Charles Lloyd has a way of talking that sounds a lot like the notes from his saxophone: full of youthful energy, yet packed with experiences reserved for grownups.
The newly elected Pope Francis (formerly known as opera lover and Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio) appears on the balcony of St Peter's Basilica on March 13, 2013 in Vatican City.
Originally published on Thu March 14, 2013 8:38 am
Here's a quick side note to today's big news ...
Immediately after the announcement of the papal election result and the name the new pope had chosen, Brian Williams of NBC News asked New York's Cardinal Edward Egan about the new pontiff, Francis.
Originally published on Wed March 13, 2013 2:12 pm
Three decades after giving the world The Number of the Beast, Iron Maiden is poised to release its latest work — and it's a beer. That's the latest from the Metal Injection website, whose "Bands and Booze" section makes it uniquely qualified to present such news.
The Silver City Blues Festival takes place Memorial Day weekend, May 24-26 at Gough Park in Silver City NM. Except for the Kick-off Dance and the Performer's Jam at the Buffalo Dance Hall, admission is FREE! Click here for details: http://mimbresarts.org/blues-festival-homepage/
Here's the lineup:
Friday Night, May 24, 2013 – Kick-Off Dance (Buffalo Dance Hall – Historic Downtown Silver City)
Tadd Dameron (smiling at center) was an important figure in American jazz and bebop. He is shown here with Fats Navarro on trumpet, and Charlie Rouse and Ernie Henry on saxophone.
Credit William Gottlieb / Library of Congress via Flickr
Dameron was a talented composer, pianist and arranger, as well as a mentor to a generation of musicians. His work was profoundly influential, although over the decades he has faded into obscurity.
Credit Paul Baxter / Courtesy Paul Combs
Paul Combs is a jazz musician, composer and arranger, as well as an educator and author.
In the 1940s and '50s, Tadd Dameron worked with everyone who was anyone in jazz, from Miles Davis to Artie Shaw, Count Basie to John Coltrane. Everything Dameron touched had one thing in common, says Paul Combs, author of Dameronia: The Life and Work of Tadd Dameron.
"A penchant for lyricism," Combs says. "Almost everything that he writes has a very lyrical grace to it."
The world often feels full of fading traditions, from drive-in movie theaters to the dying art of good old-fashioned letter writing.
For the British, add brass bands to that list. Traditional brass bands have played an important cultural role in working-class British communities for centuries. But some warn that without funding, they could become a thing of the past.
Take the Grimethorpe Colliery Band in South Yorkshire. The band was originally formed in 1917, and nearly 100 years later, a group of tuba, euphonium and other horn players still bears the band's name.
Guitarist Alvin Lee, whose incendiary performance with the British band Ten Years After was one of the highlights of the 1969 Woodstock festival, has died.
He was 68. Lee's website says he "passed away early this morning [Wednesday] after unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure." An assistant to his daughter also confirmed the news to NPR.
His band's biggest hit — "I'd Love to Change the World" — came a couple years after Woodstock. We'll embed a clip from that.
What it means to own something in the digital age is being re-negotiated.
Few of us own the music we listen to or the movies we watch in exactly the same way we did a decade ago. And today if you buy a smartphone from a cellphone company, what you can legally do with it — how and where you can use it — may be proscribed even if that phone is fully bought and paid for.
I keep a lot of music on my phone. I have the Stones, Janis Joplin and OK Go.
As a music journalist from the North Country, I'd be a fool to pass up the opportunity to head down Austin, Texas, each March for the South by Southwest Music Conference. It provides those of us on the ice-whipped prairie a respite from our endless winter season, not to mention a chance to binge on the best burgeoning artists before they make their way around the country on tour. It's become something of a requisite for many of the musicians, writers, photographers and fans from my hometown.
Screaming, crying fans are par for the course if you're teen idol Justin Bieber. But this is a bit different.
After a Monday concert at London's O2 Arena that reportedly started two hours late, the 19-year-old pop star has been forced to apologize for upsetting disappointed young concertgoers and their angry parents.
Audie Cornish has more on three Motown artists who died recently — Bobby Rogers, a founding member of the hit-making Motown group the Miracles; Richard Street, a member of the Temptations; and Damon Harris, who sang with the Temptations on many of their hits.
Part of the abandoned mining apparatus in the town of Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
A broken drum, one of the artifacts left behind by Piramida's residents that was actually intended to be a musical instrument.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The mountain that looms above Piramida and which gave the town — as well as Efterklang's fourth album — its name.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Piramida, shot from above. The ghost town, once an active Russian mining settlement, is on the island of Spitsbergen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, which is controlled by Norway.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
"It almost sounds like a vibraphone." Mads Brauer (left) and Rasmus Stolberg record sounds atop one of the empty fuel tanks that Brauer would manipulate into the organlike sounds on the song "Sedna."
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Now drained, the swimming pool in Piramida was once warmed by residual heat from generating electricity. "It was fantastic," says Hein Bjerck, a former Spitsbergen resident.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Efterklang's Mads Brauer records "the world's northernmost grand piano," one of the reasons the band wanted to visit Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The abandoned gymnasium.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Efterklang's singer, Casper Clausen, records the sound of his footsteps on a long boardwalk running out of town. The sound can be heard in the opening of the song "Dreams Today."
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
Empty buildings and rusty swing sets in the town of Piramida. The Russian mining colony that built and populated the settlement abandoned it in 1998.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The members of Efterklang in Piramida: Mads Brauer (left), Rasmus Stolberg (center) and Casper Clausen.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
An arctic-inspired mosaic on one of the walls of an abandoned building in Piramida.
Credit Courtesy of Efterklang
The spike-covered fuel tank that the band taught itself to play. A recording of the tank opens Piramida's first song, "Hollow Mountain."
Originally published on Wed February 27, 2013 4:04 pm
Beatport, one of the most popular online stores for fans of dance music, has been bought by SFX Entertainment, a company that has invested heavily in the dance music business over the past year. According to sources with direct knowledge of the deal, the company was sold for around $50 million.
"[With this purchase] you now have a great one-stop shop for consumers of dance music," says SFX Entertainment CMO Chris Stephenson.
Disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn leaves court in Paris Tuesday after attending a hearing regarding his seizure request for a new book by Argentinian-born Marcela Iacub detailing their liason.
If I wrote operas, my next work would be called DSKNY. That's a snazzy abbreviation for Dominique Strauss-Kahn New York. The idea came last night when colleagues invited me for cocktails at the Sofitel Hotel, the site of DSK's alleged sexual assault of a hotel maid in 2011, and the beginning of his fall from grace.
There's reason to be optimistic about the market for recorded music around the world, according to a new report released by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. For the first time since 1999, the report says, the global trade value for the recorded music industry (a slightly vague/confusing term for record sales) went up last year by about 0.3 percent.
Ron Nine, Mitch Ebert, Eden Schwartz, Fiia McGann and Gretta Harley perform in These Streets, a new play based on a series of interviews with Seattle musicians.
Credit Courtesy of Charles Peterson
Eden Schwartz performs in These Streets, a play about female musicians in Seattle in the early '90s.
Credit Courtesy of These Streets
"There's a power that comes from turning on the amp and getting that real loud sound and screaming it over the mike," says singer Gretta Harley.
Gretta Harley arrived in Seattle in 1990, when grunge was redefining the city. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were turning Seattle into the epicenter of the music world. Harley was a punk rock guitarist searching for her tribe, and in Seattle's thriving music scene, she found it.
Originally published on Sat February 23, 2013 9:31 am
Film scores are, by and large, manipulative. They do their work at the periphery of the senses, signaling danger, heralding victory, prodding us toward fear and joy in time with the unfolding story. Crucially, they are also empathic, letting us in on what the actors' words or faces may not convey. And when things get unpleasant, the score can step in as an emotional buffer — a layer of unreality between us and the action that lets us know we're safe. Sunday night at the Oscars, Hollywood will honor a film whose music manages to get all these things right.
