation may be setting themselves up for disappointment. Have a listen below.

Hear the Panther Burns' first-ever performance w/ Alex Chilton on drums!

The Panther Burns, ft. Tav Falco, were recorded at a rented cotton loft in Memphis February 11, 1979.

LINKS
Paste: Alex Chilton, 1975-1981
Bored Out: Ross Johnson Interview, Part Two

This is Vaudou Game... welcome to Togo!

Peter Solo's funky new Vaudou Game album Apiafo is out now on Hot Casa Records. 

LINKS

Vaudou Game FB

Hot Casa Records site

Vaudou Game's Apiafo UK release party image gallery

Watch the new Flying Lotus "Never Catch Me" video

Never Catch Me is off the new album You're Dead! Flying Lotus plays the Danforth Music Hall Oct. 21.

LINKS
NY Times: Flying Lotus picks some of his favourite albums

Alice Gerrard gets support from Hiss Golden Messenger on new album

Alice Gerrard's hard-hitting Follow The Music album is out now on Tompkins Square.

Alice Gerrard recently celebrated her 80th birthday but the respected folk-roots singer/songwriter isn't the slightest bit interested in a quiet retirement. If anything, Gerrard now seems to be busier than ever, following up last year's Laurie Lewis collabo Bittersweet with the new Follow The Music (Tompkins Square) album recorded with M.C. Taylor aka Hiss Golden Messenger and members of Megafaun.

If the goal of the unlikely pairing was to grab the attention of beard-stroking blogosphere gatekeepers hesitant to cover the music of any artist over the age of 39, let alone one with a bluegrass background, it worked. The appearance of a Pitchfork review earlier this week to coincide with the album's release was a surprise – that it was unreservedly positive (it rated a 7.4 for those who care about such things) was a shocker. In fact, this clever bit of misdirection put in play by Tompkins Square Records boss Josh Rosenthal was perhaps even more successful than the hype-savvy former Columbia promotions man and SONY marketing & sales rep had envisioned.  

Where the album conception of Taylor intersects with the haunting voice and stylistic bent of Gerrard appears to be on life's darker side in which crops fail, suitors harbour murderous intent and mother's bury their children. It's a place where both hot-tub country clowns and art-school Americana hipsters fear to tread but Gerrard has always found resonance since her brilliant Hazel & Alice recordings with longtime sidekick Hazel Dickens.

Since Dickens sadly passed in 2011, Gerrard has never found another singing partner with whom she could create such spellbinding harmonies, synthesizing the innovations of the Carter Family and Bill Monroe into a magical vocal blend that was wholly unique and profoundly moving. Let's just say without Hazel & Alice there would be no Freakwater and the duet singing of Emmylou Harris – who was schooled on the Washington, D.C. folk scene of the late 60s where Hazel & Alice held sway –  would sound very different.

Of course, Gerrard's maturely measured performances on Follow The Music don't have the raw power of those classic early Hazel & Alice sessions – which Smithsonian/Folkways has thoughtfully compiled on the excellent Pioneering Women of Bluegrass album – but her well-weathered howl can still get under your skin. Her much younger producer thankfully understands that. Our boy Taylor had the good sense to avoid the temptation to gussy things up with reverb and pitch correction software while keeping his Megafaun pals reigned in to their support role. Consequently Gerrard is allowed to do her thing and that's why Follow The Music will hit you harder than you think.




LINKS
Alice Gerrard - site
Alice Gerrard - Follow The Music on iTunes
Washington Post: Alice Gerrard keeps adding to her legacy

Happy Birthday Wendell Harrison!

Wendell Harrison (left) poses with some of his Tribe associates responsible for the recordings below.