❀ -Secondhand Sounds- ❀

2/29/12 Playlist

2012-02-29T06:00:00.000-08:00

1. Lovey Dovey-Otis Redding

2. Don't Play That Song (You Lied)-Aretha Franklin

3. I'm Lonely For You-Bettye Swann

4. That's All I Want-Bobby Day

5. Let Me Be Good To You-Carla Thomas

6. I Can Only Give You Everything-Nick Waterhouse

7. Peace of Mind-Nina Simone

8. Funky Southern f/ Mustafa Akbar-The Funk Ark

9. Can You Find Me Love-Harrison & The Majestic Kind

10. Ghetto Funk-Queens Community Show Band

11. Sophisticated Honky-Orgone

12. Cressy St. Breakdown-Cookin' on 3 Burners

13. Soul Power-Derek Martin

14. Mae Frances-Sweet Honey In The Rock

15. Pray On, Child-The Staple Singers

16. Search Me Lord-Little Richard

17. Junker's Blues-Champion Jack Dupree

18. I Want a Tall Skinny Papa-Sister Rosetta Tharpe

19. Carolina Breakdown-Etta Baker

20. Casey Jones-Mississippi John Hurt

21. So Many Roads, So Many Trains-Otis Rush

22. Hold On-Alabama Shakes

KCSOhBehave,

Ashley

Julia Fischer Review

2012-02-25T14:25:00.002-08:00

On Thursday night at Campbell Hall, German violinist Julia Fischer reaffirmed her reputation as being one of the world's most technically gifted talents by providing a riveting and emotional performance with piano accompaniment, Milana Chernyavska. With the many accolades to her name (Artist of the Year at the '07 Gramophone Awards, Instrumentalist of the Year in the '09 MIDEM Classical Awards, releasing the fastest-selling classical album on iTunes in '09) along with prestitgious international awards peppering her extensive resumé, Fischer performed Mozart's "Sonata for Piano and Violin in B-flat Major", Schubert's "Rondo for Violin and Piano in B minor," Debussy's "Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor," and Saint-Saëns' "Sonata for Violin and PIano No. 1 in D minor" with mesmerizing mastery and technical achievement. Extra chairs had to be provided to the patrons of the full venue who were taken by Fischer's rousing interpretations of these classics with a technique that powerfully combines reputable tradition with impressive range. The juxtaposition of rigid composition with natural cohesion and sonic continuity elucidates Fischer's innate ability to weave together a performance that illicits a powerful response from both those well-versed in classical music and those just beginning their journey into this beautifully tender and compelling musical terrain.

2/15/12 Playlist

2012-02-15T15:56:00.000-08:00

1. Chain Gang-Otis Redding

2. Good Lovin'-Betty Wright

3. I've Got That Feelin'-Darrell Barnks

4. I'm Gonna Keep on Loving You-Kool Blues

5. Mama Don't Like My Man-Sharon Jones

6. Progress-Booker T. f/ Sharon Jones

7. Bold Soul Sister, Bold Soul Brother-Black On White Affair

8. Marvin's Groove-BW Souls

9. Ebony-Project Soul

10. Don't Ever Leave Me (unreleased)-JC Davis

11. Si Se Puede-The Ray Camancho Band

12. Mas O Menos-The Budos Band

13. Tell Me a Tale-Michael Kiwanuka

14. Jumpin at the Woodside (1938 Version)-Count Basie & Quincy Jones

15. Reefer Head Woman-Bill "Jazz" Gillum

16. If You're A Viper-Lorrain Walton

17. My Bebop Gal-Dr. Isaiah Ross

18. Cornbread and Butterbeans-Carolina Chocolate Drops

19. Lost In the Light-Bahamas

20. Blackout-Pickwick

21. Sometimes-Punch Brothers

22. Folks-Mirah & Thao

Happy belated V-day,

Ashley

KCSBe Mine.

2/8/12 Playlist

2012-02-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

1. You Made a Man Out of Me-Otis Redding

2. Little Red Rooster-Sam Cooke

3. What Cha Gonna Do Bout It-Doris Troy

4. Ride Your Pony (Original)-Lee Dorsey

5. Chicago Falcon-The Budos Band

6. Pick It Up, Lay It In The Cut-Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings

7. Mannish Boy-Erykah Badu

8. Oughta Be A Woman-Sweet Honey in The Rock

9. Joshua Fought The Battle-Clara Ward & The Ward Singers

10. Get Away Jordan-Mahalia Jackson

11. Let's Go Out to the Programs-The Dixie Hummingbirds

12. Too Close/On My Way to Heaven-Mavis Staples

13. John Henry-Mississippi Fred McDowell

14. Jumper Hanging Out On the Line-R.L. Burnside & The Sound Machine

15. Big Men in the Sky-Mandolin Orange

16. The Traveler, 108b-Cordelia's Dad

17. The Rushing Dark-Laura Gibson

18. To Begin-Alela Diane

19. Wild Eye-Mariee Sioux

20. I'll Hold Your Head-Shelby Lynne

-Ash

2/1/12 Playlist

2012-02-01T08:17:00.001-08:00

1. Any Ole Way (Live)-Otis Redding

2. Keep Marchin'-Raphael Saadiq

3. (1-2-3-4-5-6-7-) Count The Days-Inez & Charlie Foxx

4. Scorpio-Kashmere Stage Band

5. I Want to Know-Sugar Pie DeSanto

6. Don't Mess Up A Good Thing-Bobby McClure & Fontella Bass

7. That's All I Want-Bobby Day

8. I Can't Stand Myself (When You Touch Me)-James Brown

9. Pucker Up-Junior Walker

10. Who's The Fool-Sam Ward

11. My Babe-Little Walter

12. Rock My Soul-The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet

13. Rock Crazy Baby-Art Adams

14. Shake Um Up Rock-Benny Cliff Trio

15. Vodka Before Breakfast-The Woodshedders

16. Sometimes-Punch Brothers

17. White Freightliner Blues-Steve Earle

18. Big Men in the Sky-Mandolin Orange

19. I'll Hold Your Head-Shelby Lynne

20. La Grande-Laura Gibson

Yours,

Ash

91.9FM KCSB

1/25/12 Playlist

2012-01-25T11:52:00.001-08:00

1. Chained And Bound-Otis Redding

2. Love Ain't Nothing (But a Monkey On Your Back)-Johnny Nash

3. Heart of Gold-Charles Bradley

4. In the Basement, Pt. 1-Etta James & Sugar Pie DeSanto

5. Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead-The Marvelettes

6. Oh! Baby (We Got a Good Thing Going)-Barbara Lynn

7. Sleep-Allen Stone

8. I Need a Dollar-Aloe Blacc

9. California Soul-Marlena Shaw

10. Sure Hope You Mean It-Raphael Saadiq

11. A La Modeliste-Mark Ronson f/ Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Trombone Shorty & Aloe Blacc

12. Hurricane Season-Trombone Shorty

13. On Your Way-Alabama Shakes

14. God Is Trying To Tell You Something-Quincy Jones

15. Wade In The Water-The Staple Singers

16. Jesus Gave Me Water-The Five Blind Boys of Mississsippi

17. They Are Falling All Around Me-Sweet Honey In The Rock

18. Talk With Jesus-Jones Sisters

19. Hill Stomp-Robert Belfour

20. Untitled Blues-Roland Kirk

21. Stackolee-Mississippi John Hurt

22. Lonesome Blues-Lonnie Pitchford

You're the KCSBee's knees,

Ashley

91.9FM KCSB

1/18/12 Playlist

2012-01-18T08:47:00.000-08:00

After a summer and fall hiatus, Secondhand Sounds is back and in full force! Thanks for tuning in.

1. Johnny's Heartbreak-Otis Redding

2. I'm Alright-Little Anthony & The Imperials

3. Come On and Save Me-The "5" Royales

4. The Nitty Gritty-Gladys Knight & The Pips

5. Marvin's Groove-BW Souls

6. It's Growing-Bobby Taylor & The Vancouvers

7. You've Been Gone So Long-The Cubans

8. Get It Right-Soul President

9. You Better Know It-Jackie Wilson

10. Stay Away-Charles Bradley & Menahan Street Band

11. Gone, Gone, Gone-Nikki Lane

12. I Ain't Never-Webb Pierce

13. Funnel of Love-Wanda Jackson

14. I Found You-Alabama Shakes

15. Wreck My Car-Scott H. Biram

16. You're the One That I Want-Angus & Julia Stone

17. Gun Shy-Widowspeak

18. Hots Full of Love-Josh Rouse & The Long Vacations

19. Girl From The North Country-Bob Dylan

20. Tamiditin Tan Ufrawan-Tinariwen

All the best,

Ash

Stephen Petronio Dance Company

2011-11-17T15:09:00.001-08:00

Stephen Petronio’s fifth time at UCSB culminated in a night of provocative narrative and impressive physicality set to the backdrop of the powerful and prodigious music of Nick Cave. Underland, a production that Petronio choreographed in eight weeks in the heart of Sydney, Australia, looks at the cyclical and subconscious emotionality of Cave’s work through the physical manifestation of the body as the site onto which “the dark beauty of his music, its rawness, pain and redemption” saturate the dancers’ movements with pronounced mastery and passion. The pieces illuminated Cave’s predilection towards the battle of lightness and darkness and his unique articulation of communal struggle and salvation. In the Q&A after the performance, Petronio noted how blessed he was to work with so many dedicated performers and collaborators in a creative space where, after twenty five years in the business, he could finally have the confidence to illustrate Cave’s lyrics through textured flashes that slide back and forth between abstraction and explicit illustration. With industrial overtones and muscular grace, the Stephen Petronio Dance Company moved the audience with their sultry agility and blurring movements in pieces that aptly depicted Cave’s focus on the journey of both the submission and exaltation of the human soul.

Stephen Petronio Company from Blake Martin on Vimeo.

Yours,

Ashley

Creole Choir of Cuba

2011-11-05T15:01:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday night, the Creole Choir of Cuba, comprised of ten members from Camagüey, Cuba, arrived in Campbell Hall to a crowd eager to hear their internationally renowned traditional Creole songs. Creole, the fusion of multiple languages over the course of centuries of slavery and cross-cultural interactions, represents the hybridity of Cuban culture through beautiful and soulful vocal recitation. On a sparse stage with a small percussion section, the choir evoked a markedly powerful response through their passionate harmonies and nuanced choral configurations. Energetic and lively, the song selection spanned the cultural history of Cuba from the Haitian slave trade to contemporary neo-liberalism, illuminating the textured history of Creole culture. The themes freedom, family, and hope rang true through their intimate stories of resistance and identity. With music as the hub of expression and cultural preservation, the simplicity of the performance juxtaposed to their dynamic vocal exaltations made for an evening rich in rhythm and radiance.

Best,

Ashley

Rejoice & Shout Film Review

2011-10-27T19:34:00.001-07:00

On a cold and dark Monday night, I had the pleasure of viewing, Rejoice and Shout, a documentary that chronicles the 200 year history of African-American gospel music, stemming from the call-and-response spiritual hymns on the plantations all the way to the booming industry of contemporary Christian music. As a programmer at KCSB, I host a soul and R&B show and I was delighted to see the amazing footage that director, Don McGlynn, had collected. From rare recordings from the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, to the Blind Boys sing-offs, to Mahalia Jackson’s heart stopping performance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Rejoice & Shout not only informed the audience, but also entertained them with captured moments of musical brilliance and innovation. With a deftly constructed storyline as well as lush and insightful commentary by some of gospel music’s most significant performers, like Clara Ward, Ira Tucker, and notable gospel historians, Rejoice & Shout told not only the story of gospel music, but also the story of the communities that found identity within these hallowed voices. What struck me most about this film was that almost every performance captured in both film and audio was utterly saturated with a raw sound that was simultaneously exalting, haunting, and alluring. Upon leaving the theatre I heard a couple sum up perfectly why gospel music has left such an enduring legacy in American music: these musicians were not singing for fame or fortune-they sang with an ineffable and irreparable conviction of spirit that still resonates with listeners to this day.

Mary Oliver Review

2011-10-20T20:03:00.001-07:00

You may ask yourself: why are you writing a post about a poet on a music blog? I won't even go into the intersectional nature of poetry and music (jive poetry and jazz, anyone?) but I'll say just this: Mary Oliver's poetry is music to my ears.

Bundled between a young boy and an older woman from the UK, I knew that this was going to be an experience. I had been eagerly anticipating to hear one of my favorite poets speak and here I was, right in the middle of it. The woman next to me expressed her surprise about the high quality of audience turn out. Indeed she was right: this Pulitzer Prize winner at Campbell Hall seemed to have attracted the cream of the crop of Santa Barbara's poetry lovers from both near and far. Mary Oliver's words had inspired the sleepy literary enthusiasts of the central coast to come out in full force to hear the enchanting musings of one of America's greatest poetic voices. She spoke with such endearing charm and humor, inserting witty commentary between her recitations of both her old and contemporary literary creations. Blending in old classics like "Wild Geese" (to the audience's delight she prefaced the poem saying, "People hit me if I don't read Wild Geese") and unpublished poems, she recited her work with graceful simplicity and sincerity. The times she fumbled between her passages she noted that "finding poems is like doing taxes," amusing the audience with her wry, casual humor. She created an organic experience of sharing and communication between her work and her listener, allowing her readings to be just as seamless and alluring as her printed words. As her poems capture the gorgeous multiplicities of human experience, so did her performance. Her traditional pastoral observations of her home in Massachusetts still embody an ethereal poignance even as her recent move to Florida has forced her to "learn to love the palm trees." Her fascination with the ineffable sublimity of nature enraptured the audience-the air was silent and still as they grasped on to every word. Mary Oliver's epistolic recitations was like a full season: embodying every facet of the world's dark and enduring beauty. She captured every range of emotion, confronting issues of mortality, love, nature, and, of course, her beloved canine companion, Percy.

Maneuvering between the worlds of poetry and academia, she found that "poetry only has one nation, no boundary--it's the warehouse of the world, full of metaphors." During the Q&A, Oliver revealed that while teaching she would assign students to write a "prose poem" to prove that they could, indeed, write a sentence. She seems to realize the balance of prose and poetry, claiming that one need not choose one over the other. Utilizing multiple part poems in order to allow a circular change of voice, Oliver shed light on her writing style stating that she utilized dashes and semicolons in order to make the listener more privy to finish the sentence-a sentence that could be 36 lines long. When asked about the validity of poetry she proclaimed, "Poetry saves lives...I read for joy, comfort, satisfaction, and then elegance." Each poem she read became my new favorite and by the end of the night, my notebook was full of her hauntingly gorgeous observations. Evoking an emotional standing ovation, Mary Oliver left the stage as quietly as she had entered it, but this time with an audience yearning for more.

Replacing "Wild Geese" as my favorite poem, here is "The Kitten."

The Kitten

More amazed than anything
I took the perfectly black
stillborn kitten
with the one large eye
in the center of its small forehead
from the house cat's bed
and buried it in a field
behind the house.

I suppose I could have given it
to a museum,
I could have called the local
newspaper.

But instead I took it out into the field
and opened the earth
and put it back
saying, it was real,
saying, life is infinitely inventive,
saying, what other amazements
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes,

I think I did right to go out alone
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

-----------------------------------------------

Poetically yours,

Ashley

6/8/11 Playlist

2011-06-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

1.Security-Otis Redding

2. Shake-Sam Cooke

3. Hey Lolly Molly-Oscar Mclollie & The Honey Jumpers

4. Time Is On My Side-Irma Thomas

5. Don't Play That Song-Aretha Franklin

6. She's Not Just Another Woman-8th Day

7.Get Something Out of It-The 5 Royales

8. Sitting On Top of the World-Sweet Honey In the Rock

9. I Got to Go-Little Walter

10. Frankie & Johnny-Champion Jack Dupree

11. How'm I Gonna Get Back Home-He's My Brother, She's My Sister

12. Looking For the Right Thing-Jamestown Revival

13. Little Ashtray In Sun-Cotton Jones

14. The Hills of My Home-Laurie Lewis

15. City of Refuge-Abigail Washburn

16. Wade In the Water-Patty Griffin

17. To Ramona (live)-Bob Dylan

18. Folks-Mirah & Thao

19. By Morning-Leftover Cuties

20. Minds Awake-Rumspringa

21. Wreck My Car-Scott H. Biram

22. New Shadow-The Dutchess & The Duke

23. Sophie's Waltz-Nathan

Happy summer,

Ashley

91.9FM KCSB

6/1/11 Playlist

2011-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

1. Johnny's Heartbreak-Otis Redding

2. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy-Marlena Shaw

3. Gimme Little Sign-Brenton Wood

4. I Know-Barbara George

5. These Ain't Raindrops-James Carr

6. Girl Watcher-The O'Kaysions

7. Who Knows-Marion Black

8. God Is Trying To Tell You Something-Quincy Jones

9. Talk With Jesus-The Jones Sisters

10. Drown In My Own Tears-Ray Charles

11. It Won't Be Long-Clarence "Frogman" Henry

12. Leaving Here-Eddie Holland

13. My Country Man-Big Maybelle

14. Bloodshot Eyes-Wynonie Harris

15. Little Mama-The Clovers

16. Hey Bartender-Floyd Dixon

17. Sag Drag & Fall-Sid King & The Five Strings

18. Lord Lord-Junior Wells

19. Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan-Holcombe Waller

20. Wasteland-Maggie Bjorlund

21. Southside of Heaven-Ryan Bingham

22. Sometimes-Punch Brothers

23. Good Night Darling-Huckleberry Flint

24. Long Time Traveller-The Wailin' Jennys

25. Wicker Frames-Polka Dot Dot Dot

26. Buffalo-Mountain Man

27. Lakeville-Amy Correia

28. I Like The Way You Walk-The Donkeys

Paz, Paz, Paz,

Ashley

KCSB 91.9FM

5/18/11 Playlist

2011-05-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

1. For Your Precious Love-Otis Redding

2. Mannish Boy (Muddy Waters cover)-Erykah Badu

3. Who Knows Who?-Orgone

4. This Land Is Your Land-Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings

5. Oughta Be A Woman-Sweet Honey In The Rock

6. Purple-Shuggie Otis

7. Don't Cry-Sam Cooke

8. Sincerely-The McGuire Sisters

9. I've Got That Feelin'-Darrell Banks

10. I Love You Baby-Moovers

11. Hard Time Killing Floor Blues-Chris Thomas King

12. Traveling Mama Blues-Joe Calicott

13. Sweet Appalachia-The Del McCoury Band

14. I've Just Seen a Face-The Dillards

15. As I Lay On The Prairie-Brian Harnety

16. Hello Goodbye-Barry Phillips

17. Lexington-Elephant Revival

18. Glencoe-Richard Thompson

19. Colorado Girl-Steve Earle

20. Art Isn't Real-Deer Tick

21. Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow)-Justin Vernon

22. Spanish Pipedream-The Avett Brothers

23. Sold-Dan Mangan

24. Watchman-Peggy Sue

25. My Name Is Buddy-Ry Cooder

26. Showbiz Blues-Fleetwood Mac

27. Ooh La La-The Faces

28. She PLays Yo Yo With My Mind-Sonny & The Sunsets

29. Hard Line-Jill Barber

30. Bundles-Mariee Sioux

31. Hidden Track-Johnny Flynn

32. Your Only Doll (Dora)-Laura Marling

Eclectically yours,

Ashley

KCSB 91.9FM

Del McCoury Band Review

2011-05-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, May 12 I strolled into Campbell Hall with absolute certainty that I would enjoy this performance. Taking the stage was bluegrass legend, Del McCoury and his faithful band, an ensemble who in the music industry inspire not only respect, but high praise from musicians of all genres. Having collaborated with heavy hitters like Steve Earle, Phish, and Elvis Costello, Del McCoury demonstrates that bluegrass isn't just for those with an acquired taste: it's about presence, passion, and the musical marriage of sound old and new. Listening to the Del McCoury Band was almost like a throwback to the Carter Family: after 50 years of playing, Del McCoury has certainly made his performances a family affair. With his kind and loving sharing of the stage, he incorporated his band through the recognition of his son, Ron McCoury, playing the mandolin, his other son Rob McCoury on the banjo, and his other bandmates, fiddler Jason Carter and bass player Alan Batram. Del McCoury warmly engaged with the audience, taking requests and recounting old stories ranging from his early childhood love of Earl Scruggs to past festival interactions with Richard Thompson. Del McCoury's charm was completely enchanting and comfortable: soft spoken with a wide grin, his "aw shucks" attitude perfectly complemented the ol' time sound of Americana lore. Conjuring images of wide open land, unrequited small town love, and rugged Southern mountain living, bluegrass can be at times a mesmerizing combination of both lonesome and enlivening sound, with its roots heavily embedded in the collective American unconscious. It's the soundtrack to the mines, to the family, to the pastoral, and to the golden ages of simple yearning for pure heart and soul. My favorite moment of the performance was when bass player Alan Batram hesitatingly took the mic to sing "Sweet Appalachia." His smooth and effortless voice and style took the audience completely by surprise as he crooned his way through this timeless classic. The performance in its entirety was much like Batram's solo moment: it was a showcase of everyone's immense talent and musical dexterity infused with an easy collaborative relationship of familiarity and friendship. It wasn't a time for them to put on airs (which, with their talent, would have been understandable). It was a time to play what they love with the people they love the most. And perhaps that's why McCoury is still playing to large audiences after half a century: genuine passion, a reverence for the genre, and an endearing and humble disposition to boot. And hey, I'm sure his prodigious guitar playing probably doesn't hurt either.

5/4/2011 Playlist

2011-05-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

1. Rock Me Baby-Otis Redding

2. Powerful Love-Chuck & Mac

3. I've Made Up My Mind-Josephine Taylor

4. Your Good Thing-Mable John

5. Rock My Soul-The Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet

6. Wait a Minute-Eddie Ray

7. Are You Sure-The Staple Singers

8. Ooh Poo Pah Doo-Ike & Tina Turner

9. Land of a Thousand Dances-Wilson Pickett

10. Old No. 7-The Devil Makes Three

11. Drivin' Nails In My Coffin-Those Darlins

12. Vodka Before Breakfast-The Woodshedders

13. Crazy Train-The Waifs

14. I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow-Abalone Dots

15. So Sleepy-The Punch Brothers w/ Fiona Apple

16. Creepin' In (Exclusive Live Cut)-Dolly Parton w/ Norah Jones

17. Fire & Water (Live)-Alex Ebert & Jade Castrinos

18. Tickle Me Pink-Johnny Flynn

19. Two Tongues-Mariee Sioux

20. Man In the Box-Tunng

21. Spirited-Laura Gibson

22. Postcard from Mexico-Kieran Kane, Kevin Welch & Fats Kaplin

23. Carpenter-Huckleberry Flint

24. The Ghost of Tom Joad-Junip

25. Dimming the Day-Bonnie Raitt

26. River-Howlin' Woods

27. Hidden Track-Johnny Flynn

Hooray for May,

Ashley

91.9FM KCSB

4/27/11 Playlist

2011-04-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

1. Tramp-Otis Redding

2. Give Him a Great Big Kiss-The Shangri-Las

3. I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart-Candi Staton

4. Today I Started Loving You Again-Bettye Swann

5. Soul Serenade-Willie Mitchell

6. Blues Stay Away from Me-The Sweet Inspiration

7. Lord, Don't Leave Us Now-The Caravans

8. Stand by Me-Jimmy Ruffin & David Ruffin

9. Ain't It Baby-The Miracles

10. Mr. Lee-The Bobbettes

11. I Love You Baby-Moovers

12. Chained-Marvin Gaye

13. One Man's Leftovers-100 Proof (Aged in Soul)

14. My Country Man-Big Maybelle

15. Baby Please Don't Go-Big Joe Williams

16. Fire On the Mountain-The Marshall Tucker Band

17. So So Freely-AgesandAges

18. Jesus and Arizona-Paper Bird

19. Fisherman's Daughter-The Waifs

20. Green River-M. Ward

21. Granddaddy's Mouth-The Dexateens

22. Antonia June-Lightning Dust

23. Trapeze-Patty Griffin

24. Dagger Through the Heart-Sinéad O'Connor

25. Lille-Lisa Hannigan

26. Wizard Flurry Home-Mariee Sioux

27. Suspicious Minds-My Morning Jacket

28. The Tree (f/ Alela Diane)-Blitzen Trapper

29. Carpenter-Huckleberry Flint

30. Lonesome Blues-The Be Good Tanyas

Keep it real, lemon peel

Ashley

4/20/11 Playlist

2011-04-20T06:00:00.000-07:00

1. Rock Me Baby-Otis Redding

2. Honey Chile-Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

3. I'm the Lover Man-Little Jerry Williams

4. Lover's Holiday-Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson

5. I Don't Want to Lose Your Love-The Mad Lads

6. That's How It Feels-The Soul Clan

7. I've Got a Notion-Henry Lumpkin

8. Who's the Fool-Sammy Ward

9. I Got To Go-Little Walter

10. Frankie & Johnny-Champion Jack Dupree

11. I'm Feeling Alright-Big Mama Thornton

12. Cornbread and Butterbeans-Carolina Chocolate Drops

13. CC Rider-Old Crow Medicine Show

14. Blue Car-Greg Brown

15. Circuital-My Morning Jacket

16. The Ghost Who Walks-Karen Elson

17. Lil' Big-Mirah, Ginger, and Friends

18. Opal's Blues-The Be Good Tanyas

19. Lost In My Mind-The Head and the Heart

20. Bundles-Mariee Sioux

21. My Brambles-Alela Diane

22. Amazing Grace-Cat Power & Dirty Delta Blues

23. My Sweet Lord-Yim Yames

24. Hallelujah-Jake Shimabukuro

All the best,

Ashley

91.9FM KCSB

Review: Maceo Parker

2011-04-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

As I approached Campbell Hall, I knew that I was in for a treat. Clusters of excited fans gathered at the steps to the lecture hall, clasping their tickets and engaging in animated chatter about the upcoming performance. Settling into my seat, I soon realized that I was surrounded by not only fans, but by a wide array of accomplished musicians. Behind me sat a man who was an electronic/hip hop music producer who had just completed a music archive project that intersected environmental sustainability with the soundtrack of old-school funk and jazz. In front of me was a married couple of classical concert pianists who exchanged tender murmurs of excitement as the lights came down. "He's the real thing," they whispered. And then it started. Coming on stage, with a personality that filled up the lecture hall of 860 seats to the brim. The epitome of cool, he danced and jived all through the set and when he played his infamous instrument of choice, the seductive and powerful sax, there was no one in the lecture hall who wasn't moving right along. It was time, as he said, to get funky. Every solo elicited a holler from the audience members, every little dance a grin. The performance was like nothing I had ever seen. More than two hours of pure, unadulterated music (and don't let Maceo Parker hear you call it your mama's jazz!). This was prime, old-school, full-throttle funk. Fresh off a tour that has taken him everywhere from Moscow to San Francisco, Maceo Parker has been keeping funk alive for over twenty years, collaborating with a diverse set of artists such as Ray Charles, Dave Matthews, and even the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Weaving in songs and riffs from classic motown, R&B and soul, Parker demonstrated the absolute breadth and musical aptitude that he can incorporate into this established genre. This sentiment was only amplified by the immensely talented musicians that he surrounded himself with on stage (which he introduced with James Brown-esque zest and humor). A throwback to the glory days of funk and a harbinger of the many golden days to come, it reminds us that his catchphrase of "2% jazz, 98% funk" still rings true. And that's 100% okay with me.

Keep gettin' yo funk on,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Mariee Sioux

2011-04-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

-MARIEE SIOUX-

I stumbled upon Mariee Sioux in the wee hours of an early morning music binge and was instantly captivated by her use of visceral imagery and her utilization of a sparse but powerful musical technique that echoes the theme of longing for solace, a solace that can be both lost and found within the natural world.

Here is her biography from Grassroots Records:

"The tale of Mariee Sioux began as delicately and spiritually as her captivating song, as a small ember introduced to the universe that soon grew into a flame of hope and illumination. Her dazzling debut album, Faces in the Rocks, weaves together the poetic interpretations of the universe’s deep truths and interconnectedness that have intrigued her since childhood. Each spin invites listeners to be the cast in Mariee’s entrancing tale with a journey ahead that is only beginning.
The stage was set in her hometown of Nevada City, CA, a historically creative community in which artists have flourished over the ages, where Mariee intertwined the vivid verse she had been writing as a child with the life lessons she has learned as an adult for this powerful record. Her roots had been planted deep in music through the love of her mandolin-playing father, but it was not until Mariee ventured a life-changing trip to Patagonia at the age of 17 that she began to play an instrument herself. She soon perfected the spry, delicate finger picking guitar technique featured on Faces in the Rocks, a faultless accompaniment to her strong yet sweetly cooing vocals, and toured internationally with her adoring compatriots Brightblack Morning Light.
Featuring Grammy-nominee Gentle Thunder’s enchanting sound on a redwood-carved Native American flute as well as her own famed father Gary Sobonya on mandolin, Mariee recorded Faces in May 2007 with a troupe of Nevada City’s talented musicians. Recorded with the intent of aligning the magnificence of the human voice with the universe’s creative energy, each song is a stirring exploration of life. Her tales range from the profundity of friendship on the single “Friendboats” to the yearning of self-understanding on “Bundles,” each laced with fabled images and poignant verse. “Two Tongues at One Time,” recently released on a rare 7” vinyl, is a sonnet-filled homage to the ancestors who traversed the wild lands of America hundreds of years ago, reminding listeners of our vital ties to our past.
Continuing the folk tradition of songwriting greats such as Joni Mitchell, Kate Wolf and Nick Drake, Faces glorifies an appreciation of the working spirit and the oneness of nature that remains timeless." http://www.grassrootsrecordco.com/artists/artist_mariee.html

With respect and love,

Ashley

4/13/2011 Playlist

2011-04-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

1. Johnny's Heartbreak-Otis Redding

2. Headline News-Edwin Starr

3. Westbound #9-Flaming Ember

4. Who's That Guy-The Kolettes

5. Lift This Hurt-Elvin Spencer

6. You Keep Me Hanging On-Bonnie & Sheila

7. Invisible-Baby Charles

8. I Can Be Cool-Bob & Gene

9. Your Love Keeps Drawing Me Closer-Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum, & Durr

10. Promised Land-Naomi Davis & Sugarman Three

11. Let's Take a Walk-Raphael Saadiq

12. You Wish-Nightmares On Wax

13. Nobody But You-Junior Kimbrough & The Soul Blues Boys

14. Jumper Hanging Out On the Line-R.L. Burnside & The Sound Machine

15. I Got My Eyes On You-Robert Belfour

16. John Henry-Fred McDowell

17. Baby Don't Go-Hacienda

18. Railroad Bill-Etta Baker

19. The Traveler, 108b-Cordelia's Dad

20. Angel Band-The Stanley Brothers

21. The Magnolia Set-The Duhks

22. Lil' Bit-Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, et al

23. Love's Melody-Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli

24. Swing to Bop-Charlie Christian

25. Made By Maid-Laura Marling

26. Lost In My Mind-The Head and the Heart

27. Oh Mississippi-Lissie

28. Don't You Remember-Adele

29. The Walker-Gayngs

30. Had to Go-Heartless Bastards

Spring has sprung! Let warm evenings with pleasant tunes commence!

Ashley

Review: Jake Shimabukuro

2011-04-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of UCSB Arts & Lectures, I was able to catch a free concert in Storke Plaza featuring one of the world's most celebrated ukulele players, Jake Shimabukuro. Before performing at his sold-out Campbell Hall show, Shimabukuro performed songs off of his new record, Peace Love Ukulele. On a warm Santa Barbara afternoon, Shimabukuro took the stage and performed for hundreds of eager listeners who had flocked to campus in order to see one of YouTube's biggest musical sensations. Of amicable demeanor and presence, Shimabukuro sprinkled his set with charming stories and insights into the craft of his both delicate and powerful sound. Taught by his mother in his native Hawaii, Shimabukuro recounted stories of young love in "143," dazzled the audience with his rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" and paid homage to the victims of the Japanese earthquake with the ancient Japanese folk song "Cherry Blossoms." With his inclination to transcend the rigid boundaries of genre, Shimabukuro demonstrated the unique propensity for the ukulele to combine two seemingly different musical worlds into one beautiful and unifying presentation. It was such a pleasure to see such an innovator of profound musical virtuosity and enthusiastic sincerity. I am so excited to see what he does next!

Check out his most famous cover, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" here:

Aloha,

Ashley

2011-04-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

2-14-2011 Playlist

2011-03-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

1. Open The Door-Otis Redding

2. Walking The Dog-Rufus Thomas

3. Rock Steady-Aretha Franklin

4. Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead-The Marvelettes

5. Boogaloo Down Broadway-Fantastic Johnny C

6. Show Me-Joe Tex

7. I'm Blue-The Ikettes

8. She's Not Just Another Woman-8th Day

9. Let It Please Be You-The Desires

10. They Are Falling Around Me-Sweet Honey In The Rock

11. Unrequited Love-Lykke Li

12. Lock Your Devils Up-Nathan

13. Tales That I Tell-He's My Brother, She's My Sister

14. Ten Thousand Words-The Avett Brothers

15. In the Summertime-Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter

16. Well OK Honey-Jenny O

17. Cheating Heart-The Barker Band

18. Dreams Come True Girl-Cass McCombs

19. Our Hearts Are Wrong-Jessica Lea Mayfield

20. Ruby Mae-Felice Brothers

21. Granddaddy's Mouth-The Dexateens

22. Ellis Unit One-Steve Earle

23. Amandrai-Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré

24. Down By The River-Neil Young

With finals week upon us, I tried to choose some tunes that would be conducive to studying...oh, who are we kidding? tunes that are conducive for procrastination.

Best,

Ashley

KCSB 91.9FM/www.kcsb.org

Review: Kings of Pastry

2011-03-10T18:55:00.000-08:00

-Kings of Pastry-

Let me preface this review by saying one thing: I was utterly starving the. entire. movie. This film was an ocular feast, weaving together the stories of these chefs' quest for excellence as carefully and sweetly as the delicate sugar concoctions that they created. My fellow foodies agreed: This was the Food Network meets Fashion Week. Following the lives of three chefs in their endeavor to compete in a 3 day competition to win the prestigious Meilleurs Ouvriers de France competition. A medal would solidify their position in the culinary arena as one of the best pastry craftsmen in France and the world. The film highlights chefs Jacquy Pfeiffer, Regis Lazard, and Philippe Rigollot and their families during their training and moments of triumph and heartbreak. This film encapsulates the unforgiving world of taste, texture, and the unrelenting desire for perfection. The task is daunting: create one of the most intricate and gravity-defying sugar-based desserts, a sculpture that is both sweet to the eye and tongue. The viewer sees the massive amount of effort that goes into this arduous task: from the plotting, planning, revising, rejections, and finally the grand finale: the final course. As one of the jury members notes, "Your mind has to work as hard as your hands." This movie seems to be less about the food itself but rather about the unparalleled attention to artistry that these men have incorporated into every facet of their lives. They are not providing the meat and bones of culinary consumption. They are not slicing and dicing to satiate a customer's craving. It is about the visual, the aesthetic, the sweetness of their labor which the citizens of France are completely and continually enraptured by. Their passion and precision is alluring and their final creations cater to our own appreciation for the dainty and delicious while inciting our romanticism of this otherworldly aesthetic.

For me this movie showed me the all-encompassing efforts that are made in the quest for this culinary art. But I think what is also interesting is the aura of comfort that fuels this contest. We see their ultimate devotion to reviving our senses of taste, vision and I would even say memory. Pastries are one of the few cultural productions that have long been imbedded into our domestic psychology: it is a marker of candied celebration, it is nectarous nostalgia, it is comforting coziness, and when all is said and done, it is home. This film is by far one of my tops films for 2011 thus far. It showed not only the complexities of baking, but also provided an insight into our perpetual desire for simple sweetness in both aesthetic and sustenance. During one of my favorite scenes, Chef Pfeiffer, after spending hours concocting a dome wedding cake, brings it back to his modest home in Chicago. Pfeiffer's daughter perfectly summarizes our intense yet oblivious reverence for this art: as she peers into the box, she quietly murmurs: "It's pretty. Simple." The film is quite pretty, but far from simple, and is one that can be enjoyed (and savored) by all.

With a soundtrack scored by Sebastien Giniaux, my obsession with gypsy jazz has reached new heights. Dessert AND a Django Reinhardt inspired soundtrack? You don't have to ask me twice.

Keep an ear out for some of this on Monday's upcoming show!

Best,

Ashley

Women Are Heroes

2011-03-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

Such an amazing idea for guerilla art! I suggest scoping out both the film as well as the soundtrack composed by Massive Attack. Check out Erinrose Mager's review of Women Are Heroes (www.womenareheroes.be)

"There is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators," says renowned fly-by-night French photographer JR of "pervasive art" or (l'art infiltrant"), the force behind his latest project, Women Are Heroes. The resulting film of the same name documents JR's travels to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, Brazil, Cambodia, and India as he takes candid portraits of local women with 28mm lens, rendering their images on huge canvasses that he and townspeople then plaster onto crumbling steps, train cars, rooftops, and favela walls. It's a cooperative effort, and one that speaks to the artistic and social dialogues that JR promotes through his gigantic portraits. JR was recently awarded a TED grant (it stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design-a nonprofit that supports "ideas worth spreading") for his work, and continues to collaborate with Massive Attack who score Women Are Heroes. The documentary shows the often underrepresented women of these areas whose faces articulate sorrow and hardship, faith and pride, and perhaps most strikingly, an unwavering sense of humor amidst devastating violence and upheaval."-Erinrose Mager

Check out the trailer here:

2-28-11 Playlist

2011-02-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

1. Free Me-Otis Redding

2. These Ain't Raindrops-James Carr

3. First I Look at the Purse-Contours

4. Piece of My Heart-Erma Franklin

5. Let's Twist Again-Chubby Checker

6. Keep Your Hands Off My Baby-Little Eva

7. A Woman, a Lover, a Friend-Jackie Wilson

8. Oh Lover-Sherri & Singin' Sammy

9. I Can't Quit You Baby-Otis Rush

10. Revival-Soulsavers

11. Freight Train-Elizabeth Cotten

12. Stackolee-Mississippi John Hurt

13. Overflowin'-Infantree

14. Bear Cat-Rufus Thomas

15. Call Me The Breeze-JJ Cale

16. Buggin' Blues-Kitty, Daisy and Lewis

17. Jesus-Amos Lee

18. Bridal Train-The Waifs

19. No One Knows My Name-Gillian Welch

20. Leave the Light On-Chris Smither

21. Wedding Bells-Lissie

22. Drop Down Daddy-Lucinda Williams

23. Antonia June-Lightning Dust

24. You're The One I Care For-The Weary Boys

25. Glencoe-Richard Thompson

26. A Song for Dreaming-Judson Claiborne

27. Lakeville-Amy Correia

28. The Poet-Ryan Bingham

29. White As Diamonds-Alela Diane

30. Ship Out On the Sea-The Be Good Tanyas

31. How'm I Doin-Mountain Man

Marchin' into March,

Ashley

KCSB 91.9FM/www.kcsb.org

The Record: Contemporary Art & Vinyl Exhibit

2011-02-25T12:18:00.000-08:00

I wish I could have seen this!! Such a brilliant idea.

An excerpt from Emily Temple's article:
"Opening this month at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, this exhibit makes it quite clear that vinyl records can be much more than just sonic masterpieces. The 41 artists whose work is represented--including Christian Marclay, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, and the ever-inspiring Carrie Mae Weems--made pieces out of (and about) records. The exhibition features Laurie Anderson's "viophonograph," a brilliant record-player-cum-violin, Berlin-based artist Satch Joyt's 16-foot canoe made of red 45-rpm records, and a life-sized Polaroid photomontage by David Byrne--the very one that graced the cover of the Talking Head's 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food.

[http://www.nasher.duke.edu/therecord/index.php]
=============================================================
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University exhibit summary:

"The Record" is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Bringing together artists from around the world who have worked with records as their subject or medium, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the record's transformative power, from the 1960s to the present. Through sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance, "The Record" combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, fine art with popular culture, and established artists with those who will be exhibiting in a U.S. museum for the first time.

The exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Nasher Museum's curator of contemporary art.

"The Record" explores the intersection between visual art and music, considering the vinyl record as a lens through which to view the world. Powerfully marked with nostalgia, linked to the search for musical and cultural authenticity, and valued for its listening quality and cover visuals, the record has long been both a significant source of inspiration and material for artistic production. Indeed, for many contemporary artists, the specter of the vinyl record looms large, taking on a power and significance that moves well beyond the medium's traditional use, and thoroughly into a space of innovative artistic production. The exhibition will explore the impact of the medium on both art and popular culture and the ways in which the record has been manipulated, preserved and transformed through art.

The exhibition includes rarely exhibited early work and recent and newly commissioned work by 33 international and mutigenerational artists, as well as an interactive artist-and-musician-curated component. "The Record" exhibition will be accompanied by a wide array of educational programming, a 240-page color catalogue and an extensive website with supplemental information on the exhibition and record culture at large.

Artists (partial list)
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947 USA), Felipe Barbosa (b. 1978 Brazil), David Byrne (b. 1952 Scotland), William Cordova (b. 1971 Peru), Jeroen Diepenmaat (b. 1978 Netherlands), Satch Hoyt (b. 1975 UK), Jasper Johns (b. 1930 USA), Taiyo Kimura (b. 1970 Japan), Tim Lee (b. 1975 Korea), Christian Marclay (b. 1955 USA), David McConnell (b. 1975 USA), Mingering Mike (b. 1950 USA), Dave Muller (b. 1964 USA), Robin Rhode (b. 1976 South Africa), Dario Robleto (b. 1972 USA), Ed Ruscha (b. 1937 USA), Malick Sidibe (b. 1935 Mali), Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974 USA), Su-Mei Tse (b. 1973 Luxembourg), Fatimah Tuggar (b. 1967 Nigeria), and Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953 USA).

[http://www.nasher.duke.edu/exhibitions_record.php]

Vinyl dreamin',
Ashley

35th Annual Banff Film Festival

2011-02-24T19:43:00.000-08:00

UCSB Arts & Lectures: 35th Annual Film Festival

When: February 22-February 23

Where: Arlington Theatre

The warning that the director of the Banff Centre gave before Wednesday night's screenings was undeniably true: these films will make you want to go on an adventure--immediately. The film festival offered a wide array of film genres while catering to the evening's diverse crowd. From the adrenaline junkie to the socially aware environmentalist, the film festival attracted Santa Barbarians from all ages and backgrounds, drawn together by their immense love and fascination for the undeniable allure of the natural world. With a slightly Thoreauvian meets Patagonia meets FuelTV tone, the festival's selection highlighted films in which the filmmaking and narratives were as awe-inspiring as the locations depicted. Upon leaving the always stunning Arlington Theatre, my wanderlust had never been so potent. This film festival was more than a small introspection into the natural world: it was the equivalent of a stamp on your passport. The audience held their breath with every climb and crawl, they gasped in amazement with every phenomenal physical feat, shivered with every snowy gust, swelled with every tide of the rolling sea, and gushed at the surreal world that only a few have truly seen.

The first film, The Longest Way, chronicled Christopher Rehage's travels in which he decided to walk from Beijing to Germany over the course of the year. Although his trip was cut short, the montage of the pictures taken of himself in all of his destinations allowed him to document the physical manifestations of the internal change that he was experiencing through his search and unremitting desire "to find a place called home." His film revealed the transformative power of travel, traversing the borders and landscape of the physical world and the search for one's self. It reminds me of the quote by T.S. Eliot: "We shall not cease exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." The exploration of the world coincides with the exploration (and subsequent transformation) of self in Rehage's 5-minute film. Although the film was simplistic in intention and execution, the impact was one of profound revelatory and meaningful significance. (Check it out at the bottom of this post).

As emotionally powerfully as The Longest Way, the second film, Into the Darkness, evoked an equal response, but this time of physical reaction. Into the Darkness followed extreme explorers who embarked on dangerous journeys underneath the earth's most elusive secrets: underworld caves. The audience cringed with the cave divers' struggle to get into the microscopic spaces that led to the magnificent caves adorned with ancient stalagmites. Deemed as one of Earth's "final frontiers," the hunt for these caves highlights the evanescent nature of the world's geology and the great lengths that some will endure in order to witness this uncharted terrain. Director John Waller offers a brief glimpse into the hidden worlds that are just below our feet, but teasingly out of our grasp.

In A Life Ascending, filmmakers document the life of Ruedi Beglinger, one of the most respected mountaineer guides in the world, along with his family in their residence tucked away in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia. The film examines their lives of quiet solitude against the backdrop of one of the North America's most unrelenting yet stunningly beautiful geographic landscapes. We see Ruedi's life as one of simple determination: hard work, dedication, family, and a deep abiding love for the nature that he has immersed himself in since his childhood in the Swiss Alps. It is at first contradictory: adrenaline with a business plan? adventure with household responsibilities? But we soon realize that living in such harsh terrain requires not just planning, but plotting. We learn through sorrowful testimony that it is not only difficult, but also potentially fatal. With the loss of a dear friend and seven guests, Ruedi is forced to reassess what it means to be a husband, a father, and above all, a mountaineer. Banff critics describe this film as one that "ultimately explores the power of nature as both an unforgiving host and a profound teacher." Interspersed with touching poetry and resplendent music, the film explores the Beglingers' grief, love, connection, and renewal under the heavy gaze and dark beauty of Selkirk's indomitable mountains.

Feel the Hill, was positively drenched in creativity, spawned by the ideas of two 17 year-old boys who combined their penchant for master editing and a sincere passion for the sport of longboarding all on their own dime. Although not entirely groundbreakin, this film was an amazing contribution that added a zest of enlivened youth into the realm of extreme sports. In an industry constantly dominated by corporate sponsorship and the cutthroat quest for trophies, filmmakers Jeremy Comte and Alexandre Auray reminded the audience of the unadulterated sincerity and enthusiasm that sports can evoke while highlighting their incredible inclination for highly aesthetic camerawork. A People's Choice finalist in the festival, these two young men personify the Banff festival's fresh and invigorating spirit.

The evening closed with the lively and entertaining 20 minute film, The Swiss Machine which offered an interesting view into the vivid story of Ueli Steck, the fastest alpinist in the world. While his tenacity for perfection is only matched by his surprising amicable nature, Steck showed the audience the intensely arduous journey of a man pushing the limits. Slithering up the sides of daunting mountains and cliffs with fellow climber, Alex Honnold, Steck demonstrated with unparalleled physicality and steadfast concentration (jokingly attributed up to his Swiss descent) a relationship to the natural world that was not only about survival or observation: it was one of an unquenchable lust for immaculate performance and strength. While short and sweet, this film was an appropriate close to an evening that encompassed so many dimensions of the natural world: the adversarial, the enduring, the creative, the adventurous, the daring, and most of all, the irrefutable sublimity that can occur when humanity bares witness to the raw and ferocious purity of the natural world.

Happy trails,

Ashley

Freight & Salvage: Chris Smither

2011-02-23T15:58:00.000-08:00

On a cold, rainy evening in Berkeley this past weekend I saw Chris Smither perform at one of the coolest venues in town: the Freight and Salvage coffeehouse. With floor to ceiling wooden walls and wagon wheel chandeliers, Freight and Salvage offered me an incredible concert experience (while completely satisfying my caffeine addiction). Every seat was filled and the aisles were full of people teeming to get an earful of Chris Smither, an acclaimed "blues infused innovator." Celebrating it's 40th anniversary in 2008, Freight and Coffee has created a tradition of playing host to a myriad of musicians of all genres. In its biography, the owner, Nancy Owens, states that, "Since its founding in 1968, the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse has been deeply rooted in that aspect of Berkeley's culture that embraced freedom, tolerance, cooperation, and innovation. It has resisted the bottom line mentality, and, instead, has been a mission-driven non-profit organization. The club not only survives, it has become a world famous venue for traditional music, be it folk, jazz, blues, bluegrass, world-beat, or gospel...From the start, my hope was to be multi-ethnic and multi-racial," Nancy continues, "a group of men and women and children who could get together in a spirit of community. Somehow, our dreams came together and meshed, and we created this community."

Christ Smither put on a great show, expertly blending beautiful guitar with gruff, grainy vocals. Tossing his hair back and forth and singing through a half-cracked smile, his commanding presence and witty banter was comfortable and effortless. He charmed the audience with anecdotes and stories about everything from past music festivals, to his impeding age, and, most memorably, to his young daughter. Stereo Review wrote that, "Chris Smither recasts the real folk blues in the ethereal language of the poet, projecting a kind of streetwise mysticism." Check out Richard Skelly's review as well:

"Like John Hammond and a handful of other musicians whose careers began in the 1960s blues revival, guitarist, singer, and songwriter Chris Smither can take pride in the fact that he's been there since the beginning. Except for a few years when he was away from performing in the '70s, Smither has been a mainstay of the festival, coffeehouse, and club circuits around the U.S., Canada, and Europe since his performing career began in earnest in the coffeehouses in Boston in the spring of 1966. Smither is best known for his great songs, items like "Love You Like a Man" and "I Feel the Same," both of which have been recorded by guitarist Bonnie Raitt. Raitt and Smither got started at about the same time in Boston, though Smither was born and raised in New Orleans, the son of university professors.

Smither's earliest awareness of blues and folk music came from his parents' record collection. In a 1992 interview, he recalled it included albums by Josh White, Susan Reed, and Burl Ives. After a short stint taking piano lessons, Smither switched to ukulele after discovering his mother's old instrument in a closet. The young Smither was passionately attached to the ukulele, and now, years later, it helps to explain the emotion and expertise behind his unique fingerpicking guitar style. Smither discovered blues music when he was 17 and heard a Lightnin' Hopkins album, Blues in the Bottle. The album was a major revelation to him and he subsequently spent weeks trying to figure out the intricate guitar parts. Smither moved to Boston after realizing he was a big fish in a small pond in the New Orleans folk/coffeehouse circuit of the mid-'60s.

Since then, he's more than proved his mettle as an enormously gifted songwriter, releasing albums mostly of his own compositions for the Flying Fish, Hightone, and Signature Sounds labels. Smither's albums during the '90s and into the 21st century include Happier Blue (1993, Flying Fish), Up on the Lowdown (1995, Hightone), Drive You Home Again (1999, Hightone), Live as I'll Ever Be (2000, Hightone), Train Home (2003, Hightone), Leave the Light On (2006, Signature Sounds), and Time Stands Still (2009, Signature Sounds), a career highlight. Any of Smither's releases are worthy of careful examination by guitarists and students of all schools of blues and folk music. Smither is still, to some extent, an unheralded master of modern acoustic blues. Fortunately, his recordings and festival bookings during the '90s and into the 21st century have elevated his profile to a higher level than he's ever enjoyed previously."

Review: Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider

2011-02-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

UCSB Arts & Lectures:

-Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider-

When: February 16

Where: Campbell Hall

On Wednesday, February 16 I had the immense pleasure of seeing 3-time Grammy nominee Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider perform at Campbell Hall at UCSB. Let me preface this review by stating clearly and concisely: I am not a music critic. But even with my little knowledge about Persian music or even Kalhor's instrument of choice, the kamancheh, I was able to immerse myself in the gorgeous, haunted rhythms of this collaborative performance.

Cited by NPR as being responsible for "recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st century ensemble," the evening began with Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola and Eric Jacobsen on cello performing Giovanni Sollima's "Frederico II" from Viaggio in Italia, a composition which chronicles Italy's tumultuous history. Sollima is quoted saying that the inspiration for "Frederico II," was based off of the Italian ruler, who when his tomb was exhumed was found in the arms of woman. Sollima chose Frederico II as inspiration because he wanted to "render the bright, joyous and multiethnic atmosphere of the court of Emperor Frederico II (1194-1250) in the guise of dancing..." This inclination for a transnational transference of language, emotion, and experience parallels Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider's collaboration. What began as a soft interim soon segued into a profound musical experience that had the audience utterly captivated and enraptured with the beaucoup of musical innovation and creativity on Campbell's stage. It was at once active and tender, tantalizingly delicate yet still laden with vibrant fortitude. There was an indelible, muscular quality to their performance. And it seemed to be almost a dialogue between the instruments, a duel of an expansive, sonic feast, teased out by the musicians who sporadically beat on the sides of their instruments and playfully took turns with unique solos. And as quickly as they began this banter of sound, they just as easily, seamlessly and masterfully aligned themselves in their primal yet dulcet vibrations.

After a roar of applause, they embarked on Philip Glass' Quartet No. 3 "Mishima." Prefacing it by stating that they wanted to move from one port city (Sicily) to another port city (New York), they began to evoke a transnational, borderless and, seemingly, boundless performance. "Mishima" was multilayered, pensive, and saturated with wistful longing. The violins' wavering strings mirrored that of a slowing heartbeat or a swaying breath. It was a dark, romantic, winding tide that surprisingly culminated into an abrupt, anticipatory pause. After a few moments of searing silence, they erupted into soaring crescendo of newfound energetic revival. The song's stages were staggering: from fragile and exquisite to sojourn and somber to frenetic and pulsating, the song was both rich and riveting throughout its entirety. Inspired by the famous author's suicide after an unsuccessful coup d'etat, the group is quoted saying that the openness of the music allowed it to be "curiously 'unstuck' from time" which catalyzed them "to draw connections to other familiar sounds from the urban mechanization of Brooklyn to the drone infused textures of Persian music; all of this made the music more deeply rooted in our collective experience."

Soon it was time for the next piece. The musicians discussed how upon their pilgrimage to Iran they soon became enveloped with not only Iran's language and culture, but also the ultimate texture of the culture, a texture that seemed to permeate all facets of life, from calligraphy, to art, and, most significantly, to the music they heard everywhere, from temples to every nook and cranny of Iran's busy streets. There was a component of antiquity to their performance, almost as if an homage was being paid to the Zoroastrian temples in which they observed Kalhor improvise for hours upon hours during their trip. They likened this experience of observing Kalhor to fire, an element that was "at once hypnotic and perpetually changing." Then, Kalhor arrived: He came onto the stage, quiet and unassuming, taking his seat on a large, Persian pillow center stage. He raised his bow and immediately began Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged, a title stemming from 16th century Turkish poet Fuzuli who writes of star-crossed lovers, doomed by their zealous love. It begins slowly, with deep complexity and intention. It rendered the audience silent with its tendrils of smokey and hollow tones, combined with its tenuous and diaphanous melodies. Soon, Kalhor's kamancheh merged with the other musician's strings, creating a marriage of two sounds and, subsequently, two worlds. It was an undulating efflux of competing but complementary sounds: it was not a clash of cultures but rather an entrancing dance. It seemed voyaging and triumphant, conjuring feelings of epic and primordial distinction. And all too soon, it was time for intermission.

After a brief break of toffee and tea, the audience returned to their seats, wide-eyed and eager for Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider to continue. Their last piece was entitled, Silent City, a collaboration that they explained was the result of a process in which they not only explored one another musically, but also delved deeper on an emotional and personal level. They relished their relationship with one another and began to learn from Kalhor the subjective and reflexive nature of time and music. Music became a journey and Silent City became an example of their assertion of control and autonomy over the time of a story: they decided to have the song tell a story in reverse, going gradually from desolation to a state of prosperity. And so the song commenced: it began like an instrumental desert, as windswept and bare as the land from which Kalhor hails. But soon this dirge bloomed into a sound of resurrection, unfurling with sounds of grandiose exultation and joy. Utilizing improvisation, call and response, and divergent harmonies, the piece becomes a narrative of "a universal testament to fallen cities and civilizations. But even more central to Silent City is the idea that life always returns, sprouting anew out of the empty landscape." As the audience sprang from their seats for a standing ovation, the ending of the song was an appropriate conclusion to an enriching evening of musicianship at its finest. Their performance was many things, but above all, it was drenched in feeling, feeling that lingered long after the last note.

All the best,

Ashley

Featured Artist: LA Ladies Choir

2011-02-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

-LA LADIES CHOIR

“We have restrictions in every other place in our lives, so I wanted the choir to be a place where there are no rules, where we just enjoy each other,” says Aska Matsumiya, one of the two leaders, along with Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark, of the L.A. Ladies Choir. “Actually,” she says, correcting herself, we do have one rule: “Sing joyfully.

-By Alexa Brazilian-

"The project that’s got Hollywood buzzing? We’ll give you a hint: It’s not the next 3-D blockbuster. From Silverlake to Malibu, California’s coolest girls are joining the L.A. Ladies Choir, a group of creative types that includes model Frankie Rayder, pastry chef Jenny Park of the beloved Trails Cafe, singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari, Diva Dompé of the rock band blackblack, cult costumer and stylist Miss KK, and vintage-store owner and musician Kitty Jensen, among 30 others. The gang gets together weekly—sometimes accompanied by Rayder’s husband, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, on bass—to sing around the city, belting out everything from groovy classics by Leonard Cohen, Yoko Ono, and Marvin Gaye to originals by founders Becky Stark (front woman for both the folksy-pop quartet Lavender Diamond and the trio the Living Sisters) and Aska Matsumiya (of indie bands AsDSSka, the Sads, and Moonrats). Here, Stark and Matsumiya share the secrets and joys of perfect harmony."

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By Nikki Darling

In a city crammed with noise, punk, metal and thug bands, the L.A. Ladies Choir seems downright radical: a group that is exactly what its name implies. But that’s the simple truth: They seem to have no ulterior motives other than to spread the proverbial peace and love. For real, a fluttering, unironic rainbow of pastel-colored vintage dresses, genuine smiles and beautiful faces. (This isn’t a requirement in the Ladies Choir, just some freakish accident.) Upon closer inspection, what becomes obvious is that each member’s beauty is a result of Matsumiya’s golden rule.

Formed in January after what seems to be a fated meeting, the choir gave its first performance, fittingly, on Valentine’s Day at the Aaron Rose–curated show “Passion for the Possible” at theCalifornia State University Northridge Art Galleries. The exhibit’s focus was Sister Corita, a sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Order, famous for her antiwar lithographs during theVietnam War. She serves as a powerful source of inspiration for the group. “If the Ladies Choir was a religion, Sister Corita would be our god,” says Matsumiya, who also performs in Moonrats, AsDSSka and Aaron Rose’s band, the Sads.

Like many magical things in this world, the L.A. Ladies Choir came into being, in part, inside a different reality, Stark explains on the phone while on tour with the Decemberists, for whom she sings background. “I had this dream. In it, I needed a female pianist and a place for the choir to rehearse.” Her band mate in Lavender Diamond, Ron Rege Jr., had been urging her to start a choir. She recalls him saying, “‘You know so many women. You all need to sing together. You need to start a choir.”

Rege organized a small singing group for an installment of Arthur Fest, and shortly thereafter Stark put together an event at the Silent Movie Theatre. “I set up this whole carnival environment: kissing booth, raffle, and a fortunetelling booth. We had a crystal ball, lace curtains, but no one wanted to be the fortuneteller.” She suggested everyone tell their own fortunes, but soon people started approaching her to describe these amazing sessions they had just finished. “So I walked to the booth to see who was doing the fortunetelling, and it was Aska’s amazing 5-year-old daughter, Babel. She is the most amazing child. Then later at a show, Aska walks up to me and says, ‘Hi, do you remember me? My daughter was the fortuneteller. I’ve been thinking of starting a ladies choir; would you want to join me?’ It all came together. Aska and I had been having the same dream!”

The choir added members, and currently consists of a bevy of notable musicians, including Anna Oxygen; Kitty Jensen from Portland’s Parenthetical Girls; Diva Dompe from Black Black and Pocahaunted; supermodel (and Flea’s wife) Frankie Rayder; and an ever-growing roster of talented, dedicated women, not all of whom consider themselves trained musicians. They now carry the message in all aspects of the group’s work, from charity functions for the downtown women’s shelter to simply hanging out and rehearsing.

Membership is pretty much open. “I actually met Becky in a coffee shop and we were discussing holiday woes, and she said, ‘Why don’t you join the choir?’ ” member Tracy Hood recalls. “I walked in and all these wonderful women were singing, and I just went, ‘Whew, I’m at home.’ ”

The choir has attempted to capture that feeling on tape. Its first EP, produced by the legendary Jim Scott (who’s worked with everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dolly Parton to Wilco, Tift Merritt and Lavender Diamond), is called Sing Joyfully, and will be released in the fall.

Stark was inspired to form some sort of choir a few years ago, after she’d finished writing music for the Tom Hanks–produced film City of Ember, which came out last fall. “It’s this story about an underground city,” she explains. Her friend, the director Gil Kenan (whom she’d met at the Smell), recruited her for the project. “[He] asked if I wanted to write postapocalyptic children’s hymns for this movie. And I just said, like, ‘Yes!’ ”

Stark speaks in excited gasps over the phone. “Making the music for that film was the most unbelievable experience ever, and it left me totally wanting so much to make music with a choir. The experience of singing together is so powerful. I had choral parts I wanted to try, but I wanted it to be a ladies choir for myself and for the world.”

Matsumiya mirrored Stark’s sentiments recently while eating a goat cheese–and–balsamic vinegar salad at Sunset Junction’s Casbah Café. Looking every bit the mercurial L.A. wandering-Gypsy musician, the striking Matsumiya says the goal from the start was simple: “We wanted to create this positive feminine energy, not against anything, but just this beautiful energy of strength and power for something, by women.”

She and her band, the Moonrats, moved to L.A. from Seattle three years ago. “I have a daughter,” Matsumiya explains, “and I wanted her to grow up in the sunshine.” As well, they packed a bit of the DIY Northwest. Her presence alongside feminist performance artist and musician Oxygen and the dozen-odd others, with Stark’s mantra of peace and love, make for an interesting swirl of women and ideas commingling and rejoicing in the same room. One of their performance staples is a cover of Yoko Ono’s “Sister O Sisters,” with the chorus, “O sisters, o sisters, let’s give up no more/It’s never too late to build a new world.” Not exactly an apolitical song, this contrast between politics and agenda and an innocent, unbridled enthusiasm offers a curious tension.

The bonus, adds Pocahaunted’s Dompe, is community. “I never really had a large group of women friends. I’ve played in bands with boys, but here, I really look forward to coming in and relaxing and being around everyone. Everyone is so different.”

And yet when they gather, the differences combine to create a single, beautiful voice."

Surrender to your feminosity,

Ashley

Feature: Down Home Records

2011-02-22T14:56:00.000-08:00

-DOWN HOME RECORDS-

This Memorial Day weekend my father and I had the pleasure of visiting Down Home Records, a small record store in El Cerrito, CA. Cluttered with posters on the walls and worn wooden paneling, this musical treasure chest is the type of record store that attracts all types of listeners: the store caters to a crowd as diverse as its selection. It is the type of place where once you start chatting up your cashier, you find that he is not only a bluegrass fan who becomes bashful when he talks of his own recordings, but that he also holds a master's and PhD in International Relations. As we perused the new and used sections of cds and wall-to-wall vinyl, I wondered how this little gem of store has flown under the radar. Upon further research, I made the discovery: it hasn't. Check out this recent article in the New York Times:

STILL THE ADDRESS OF DOWN HOME SOUNDS BY LARRY ROHTER

The sign on the wall of the building that serves as the home of Arhoolie Records here, just north of Berkeley, promises “down home music,” and for 50 years, often operating on a shoestring, and a thin one at that, the label has delivered a rich and quirky mixture of blues, folk, jazz, Cajun, Tex-Mex, country, zydeco and gospel — the full panorama of American roots music — to an equally diverse collection of music fans.

John F. Kennedy had just been elected president when Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie’s founder and still its owner, sat pasting pictures on the cover of the label’s first LP, “Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster.” Driving across the South a few months earlier, Mr. Strachwitz had recorded that blues singer at home, dreaming of giving up his job as a high school teacher but never imagining that his homespun venture would outlive some of the world’s largest recording conglomerates.

To commemorate its 50th anniversary, Arhoolie is about to release a four-CD collection of songs, ranging in style from the blues of Jesse Fuller to the free jazz of Sonny Simmons, that Mr. Strachwitz recorded between 1954 and 1970 in the San Francisco Bay area. Called “Hear Me Howling: Blues, Ballads & Beyond,” the package also includes a 136-page book that tells the history of the label; the set will be available for purchase at the company’s Web site, arhoolie.com, beginning next week and from music stores early in 2011.

Most of Mr. Strachwitz’s best-known recordings, though, are from the field, especially in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. That is where, starting in 1960, he found, recorded or helped revive the careers of seminal bluesmen like Bukka White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Lipscomb, Mississippi Fred McDowell and even Clifton Chenier, the accordion-playing King of Zydeco.

For someone so devoted to American roots music, Mr. Strachwitz has an unusual background. Born in Germany in 1931 into an aristocratic family as Count Christian Alexander Maria Strachwitz, he spent his childhood under Nazi rule and came to the United States after World War II as a high school student living originally in Reno, Nev. From the start, he said, the variety of American music styles, especially their driving beat, enthralled him.

“The rhythms haunted me,” he said in an interview in his office, cluttered with records, at Arhoolie’s headquarters and warehouse. “I’d hear all this stuff on the radio, and it just knocked me over. I thought this was absolutely the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.”

Richard K. Spottswood, a prominent musicologist who edited and annotated the Library of Congress’s 15-volume series “Folk Music in America” and is the author of “Ethnic Music on Records,” said that Mr. Strachwitz’s role in preserving American vernacular music has been crucial.

“He is probably more American than many of us, but he experienced this music not as something he was born into and took for granted like the air we breathe, but as something rare and delightful, not available to the rest of the world,” Mr. Spottswood said. “Coming from another language and culture, he perhaps saw the artistry in this music a little sooner, a little earlier than the rest of us, and his vision of a kaleidoscopic American musical culture, from Tejano to country and Southwestern blues, has helped thwart the single standard the music industry has tried to impose on us over the years.”

For a generation of folk- and blues-inspired performers, from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Bonnie Raitt and T Bone Burnett, Arhoolie has been a lodestone. In his autobiographical “Chronicles Vol. I,” Mr. Dylan, a member of the advisory board of the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation, credits the label as being the place “where I first heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson.”

Ry Cooder, the Grammy Award-winning guitarist and producer, recalled that “I must have been about 13” the day he took a bus to a blues and folk record store in downtown Los Angeles and for the first time heard Big Joe Williams singing ferociously and playing a nine-string guitar, on an album called “Tough Times.” That recording, Arhoolie’s second release, changed his life, Mr. Cooder said.

“The whole thing started like it was going to blow up, or fly apart at the seams, and it really took hold of me,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘This is what it ought to be like, total physical involvement with the music, going into it so hard that you just about lose control.’ ”

He added, “It started me on a path of living, the path I am still on.”

At a time long before the Internet the extensive liner notes on the back of Arhoolie recordings — many written by Mr. Strachwitz — were a vital source of information about artists considered far outside the mainstream. From recordings put out by Arhoolie, whose name comes from a Southern dialect term for a field holler, budding performers could learn not just about songs, but also the instruments and tunings that performers used.

“I was a big folkie back then, and I would read about the latest releases on Arhoolie in Sing Out magazine,” said Ms. Raitt, who is also an advisory board member of the foundation, which is dedicated to documenting, preserving and disseminating “authentic, traditional and vernacular music.” “Every one of those records was a treasure. I loved the tasteful artwork on them.” She added, “Chris became an important figure, a monumental link really, from whom I learned a lot, especially about Cajun and Tex-Mex and zydeco and Hawaiian music.”

But Mr. Strachwitz is above all a collector. Even now, what strikes those who have worked with him, like the documentary filmmaker Les Blank, who collaborated with Mr. Strachwitz on films like “Chulas Fronteras,” about Tejano music, and “J’Été au Bal,” about Cajun music, is “the degree of his extreme enthusiasm” for tracking down and acquiring the recordings that interest him.

“He’s like a kid who caught his first fish when he finds one of these groups that he likes, or old 78s he wants to add to his huge collection,” Mr. Blank said. “While we were in Texas, he’d hear about a stash, some vendor who once served jukeboxes, his widow and children have a big room full of records, and he’s on to it. He won’t eat or drink or sleep until he gets his hands on it.”

Though he does not speak Spanish, Mr. Strachwitz has built what is believed to be the largest private collection of Mexican-American and Mexican music, from mariachi and norteño accordion groups to corridos, with some recordings from as early as a century ago.

“That music had the same appeal to me that the hillbilly music did, this soulful country sound and a lot of duet singing,” he said. “And there was this weird mixture of string music with the trumpet filling in almost like a jazz musician, which I thought was just gorgeous. And the accordions!”

Last year, after the Arhoolie Foundation donated those recordings, the Frontera Collection opened to the public at the University of California, Los Angeles. Recordings are first catalogued and digitized in a small room at the Arhoolie building, then made available through the U.C.L.A. library; scholars have already drawn on them for academic papers, theses and a book.

“The range of these nearly 50,000 recordings is amazing, so vast that we don’t yet fully have a handle on it,” said Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center at U.C.L.A. “This is our musical heritage in the broadest sense of the word, and it is remarkable that Chris Strachwitz had the foresight and passion to know how important it was to preserve this.”

As Mr. Strachwitz is quick to acknowledge, his collecting obsession can be expensive, and there has never been much money to be made in the line of work he has chosen. But every now and then, mainly through pieces of the publishing rights to songs that have become unlikely hits, he has had lucky strikes that have helped keep his business afloat, if not flourishing.

In 1965 a Berkeley folkie named Joe McDonald wanted to record a newly written protest song on short notice and ended up doing so in Mr. Strachwitz’s living room with Mr. Strachwitz’s equipment. In exchange, he granted Mr. Strachwitz publishing rights to the “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” which four years later became a worldwide sensation when Mr. McDonald, by then the leader of the psychedelic band Country Joe and the Fish, performed it at Woodstock and it was included in the movie of the festival. Mr. Strachwitz’s share of the royalties on the song, an anthem of opposition to the war in Vietnam, allowed him to put a down payment on the building that is now Arhoolie’s home.

Arhoolie also recorded the bluesman K. C. Douglas, whose “Mercury Boogie” has been a hit numerous times, perhaps most notably in a 1993 country music version by Alan Jackson that became the centerpiece of an ad campaign for the car manufacturer. Mr. Douglas had already died by that time. But Mr. Strachwitz said one of his most gratifying moments in his career was handing over a royalty check to Mississippi Fred McDowell after the Rolling Stones recorded his “You Gotta Move” for their 1971 album “Sticky Fingers.”

“I got tangled up being a sort of agent for some of them, for Fred and Mance and Lightnin’,” Mr. Strachwitz explained. Originally, he said, when he approached the Stones about royalty payments “their lawyers said ‘no, no, no, everything they record is their own stuff.’ ” But Mr. Strachwitz persisted. “Fred was already suffering from cancer,” he said. “But I was very happy to be able to give him a check before he died.”

Those dealings with Mr. McDowell are indicative of another trait associated with Mr. Strachwitz: his reputation for being upright in his business dealings. “Chris does not exploit his artists, he respects them,” said Ms. Raitt, who early in her career played on bills with Arhoolie performers. “That shadow, of people trying to make money off the artist at the artist’s expense, is not there with Chris. He has so much integrity that he really does his utmost to take care of the person as well as the music.”

Get on Up and Get on Down,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Melody Gardot

2011-02-22T14:29:00.001-08:00

-MELODY GARDOT-

By Andrew Goldman

Behind the doors of a suite in Barcelona’s Hotel Alexandra, Melody Gardot talks on the phone in seemingly perfect French while tapping on her iMac, a cigarette with a perilously long ash between her lips. Although she was raised in New Jersey, you might guess that she grew up abroad, considering the unidentifiable, almost stilted manner in which she speaks. Her official photographer and all-around aide-de-camp, Shervin Lainez, who has ushered me in, hands Gardot a large bottle of hairspray. Judging from her snug black Lanvin skirt and blouse, lethal patent leather spike heels, matching deep red lips and nails, black leggings that shine like sealskin, and platinum blond hair, appearance is very important to her, even on travel days like today—she is in the midst of her European tour, en route, somehow, from Spain to London and a show at the Palladium, if only an Icelandic volcano would cease belching a massive cloud of dust into the sky. Her most distinctive accessories, and what really pull the look together into what might be described as Boris-and-Natasha-retro-spy-chic, are dark Wayfarer-style shades with gold-accented stems and a cane with a pink pearl handle, neither of which she is ever seen without.

There’s a famous line often attributed to Thelonious Monk: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Writing about it isn’t any easier, but I was so in love with Melody Gardot’s voice before I’d learned a thing about her remarkable story that it literally stopped me in my tracks and sent me scrambling for pen and paper to write down the name of the singer on the radio who had so magnificently covered the Beatles’ “Because.” The first thing that hit me was the elegantly baroque flamenco-sounding vocal flourish that she tosses in before the first verse. The Beatles’ original, with its lush harmonies, is obviously gorgeous, but in Gardot’s hands, a woeful longing emerges in the song. You sense that the big, belting notes would be available to her if she wanted them, but, as in all of her music, restraint rather thanAmerican Idol–ish vocal pyrotechnics is the objective. Her voice is pristine yet telegraphs great wisdom and experience—it’s almost like hearing the singing of a 70-year-old woman who’s been on vocal rest for the past five decades.

And then a simple Google search reveals that not only does she have amazing talent, but she also has a jaw-dropping backstory. Seven years ago, at 19, she was hit by a car while on her bike and suffered devastating injuries, especially to her brain. After months of going through all the traditional therapies for the brain-injured and still being unable to read, still struggling to speak and walk, she was encouraged by her doctor to try playing music, since she’d played piano as a child and teenager. The reintroduction of music to her life affected a kind of miraculous awakening. Lying on her sickbed, she taught herself to play guitar, began to sing for the first time, and even started writing songs, which unbeknownst to her a friend posted on MySpace. It turned out she could sing like an angel, and her songs were good by any measure.

Naturally, the media flocked to her. The Times of London, The San Francisco Chronicle, Le Monde, The Korea Times, National Public Radio, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times, and CBS Sunday Morning, to name a few, tell variations on the Only Music Can Heal Her story. I flocked to Gardot too, hopping a plane to Spain to interview this amazing singer, a walking example of the healing powers of music.

Musicophilia, the 2007 book by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, illustrates the ways in which music is a therapeutic boon. Aphasics, he writes, cannot locate words, but they’re often able to sing the words to songs. A Parkinson’s sufferer, unable to speak or move, can, when listening to music, actually get up and dance gracefully.

But the Melody Gardot case represents success on an entirely different scale. Music therapy didn’t just allow this young woman to enjoy a relatively normal life after a traumatic injury—it brought out such a gift that she has actually become famous. She has sold more than half a million albums in jazz-friendly Europe. Before coming to Spain, she played three sold-out nights at Paris’ famed Olympia theater, the favorite venue of Edith Piaf (to whom she’s often compared) and host also to the Rolling Stones and Madonna. In America, her 2009 major-label debut, My One and Only Thrill, has hovered atop jazz charts since its release. She performed on Letterman and has found an unlikely fan in NFL quarterback Brett Favre, who reportedly liked to play the album in the Vikings’ locker room last year. I had to meet the miracle.

“I remember one of Melody’s people said to me, ‘When are we going to look at Melody’s music separate from her injury?’ ” says Dr. Richard Jermyn, the New Jersey specialist whom Gardot credits with masterminding her rehabilitation. “I thought about that and said, ‘You know, you can’t, because this changed her forever.’ You can never separate the Melody of today from the brain injury, because it changes you. Not only does it change your brain and your brain chemistry—just living through that amount of pain at such a young age will change you forever. You’re never going to be the sweet young person you were before. You’re going to be a person who has lived a life in two years that most people haven’t lived in a lifetime.”

Or, as the 26-year-old Gardot herself puts it, “The crux of it is that I’m very much a young woman and an old woman at the same time.”

As she settles down on a sofa in her Barcelona hotel, lights another cigarette, and adjusts a burning stick of Nag Champa incense in a tumbler full of soggy cigarette butts, I ask why a TV set in the room is covered in vibrant fabric. “That’s a Tibetan wall hanging that was a gift from a piano tuner in Strasbourg,” she says, explaining that as a touring, practicing Buddhist, she usually turns hotel TV sets into altars. Gardot says she is a follower of a Buddhist sect called Soka Gakkai that has attracted a disproportionate number of jazz musicians. “Herbie is Soka Gakkai. Wayne is Soka Gakkai,” she says, first-name-checking legends Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter in a manner that suggests that the trio might have shared the stage at the Village Vanguard back in ’65. For all she can remember, she was there with them. “Understand that I had a massive head injury, so in a way, my life before the accident is like a past life,” she says, when I ask her to recall certain details of her childhood. “It’s like a sense memory. I have a sense of it, but I don’t remember it.”

Some of the memories that Gardot does retain (ironically, about forgetting) come across less like actual memories than stage yarns or between-song set pieces. “I forget everything,” she says. “I forget what time I’m supposed to do things. I forget lovers.”

She’s actually forgotten lovers she’s had since the accident? She nods. “We were in New York and there was a gentleman who came up to me after a gig at some club and he called me ‘Baby.’ I said, ‘I’m not your baby.’ He said, ‘Don’t you remember? We had this beautiful night. We went to dinner, blah, blah, blah.’ I said, ‘Well, frankly, darling, it must not have been that wonderful, because I don’t remember a damned thing.’ And he said, ‘Well, let me refresh your memory.’ So we went out that night and sure enough, I remembered the reason I forgot him.”

It’s a slightly destabilizing experience spending time with Gardot, not only because stories tumble from her at a galloping pace that’s hard to follow, but because they sometimes feel like they could have been culled from a Tallulah Bankhead memoir or film script. I find myself wondering: Am I getting the real Melody Gardot, or shtick?

“You interviewed a brain-injured patient. That’s why you’re feeling a little overwhelmed and not so sure what to take away from it,” Jermyn explains. It is common, he adds, for an injured brain to spackle between gaps in memories. “The brain will naturally try to fill in memory, and one won’t be able to distinguish between what’s considered reality and what is actually real. If Melody did tell you anything that wasn’t a true story, or if something seemed a little out there, I can tell you, Melody believes it wholeheartedly.”

To re-create Melody Gardot’s pre- accident years is to wade through every interview she’s given since her 2005 rise in the Philly music scene, collect threads, and hope to fashion something that resembles a rope, because Gardot herself confesses to being an unreliable narrator. “You have to understand,” she says, “my life was re- explained to me completely. People were reintroduced to me.”

She has said she was born in New Jersey. Her name was not Melody Gardot—something that I learn only because her doctor says he knows her by another name that patient confidentiality prevents him from passing along. Gardot says she was “pretty nomadic” as a kid, never mentions a father, and says that she was raised by women. She lived for some time with an aunt as well as her late grandmother, who spoke with a Polish accent and introduced her to The Wizard of Oz—she often garners a mention during Gardot’s performance of a syncopated version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The musician is close to her mother, who still lives in New Jersey and is a painter these days. Gardot refuses to let me speak with her. “I’m onstage,” she says, “my family’s not.”

She has said that she took piano lessons as a child and that by the time she was 16, she was good enough to make a few bucks playing in piano bars around Philadelphia, but only covered others’ songs and never opened her mouth. “I never sang before,” she says. “I can remember goofing off and singing along to stupid songs in the car, but nothing with intention, you know?”

By fall 2003, Gardot was 19, studying fashion at the Community College of Philadelphia, which is when her accident happened. Considering her failure to remember so much, her memories of it are remarkable. She was pedaling south on Second Street, a busy thoroughfare on the fringes of Philadelphia’s historic Old City. At the intersection of Callowhill Street, an SUV made an illegal turn and hit her. “I remember two lights out of the corner of my eye, and I knew what kind of car hit me because JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE was the last thing I saw. The letters looked huge,” Gardot says. She’s said that she recalls hearing the sound of her body hitting the pavement, as well as a horrible screeching noise, which she eventually realized was her own screams. The last thing she remembers is opening her eyes and seeing the world in panorama, her vision widened and flattened into a long, thin rectangular strip. She was alive, though her pelvis was broken in two places.

But it was her brain that may have suffered the most. In a grisly real-life example of Newton’s First Law, Gardot’s body absorbed the SUV’s force and was propelled to the pavement. The ground stopped her body, but her brain kept traveling forward. “With this kind of injury,” Jermyn says, “the brain flops against the front part of your skull, then hits the back part of your skull, and also actually rotates inside the skull.” Brutally simplified, the front of the brain handles speech and cognition, the back coordination and sight, and the sides hearing.

Perhaps even more significant than the trauma of Gardot’s brain rattling around inside her head was the damage to her midbrain. Jermyn says that if you think of the central nervous system as a lollipop, with the brain as the candy top and the spine as the stick, the midbrain is where the stick and candy meet. The jerking of Gardot’s brain caused the tiny nerves in that area—tasked with, among other things, tactile sensation and limb movement—to shear in ways imperceptible on the MRIs.

Roughly a year after the accident, Gardot’s mother brought her into the NeuroMusculoskeletal Institute in Stratford, New Jersey, which is part of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. By this point, the situation seemed desperate: Gardot had been in and out of the hospital, dosed with ever increasing amounts of pain medicine, and visited by countless doctors—all to no avail. At the institute, she met Jermyn, the director and a physiatrist, an osteopath who specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation.

The soft-spoken, clean-cut then-38-year-old had certainly seen worse cases come through the doors of his institute and during his brain-injury residency at Philadelphia’s MossRehab, where he treated many patients in persistent vegetative states. Gardot was actually able to speak, though slowly, and occasionally had anomia, or trouble locating words. She also spoke very softly, because the injury had caused an extreme aural sensitivity; at the time she said that just hearing ambient street noise could overwhelm her to the point that she’d pass out; even the sound of someone doing dishes in the same room was intolerable.

She had also become extremely photosensitive; without sunglasses, she wrote at the time, the world appeared to her “as if I’m looking into heaven all the time (white and blurry), not to mention painful.” She could walk only with difficulty and spent much of her time in a wheelchair. She couldn’t read. “My eyes were unable to focus on words,” she says. “The words actually looked like they all ran together and fell right off the page.” Her short-term memory was totally gone, so she might eat three apples a day, thinking each was her first. Time seemed to move much faster, a common symptom of brain injury; Gardot might take a 90-minute shower and emerge to notice that she’d only shaved one leg.

To add insult to injury, she says her friends abandoned her. A cell phone she was carrying at the time of the accident had 85 numbers programmed into it, but “my phone never rang once in about a year and a half,” she says, tartly. “It’s an indication of where my life was. I was surrounding myself with people who I thought were genuine friends, but the truth is, they were just a matter of convenience. A lot of people couldn’t deal with [me].”

Jermyn had no idea how much better Gardot could get, but he viewed his primary goal in treating her as lessening her excruciating pain. He tried everything in his quiver, both traditional and holistic. He prescribed various heavy-duty painkillers and assorted creams and pads. She received osteopathic manipulative therapy and cranial sacral therapy (two treatments that involve manipulating the muscles and skull in hopes of increasing mobility), in addition to cognitive remediation therapy (a standard for helping brain-injured patients recover their writing and speech). From the start, Gardot wasn’t easy—“always very challenging” are Jermyn’s words; he knew that on days when she had an appointment, he’d invariably get behind schedule because she demanded so much time. Nothing was working. One day she marched into the office with a shopping bag that contained every single product he’d given her. “Now what?” she asked, dropping the bag at his feet.

“That was a career-changing moment for me, one of those moments where you’re as desperate as the patient,” he says. He asked, “Well, what did you do for fun before the accident?” Gardot told him she played piano.

Jermyn thought back to his training, to the patients in persistent vegetative states who when they were wheeled into a room where someone was playing piano would perk up and turn toward the music, maybe even move a tambourine. “The spoken voice couldn’t do it, but music touched them,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any other modality that can light up that limbic system, that center of our brain that feels enjoyment and pleasure, as quickly as music can.”

Like many doctors, Jermyn thinks of the injured brain as an intact but inaccessible hard drive; reestablishing access depends upon finding the combination of keys to push, and every patient’s combination is unique. Because he reads music, he knew that there were two essential musical components that might help Gardot. Music is time. Conversation can be like an erratic tennis match of questions and answers being lobbed back and forth, but a piece of music will proceed through a steady period of time that is identical for both the injured brain and the healthy. Music is also mathematics, the division of measures into beats, the division and multiplication of beats into notes.

Then and there, Jermyn told Gardot to forget about her cognitive therapy and all but the bare minimum of pain drugs. Go home and play your piano, he told her. Four weeks later, she showed up smiling—the first smile Jermyn had seen on her face in the 18 months she’d been his patient.

“It’s there,” she said. “The music is there. And I don’t have to think about it. It’s in my head.”

The music, Jermyn says, “was the bridge that allowed us to get to the other aspects of her brain.” Though the areas of the brain responsible for playing and enjoying music are distinct from areas that deal with writing and reading comprehension, the introduction of music seemed to unlock the rest of her brain. This breakthrough allowed Jermyn to design a therapy regimen that would help her heal cogni tively. “The fact that she remembered music,” he says, “was huge for us.”

The night before our interview, Gardot plays Barcelona’s famed Palau de la Música Catalana. The 1908 building is typically art nouveau, in that every line in the place curves. In fact, the room seems to be undulating, like Barcelona itself, with its ornate, almost hallucinatory Antoni Gaudí architecture. No surface in the Palau is left undesigned: A mounted Valkyrie in bas-relief gallops out from the ceiling above the stage; a massive stained-glass skylight glows in a million colors above. Many performers might feel upstaged by the room, but Gardot comes bearing tricks. A minute before her entrance, the smoke machines start up. Then she clicks onstage in all black and in her shades and, looking a bit like the bride of Dr. Strangelove, sits at the grand piano, leans into the belly of the instrument, and with her hands on the strings, begins bashing out a cacophonous introduction to her song “Your Heart Is as Black as Night.” To look at her, you’d never know she’d been in a nearly fatal accident, though she often says that her hours onstage are the only ones without pain. At one point while introducing her band she does a deep-knee bend to the ground. Two bright banks of canister lights flashing behind her make me wince, knowing that being in the same room with a 25-watt bulb not long ago was agonizing.

From her first moment onstage, it’s clear that she has an aesthetic vision much closer to that of Lady Gaga than to the languid artist to whom her music is most compared, Norah Jones. Gardot is not just a great talent; she’s a star. Following an hour and a half of songs that reveal the influences of Astrud Gilberto, Nina Simone, and Piaf, she is whistled and applauded into two encores and leaves the stage to a standing ovation.

Two and a half hours later, after 2 a.m., I see her again, in the Hotel Alexandra’s lobby, though she doesn’t appear to notice me when I wave. She’s deep in discussion with Irwin Hall, her saxophonist. It seems serious, their conversation. I overhear her mention “Summertime,” which was part of her set. “What happened with that?” I hear her say with concern.

Glenn Barratt, who owns Philadelphia’s state-of-the-art MorningStar Studios and produced her first album, Worrisome Heart, says, “She was almost like James Brown. She rehearsed a small group of guys over and over and over, and she expected them to play specific notes at specific times. It seemed like in her head was every note that she wanted to hear. She was very specific about certain things she wanted to have happen.” The producer Larry Klein, who produced My One and Only Thrill, concurs with Barratt. “She has a very discerning and specific taste, and also the capacity to be quite sharp-tongued,” he says. “In fact, there were times when I took her aside and told her, ‘Listen, you need to temper the way you speak to musicians, you know.’ ”

Jermyn says both bluntness and meticulousness are typical of brain-injured patients. “When you get a frontal-lobe injury, you lose your inhibitions,” he says. “That’s classic with brain injury. You say what you think, do what you want, tend to be impulsive sometimes, and you don’t care about what others think. There’s a lot of that in Melody. No one can tell Melody that her music isn’t good.” As for the obsession with detail, the therapy for brain-injured patients actually encourages them to be “very, detailed,” he says. “Imagine if you have no sense of day or night, or timing. So basic brain-injury training—Melody’s training—was schedule, schedule, schedule, and to write everything down and follow it to a T.”

In spring 2005, Patrick Rapa, a music writer for the Philadelphia City Paper, an independent weekly, noticed an odd e-mail that arrived in the editorial department’s general mailbox. The letter writer, who introduced herself as Melody Gardot, “a 21 year old singer songwriter in Philadelphia, PA,” wrote, “Excuse the length, but this is as abridged as I could get.… You might want to grab a coffee for this one.” And then in the next 1,400 words she laid out the fascinating story of her accident and inspiring recovery.

“I have had to take it easy as I am currently disabled, but I don’t let that stop me from making music,” she wrote. She included the odd symptomatology of her condition: “On top of the hearing problems I am photosensitive so I have to wear these super dark large sunglasses everywhere…even now while typing on the computer.… I will get visual disturbances when sound is too loud. If you are talking to me and you are moderately too loud for me, I will begin to have both ears start ringing and then I will see an aura and eventually I cannot hear anything at all. My hearing shuts down and I begin to spin (vertigo). If the music is too loud I can pass out. My entire system shuts down in what is believed to be a protective mechanism.”

But the e-mail, the intent of which was to get the paper to write about her, was also suffused with hope and optimism. “I feel [my story] would inspire and comfort those who are suffering…as well as show musicians and [others] in…Philadelphia [that] no matter what, you can get by,” she wrote. Rapa checked out Melodygardot.com, which still exists, and listened to a couple of the songs she’d posted. Impressed, he interviewed her in the lobby of a Philadelphia hotel and listened as the frail young woman sang and played her songs on the hotel piano until the management asked her to leave. When Rapa’s feature on her ran, along with photos of Gardot as she was then, an adorably round brunette in a hippie skirt and a denim shirt, it marked the beginning of the Melody Gardot legend.

But even before she reached out to Rapa, she e-mailed Phil Roy, a respected Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter. She complimented him on a song he’d just released called “Nobody Has to Know,” telling him she loved how the song was quiet and intense at the same time. Roy listened to a few of her songs, and “right away I realized this was not just another hummer and strummer,” he says. He met with her, started inviting her to open for him at clubs, even had her record the backing vocals on a track on his album The Great Longing. “Did I fall in love with her? Of course I fell in love with Melody. A lot of people fell in love with Melody,” Roy says. He still marvels at the young performer’s discipline. “She had one guy film every show that she did. And she would go back and look at her shows and try to improve it. Honestly, I wish I had a little more of what Melody brings to the game.”

While performing, Gardot met local singer-songwriter Lizanne Knott and told her that while on her sickbed, Knott’s 2002 song “Jesus or Elvis (Revisited)” had inspired her to write her first song. Knott told her husband, Glenn Barratt, that he had to hear this girl who had great songs but a crappy-sounding homemade demo. Barratt approached Gardot after a show and told her he wanted to record her. Soon Gardot and her mother showed up at MorningStar Studios. “We’re on limited funds,” Gardot told him. “The money will take care of itself,” Barratt told her. “Let’s make a great record.”

At the suggestion of Roy, Gardot sent the CD they made, Worrisome Heart, to the influential radio host Mike Marrone. Marrone played her songs on his show and touted her as one of his favorite unsigned artists. Sandy Roberton, who is perhaps the music industry’s most influential manager of producers, heard one of the songs and immediately called Larry Klein, the Grammy winner most famous for producing, and having been married to, Joni Mitchell. Roberton then put out the word to labels that Klein was interested in working with her, and soon her shows were being attended by obsequious A&R guys from various labels. Plane tickets were bought, cars were sent, and meetings were taken. In the end, in July 2007, Gardot signed with the British arm of Universal, the biggest label on earth.

That’s the backstory, as best I can make out, but some of Gardot’s tales seem hard to confirm, and she doesn’t offer me much assistance in Barcelona. I was curious to talk to the friend who had posted her first recorded songs on MySpace, even though Rapa doesn’t remember hearing anything about the guy—he only remembers being directed to her website.

“Oh, that was one of the cats that disappeared with the phone,” she tells me, referring to the friends before the accident. “He hung around for about maybe a year and a half or so, and then I think he fell in love with me and I didn’t fall in love with him, so he had to leave.”

So if he was one of your cell phone contacts, does that mean you knew him before the accident? I ask. “I think we had met maybe days before I got hit, actually. But I don’t even know where he is,” she says.

When she tells me, “I spoke at Penn not too long ago to a panel of neuropsychs from all around the world,” I ask her what the name was of the neuropsychiatrist who approached her and invited her after seeing her perform. “Oh, God. This was like, three years ago, so I don’t remember his name. But he gave me his card and told me he was the director of something.”

The essence of Gardot’s story is the miraculous before-and-after, how trauma turned a teenager into a prodigy; how a brain injury, ironically, may have unlocked the tools and talents to become a famous singer. But I can’t contextualize the miracle without knowing more about the pre-accident Gardot. I plead with her: Is there one single person who knew you before the accident with whom I might be able to speak?

She gets up, starts fiddling on her laptop, shrugs apologetically, as if she’d love to help but her hands are tied. “Like I said, no,” she says firmly. “People can’t accept when you change sometimes. You’ve got to understand that. If you knew me before and then you met me afterward, it breaks your heart. It really breaks your heart.”

Artists, particularly musical ones, create worlds and atmospheres within their work that we seek to live in; music is our escape. The raison d’être of profiles like this one is that knowing more about the artist may somehow enrich the experience of listening to her music. But I wonder: Would a backstory that may not be totally true make Melody Gardot less compelling? In the early days, Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman, famously told tall tales about his past—that he ran away from home and joined the circus, that his parents were dead. Does knowing that he made it all up render The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan any less great?

Rapa seems surprised to hear that Gardot claims to have almost no memories of her life before the accident. “The first interview I did was with her and her mom, and I never got the impression that she didn’t know about growing up and her home life,” he says. “I’m not sure that the memory not being there is entirely true. It might just be easier for her to package it that way.”

Jermyn tells me most brain-injury patients have much more difficulty laying down new memories, but that their pre-trauma memories typically survive intact. Yet there might be so much psychic pain associated with the injury—friends who fade away, families shattered by the pressures of caring for the injured—that selective forgetting is easier. “Maybe that’s memory in her brain that she doesn’t want to go into, that she’s eliminated,” he says. “I don’t blame her.”

The Philadelphia police confirm that a young woman on a bicycle was struck at the intersection of Second and Callowhill streets on November 11, 2003, at 5:26 p.m., but can’t release the name of the victim or driver as there were no fatalities and no charges brought. The only clue I have about her past is from Rapa’s first story. Gardot mentions that as a teenager she’d played at the piano bar at a Philadelphia restaurant called Tiramisu. The owner of the now-shuttered place didn’t remember her but suggested that I call the piano bar’s master pianist, Mike Margarite. Margarite, who worked there from 1993 to 2000, said he’d certainly remember if a 16-year-old girl had ever sat in while he was there, but maybe Bill Mayo, the singer who worked the room after he moved on, might recall.

This actually rings a bell with Mayo. He remembers a young woman would come in on occasion and sit in with a piano player named John Conahan, who for two years played Fridays and Saturdays at Tiramisu and now teaches music at a high school about a half hour north of Philadelphia. I find Conahan and e-mail him the details—how her name might not yet have been Melody Gardot, how Mayo said he remembered her at Tiramisu. Two hours later Conahan writes back, “Melody’s a friend. I’ll give you a call soon.”

But it takes him another full day to call. Right away he tells me he doesn’t know how much he can help me, since it turns out he doesn’t remember Gardot from before the accident, after all. Last night, he says, Melody called him from Norway. “We talked about it and can’t remember seeing each other at Tiramisu,” he says, chuckling about the confusion and remarkable coincidence, noting that they’d only met after the accident, at MorningStar Studios, where they’d both recorded. “Bill told you that I knew her then? I don’t remember knowing her, and she doesn’t remember knowing me then.”

Back to Mayo I go. What do you remember about that mystery girl who sat in with Conahan? I ask. His memories weren’t too specific; it was, after all, a decade ago. Except for two things: The girl sang original songs. And she had a great voice."

Music and Memories,

Ashley

2-14-11 Playlist Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T18:26:00.000-08:00

1. I've Been Loving You Too Long-Otis Redding

2. Love & Happiness-Al Green

3. Tramp-Carla Thomas

4. I Know (You Don't Love Me No More)-Barbara George

5. You Don't Love Me Know More-Candi Staton

6. I Wanna Love Him So Bad-Jelly Beans

7. Please Please (Love Me)-Estelle

8. That's Why (I Love You So)-Jackie Wilson

9. Win Your Love For Me-Sam Cooke

10. Hallelujah I Love Her So-Ray Charles

11. Found Love-Jimmy Reed

12. Love Hurts (Orbison cover)-Jenny Lewis f/ Jonathan Rice

13. Careless Love Blues-Bessie Smith

14. She's Got You-Patsy Cline

15. Mama's Heart-Those Darlins

16. The One That I Love The Best-Jessica Lea Mayfield

17. Dog Song-Mountain Man

18. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow-Lykke Li

19. Love is a Rose-Neil Young

20. Do You Love Me?-Eef Barzelay

21. I Thought You Should Know-Steve Earle

22. Love Is All-Tallest Man on Earth

23. Chelsea Hoted (Cohen cover)-The Shivers

24. In Every Direction-Junip

25. Rolling Sea-Vetiver

26. While We Were Dreaming-Pink Mountaintops

27. When the Devil's Loose-A.A. Bondy

28. That's How Strong My Love Is-Otis Redding

Love it or hate it, Valentine's Day is here to stay. Here's some songs of unrequited, unrelenting, and (on a positive note) un...derstanding love.

Besos,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Mountain Man

2011-02-14T07:05:00.000-08:00

I saw these lovely ladies open for the Decemberists this past Saturday in LA at the Wiltern and I was completely enamored with their sound. Such a lovely dichotomy of seemingly contradictory elements: spare but layered, haunted but comforting, simple but textured, endearingly tenuous yet composed, alluring but unsettling...

Their empyrean harmonies are at once both light and refined in intention but filmy and foggy in their effortless execution. Their sound is a ghostly, gossamer throwback to the haunted hills of the Appalachians or the chilly forests of the coast. They have been designated the new, female Fleet Foxes. Check out their label summary:

Mountain Man
Made the Harbor

We made the harbor filled with wind, bellowing sea lions, and sand dollars from past loves, current sisters. What we have collected are chimes in the salty air. Made the Harbor is an album to swim home to, and to sail away with. It grazes the horizon with its sails.

Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig and Amelia Randall Meath met at Bennington College, in the small town of Bennington, Vermont. They are from the West, Middle West and Eastern United States. It was not until Molly visited Bennington during a term off that the seeds of Mountain Man were set on the windowsill. At the sound of Molly playing a song in the living room of their shared house, Amelia rushed down the stairs and demanded it be taught to her. At this point, Molly and Amelia were not friends. But they shared the bond of mutual heartbreak, of having been left with space between open arms. Amelia trapped Molly in her room upstairs where she sang “Dog Song” over and over, bewildered and a little afraid, until Amelia felt she could remember it well enough to teach Alex. When Molly came back to Bennington in the spring, Alex and Amelia excitedly sprang into her room, and all three sang together for the first time. They were equally bewildered by each other and by the sounds they made together. Molly and Amelia are still in school, studying Performance and Gender, and Theater and Performance, respectively. Alex graduated in the spring of 2009 with a degree in Literature and Visual Arts. She is now a nanny for two wonderful children.

The music of Mountain Man is nestled in the tradition of American folk, but shoots like diamond dust out of the nest into the high, wide atmosphere. Their songs are shaped by three searching voices, encompassing harmonies and a shared belief in and love of the world. They are mutually moved to sing by their love for people, and for trees, birds and mountains, the ocean, the night, the moon, and being a woman. They all love the rambling, rumbling, rolling summer….

Recorded in an old ice cream parlor from the turn of the 20th century, each track of Made the Harbor is imbued with the likes of warm breaths, creaking of floors, soft thumping of hands against their bodies, the clearing of their throats, or the false start of a tune, evoking the feeling of being in the room with the band as the record plays: demand for intimacy between the art and its listener.

Happy trails,

Ashley

2-7-2011 Playlist

2011-02-07T17:11:00.001-08:00

1. Your One and Only Man-Otis Redding

2. Same Thing-Gino Parks

3. I Let A Good Man Go-Patrinell Staten

4. Get Out of My Life Woman-Lee Dorsey

5. Who's Making Love-Johnnie Taylor

6. Band of Gold-Freda Payne

7. His Eye Is On The Sparrow-The Soul Stirrers

8. Jesus Gave Me Water-Sam Cooke

9. In Your Spare Time-Cindy Scott

10. Leaving Here-Eddie Holland

11. Just One Look-Doris Troy

12. When They Fight, They Fight-The Generationals

13. Sea Lion Woman-Feist

14. Baby It's You-Smith

15. Oh Happy Day-Quincy Jones

16. This Trumpet in My Head-Lykke Li

17. Good Morning Blues-Count Basie

18. Regret-Wye Oak

19. Wicker Frames-Polka Dot Dot

20. To Hell and Back-Madeline

21. Love Serenade-The Waifs

22. One Man Down-Christina Courtin

23. Love Song For Bobby Long-Grayson Capps

24. Lone Pine Hill-Justin Townes Earle

25. Potter's Field-Dave Alvin

26. Could Be So Happy-Heartless Bastards

27. Weeping Pilgrim-Elvis Perkins in Dearland

28. Call Me The Breeze-J.J. Cale

29. Ruby Mae-The Felice Brothers

30. This Is Not A Song, It's an Outburst-Rodriguez

Best,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Wanda Jackson

2011-02-05T07:07:00.000-08:00

-WANDA JACKSON-

"Jack White's collaboration with rock's original trouble girl is at once reverent and uproarious. At 73, Jackson can still summon the irascible Okie pip of Fifties rockabilly hits like "Fujiyama Mama," and White convenes a roots band with a killer horn section. The song selection is superb: rollicking versions of Eddie Cochran and Little Richard songs, calypso standards, a gusty reimagining of Bob Dylan's "Thunder on the Mountain." Jackson's not content to just remake the greats: Her slaying of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" is a master class for her wild-child inheritors."-Rolling Stone

Jack White produced your new album, The Party Ain’t Over. Did he get anything out of you, at age 72, that you hadn’t done before?
Maybe not things I hadn’t done before, but he’s a slave driver, a velvet-covered brick. He just drains the artist dry. I like working with someone who knows what they want.

And what did he want from you?
When we were laying down the single, “You Know That I’m No Good,” Jack kept saying, “I want you to push! I need this to sound like Wanda Jackson, not Amy Winehouse.” And if you listen to the track, in the beginning, you can hear me say, “I always have to push.” That silly guy left that on there! Sometimes you just have to get a little bit mad to get the job done.

Well he’s got you sounding pretty wicked!
Yes, that’s very Jack. And very Wanda!

You’re known for the growl in your voice. Was it shocking for a lady to be singing that way when you started doing it?
I think it was, but I was the first to do quite a few things and I never let that bother me. I liked the shock-and-awe approach. I was already wearing the tight dresses and the sexy high heels. Elvis encouraged me to try rockabilly, and I thought since he was getting so popular, I better take his advice. We dated you know.

Yes, you’re famous for that too! Is it disappointing to you, as someone who pioneered the idea that a woman could sing “man’s” music, to see women performers dealing with sexism all these decades later?
I never did understand that. When I started we didn’t know that rock would change the world forever. But we knew it was the next big thing, and I was very surprised that I was the only girl willing to try it. I think we should be out there doing it like the guys, whether you’re in an office or on a stage.

Jack recently told the press that you should always have a woman in the band because you’ll get a lot more done that way. Do you think so?
Well, I heard a saying not long ago that I do agree with: If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.

- Cristina Black

Amen sista,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Candi Staton

2011-02-04T12:02:00.000-08:00

-Candi Staton-

"There are southern soul voices and there are southern soul voices. Raw and ravaged, Candi Staton's is one of the signature sounds of the genre. It's a voice with a tear in it, the cry of a woman wounded by life, by men, by woes turned inward."

A voice drenched with rich depth and songs tinged with sorrow and romance gone awry, Candi Staton remains one of the many unsung female soul singers of the era. Her dichotomous presence, both sonically and lyrically, is one of both vulnerability in identity juxtaposed with an undeniable fortitude and clarity. This song will be on your repeat, guaranteed.

Besos,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Bettye Swann

2011-02-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

-BETTYE SWANN-

Best known for her 1967 R&B chart-topper "Make Me Yours," Southern soul chanteuse Bettye Swann was born Betty Jean Champion in Shreveport, Louisiana on October 24, 1944. She first surfaced during the early 1960s as a member of the Fawns before mounting a solo career in 1964 with the Carolyn Franklin-penned "Don't Wait Too Long," the first of a series of Arthur Wright-produced singles for the independent Los Angeles label Money. "The Man That Said No" and "The Heartache Is Gone" followed in 1965, and two years later, Swann returned with the gorgeous "Make Me Yours," which also served as the title for her first full-length LP. 1967 saw the release of three more Money singles -- "Fall in Love With Me," "Don't Look Back," and "I Think I'm Falling in Love" -- while the next year heralded a leap to major label Capitol for "My Heart Is Closed for the Season." The follow-up, "Don't Touch Me," was the first single released from Swann's second long-player, The Soul View Now; Don't You Ever Get Tired of Hurting Me? followed in 1969, highlighted by the minor hit "Little Things Mean a Lot." After a one-off single for Fame, 1971's "I'm Just Living a Lie," Swann landed at Atlantic; her label debut, "Victim of a Foolish Heart," cracked the R&B Top 20 in 1972, and was revived over three decades later by blue-eyed soul upstart Joss Stone. Her next Atlantic effort, "I'd Rather Go Blind," was notable in large part for its B-side, a reading of Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again," that proved Swann a superb interpreter of country-soul -- 1973's "Yours Until Tomorrow" was backed by another Nashville cover, this time Tammy Wynette's "Til I Get It Right." In 1974, she made a return to the lower rungs of the Billboard Hot 100 with "The Boy Next Door" -- the flip side, "Kiss My Love Goodbye," found Swann operating firmly in Philly soul territory, its slick, urbane production courtesy of the Young Professionals team of LeBaron Taylor, Phil Hurtt, and Tony Bell. With 1975's "All the Way In or All the Way Out" she again enjoyed minor chart success, but subsequent recording sessions are undocumented, and Swann eventually faded from sight. ~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi

::Bettye Swann: the silent voice of soul that deserves a second listen::

Best,

Ashleuy

Road trip, anyone?

2011-02-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

-STAX RECORDS-

The rise and fall of Memphis-based Stax Records remains one of the more compelling sagas in American popular music history. Founded in 1957 as Satellite Records, renamed in 1961 by blending the surnames of brother-sister co-founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, Stax was Motown's funky Deep South counterpart. From its loose atmosphere came giants, including Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas and daughter Carla, Booker T and the MGs, Eddie Floyd, Sam & Dave, Albert King, Isaac Hayes, and the Bar-Kays. Recording in a converted movie theater, the earthy results were often as stunning and transcendent as anything from the equally loose Sun Records across town or Motown itself.

The only soul museum in the world, the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, located at the original site of Stax Records, pays tribute to all of the artists who recorded there with a rare and amazing collection of more than 2,000 interactive exhibits, films, artifacts, items of memorabilia, and galleries designed to keep Stax alive forever.

I believe a summer 2011 road trip is in order.

~Ashley

Featured Artist: Karen Elson

2011-02-03T07:08:00.000-08:00

-Karen Elson-

On her debut disc, The Ghost Who Walks, Karen Elson spins intriguingly unsettling tales of lost love, dashed hope, romantic betrayal and various crimes of passion witnessed only by the full moon. In a coolly inviting voice, strumming an acoustic guitar, she summons up a dark yet seductive atmosphere, an after-midnight world that’s irresistibly alluring. The arrangements for her small band – featuring the virtuosic Jackson Smith on guitar, Elson’s Citizens Band co-hort Rachelle Garniez on accordion and vocals, The Dead Weather’s Jack Lawrence on bass, My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel on pedal steel and producer Jack White on drums – evoke the lonesome feel of country (“Cruel Summer”), the tormented side of the blues (“The Truth Is In the Dirt”), or the haunted stories of traditional folk balladry (“Stolen Roses”).

The Ghost Who Walks may not be drawn literally from Elson’s life, but it does represent an aspect of her psyche she’s been brave enough to explore: “I’m very much interested in the dark side of things. In my life, truthfully, I’ve had a lot of bizarre and dark experiences that have definitely colored the way I think about a lot of personal things. The music I have always listened to as well has had a sorrowful, mournful, if not murderous, quality to it.” She pauses to laugh. “I’m not saying I would ever want to kill anybody, but sometimes love can drag you to the very depths of yourself and – my God – make you so desperate and forlorn. I really respond to songs that write about that. Hank Williams, for crying out loud, speaking of being forlorn and forsaken -- there’s a song I just heard of his, an early demo, that really resonated with me. Those songs move me in a way that happy go lucky songs don’t.”

These mysterious and beautiful songs, more than any picture, speak volumes.

Hauntingly yours,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Jimmy Reed

2011-02-03T06:58:00.000-08:00

-Featured Artist: Jimmy Reed-

There's simply no sound in the blues as easily digestible, accessible, instantly recognizable, and as easy to play and sing as the music of Jimmy Reed. His best-known songs -- "Baby, What You Want Me to Do," "Bright Lights, Big City," "Honest I Do," "You Don't Have to Go," "Going to New York," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," and "Big Boss Man" -- have become such an integral part of the standard blues repertoire, it's almost as if they have existed forever. Because his style was simple and easily imitated, his songs were accessible to just about everyone from high-school garage bands having a go at it, to Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Lou Rawls, Hank Williams, Jr., and the Rolling Stones, making him -- in the long run -- perhaps the most influential bluesman of all. His bottom-string boogie rhythm guitar patterns (all furnished by boyhood friend and longtime musical partner Eddie Taylor), simple two-string turnarounds, country-ish harmonica solos (all played in a neck-rack attachment hung around his neck), and mush-mouthed vocals were probably the first exposure most white folks had to the blues. And his music -- lazy, loping, and insistent and constantly built and reconstructed single after single on the same sturdy frame -- was a formula that proved to be enormously successful and influential, both with middle-aged blacks and young white audiences for a good dozen years. Jimmy Reed records hit the R&B charts with amazing frequency and crossed over onto the pop charts on many occasions, a rare feat for an unreconstructed bluesman. This is all the more amazing simply because Reed's music was nothing special on the surface; he possessed absolutely no technical expertise on either of his chosen instruments and his vocals certainly lacked the fierce declamatory intensity of a Howlin' Wolf or a Muddy Waters. But it was exactly that lack of in-your-face musical confrontation that made Jimmy Reed a welcome addition to everybody's record collection back in the '50s and '60s. And for those aspiring musicians who wanted to give the blues a try, either vocally or instrumentally (no matter what skin color you were born with), perhaps Billy Vera said it best in his liner notes to a Reed greatest-hits anthology: "Yes, anybody with a range of more than six notes could sing Jimmy's tunes and play them the first day Mom and Dad brought home that first guitar from Sears & Roebuck. I guess Jimmy could be termed the '50s punk bluesman."-Cub Koda

Blues & Booze,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Laura Marling

2011-02-03T06:48:00.001-08:00

-Laura Marling-

Laura Marling had just turned 18 when she released her 2008 debut, but it seemed like she'd already lived four or five lifetimes.

By then, she had somehow digested the entire canon of British folk music along with her guitar lessons, in the process becoming world-weary enough to write lines like “The gods that he believes never fail to disappoint me” and “Don’t cry child, you’ve got so much more to live for / Don’t cry child, you’ve got something I would die for.”

And in between touring the globe and being touted as the young queen of a new-folk revival (and shattering the heart of her then-boyfriend/producer, Noah and the Whale’s Charlie Fink, indirectly giving us one of 2009’s best symphonic breakup albums, First Days of Spring), she found it in herself to make yet another gorgeous, melancholy, old-souled record.

Despite its uncanny emotional weight, Alas has its moments of glittering girlishness and sounds at times like it was recorded in an upstairs bedroom at her parents’ house. I Speak Because I Can trades in references to broken dolls for tales of real live babies found in the forest and the yearning for a “Tap at my Window,” for the love of a “Rambling Man.” Fellow new-folk vanguards Mumford & Sons (who released their own excellent album earlier this year) reprise their occasional role as Marling’s backup band, providing urgent, dirty-fingernailed accompaniment—banjos, shuddering organ and occasional brotherly backing vocals—to her lovely, blustery voice and pace-setting guitar (strummed and finger-picked, both with increasing confidence). Marling avoids both precocity and self-seriousness, even when she sings, on the wrenching “Hope in the Air,” “I forgave you your shortcomings and ignored your childish behavior / Laid a kiss on your head and before I left said, ‘Stay away from fleeting failure.’”

Reading-based songstress Laura Marling has been likened to veteran folksters Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Despite such hyperbolic accolades, her entry into the crowded world of young female singer-songwriters has been remarkably hushed and wonderfully organic. Having started writing songs at the age of 15, Marling's success has been achieved not by shouting, but by whispering her way through the ranks. Perhaps because of her youth--she turned 18 just before releasing thisAlas, I Cannot Swim--Marling has an understated yet accomplished manner that just doesn't grate like some of her peers. Plus her songs are good--very good. Backed by imaginative arrangements from leftfield acoustic outfit Noah and the Whale, the tracks here are often coyly charming, though far from naïve. Marling digs impressively deep into all kinds of universal topics, from religion and parents to love and romance. Lead single "Ghosts" introduced to many her soft, alluring vocal style, and other songs here share the same sense of intimacy, even if they differ thematically and musically. Things are kept simple throughout (think acoustic strums and a homespun delivery), but there are subtle and beautiful contrasts throughout; the Beirut-esque carnival aura of "Crawled out of the Sea" and the brooding "Night Terror", for example, which provide darker counterpoints to airier fare like the folksy title track and the compelling "My Manic & I". Disarming yet deep, provocative yet peaceful, Alas places Marling head and shoulders above the bawlers and wailers. --Paul Sullivan

Easy, breezy,

Ashley

Featured Artist: Billy Bragg & Wilco (f/Natalie Merchant)

2011-02-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

-Billy Bragg & Wilco-

A ghost, a band, a troubadour. Easily the strangest co-op project ever, and easily one of the finest and most evocative albums of the year. British socialist and folkie Billy Bragg was given unprecedented access to Woody Guthrie's unrecorded lyrics. Teaming up with alt-country band Wilco and quoting from more than 50 years of country, folk, and rock music, Billy and company bring Guthrie's politics, poetry, and morality to the end of the century and prove he's as necessary now as ever. --Tod Nelson

Named for a Coney Island street where Woody Guthrie lived in the late Forties and early Fifties, Mermaid Avenue is a collection of recently discovered Guthrie lyrics now set to music for the first time. It's also nothing that the previous work of those involved could have led anyone to expect.

Born in 1912, shaped by the 1930s, recording mostly in the 1940s, the shadow self of a young Bob Dylan in the early 1960s and dead in 1967, Woody Guthrie made his mark as a left-wing version of the professional American. If you listen to him now — homing in on such all-American folk passwords as "Stackolee" and "When That Great Ship Went Down" or on Guthrie's own compositions, from "This Land Is Your Land" to "Farmer-Labor Train" — he can sound very far away. His singing ranges from witty to ghostly to (too often) dull. Flights of craft and inspiration in his words and melodies can be dragged down to earth by the freight they carry: the perfectly weighed and measured details of saying the politically proper thing in the politically proper way.
You can hear a similar imprisonment in the careers of Billy Bragg and Wilco. Since 1983, Bragg has combined a heavy East End London accent, often the naked sound of his own electric guitar, and a political sensibility that owes more to the 1930s than to any time since. He has left behind "Levi Stubbs' Tears," which still feels like an open wound, and a slew of pieces testifying mostly to the fact that his heart is in the right place, even if he wears it on his sleeve. Singer Jeff Tweedy stepped out with Uncle Tupelo in 1990; there or in Wilco, with guitarist and keyboard player Jay Bennett, drummer Ken Coomer and bassist John Stirratt, he has sung more at his red-dirt revisions of the oldest folk and country airs than from inside them. He has seemed far more sure of himself singing other people's songs, even such seemingly uncoverable eruptions of the American Gothic as Richard "Rabbit" Brown's "James Alley Blues" or Dock Boggs' "Sugar Baby," both of which were originally recorded around seventy years ago. It's as if Tweedy loves the old American music too much to trust his own.
Thus it's the best shock of the year to find Mermaid Avenue opening with a couple of sailors tripping over each other in search of booze and pussy — there being no more proper way to put it. "Walked up to a big old building/I won't say which building," Bragg says happily. "Walked up the stairs/Not to say which stairs" — and just like that, with a crowd of smelly drunks shouting Bragg through the choruses, Guthrle's lyric sheet for "Walt Whitman's Niece" turns into some seemingly fated tangle of "Gloria," Last Exit to Brooklyn and Beach Boys' Party! as performed by the Three Stooges. For the rest of the disc, making a better world is inseparable from making a better night, and the historical treasure of Guthrie's found lyrics yields to the melodies and arrangements that Bragg and Wilco use to bring them to life.
Hard or even impossible to place, those melodies, from just below the surface of the American pop tradition or from the true depths of the British folk tradition, float Guthrie's screeds, stories and musings off into a realm where he is freed from his legend — into a realm where the people now singing his songs are freed from respect for it. The songs seemingly move of their own accord, and the record becomes unstable. The number that you know is the best piece here isn't the one with the tune you can't get out of your head — and which one that might be changes every other day. From Tweedy's dry-as-dust vocal on "Hesitating Beauty" — a seduction song named for Guthrie's daughter — to the rousing sing-along Bragg makes of "I Guess I Planted," Guthrie's summation of his life's work, the forgotten or untold stories in the songs become a new story, and it all comes to verge with "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key."
A young man gets a young woman to crawl into a hollow tree with him; promising that "there ain't nobody that can sing like me," he gets her to take off her shirt; years and years later, he looks back and smiles. The melody that guides this slowly told, perfectly written tale convinces you that even if the man grew up to rob widows and orphans, he has lived a blessed life. Natalie Merchant, coming in behind Bragg's lead, opens up the song, making it the woman's as much as the man's; Eliza Carthy's fiddle, seemingly waiting in the melody long before it chooses to take up Guthrie's words, makes the story being told feel as old as the stories told in the oldest folk songs, in "The Coo Coo" or "The House Carpenter." As Bragg and Wilco perform it, the number is also no more than what it is: an old man's grin.-Greil Marcus
Cordially,
Ashley

Featured Artist: The Dutchess & The Duke

2011-02-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

-The Dutchess & The Duke-

"By taking tonal cues from darker, acid-tinged '60s pop and sweetening it with just the right amount of meticulously constructed harmonies, they are managing to pull off one of the trickier combinations in songwriting--sounding timeless and utterly modern at the same time."-Seattle Weekly

Moeller's review: (it's too poetic not to post)

She's still the Dutchess and he's still the Duke on the Pacific Northwest band's sophomore album, "Sunrise/Sunset," but Kimberly Morrison and Jesse Lortz have put together an enhanced vision of who they were on their debut album. The Dutchess & The Duke is certainly one of the finest folk bands working today, writing songs that should have existed decades ago, when there were no such things as digital recordings or MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3s, when everything one heard was bejazzled with the blissful hiss and hum of analog tape. It was as much of what we heard and as soothing of a sound as the box fan turned on in the bedroom at night, for some, when cooling the air isn't the reason for doing it. It was, most likely, one of Lortz's first loves. Instead of taping or push-pinning magazine cut-outs of Pete Townsend or Neil Young on his walls in junior high and high school, he would have - if he could have - taped a photographic representation of analog tape hiss to the wall. He may have even - at night - wished upon that torn out piece of paper hanging on that broad side of painted dry wall, believing that doing so would some day let him fall or work into a world that would never be missing that same hum and hiss. Lortz would have been much more at home then. And by "then," we mean another time when recording procedures were so much simpler and so much more complex, needing a near perfect performance from everyone in the group to be a take worth keeping, when the room was an auxiliary player and there were fewer ways to be anything other than what you actually were as a singer, a musician and a presence. The music and the songs on "Sunrise/Sunset" rely on this authenticity and even more so on this ability to suggest different things at once.

For the most part, Lortz and Morrison make their music feel as sun-kissed as it could possibly get, skirting any kind of reddening of the skin, avoiding damage, just giving smooches, just letting you feel as if the outside temperatures were no different than inside temperatures, as if you were walking through a continued climate - only, there's the sun meeting you halfway. It's this randomly measured way of feeling completely eased into a spot, the same way you get when you plop down on your couch, in the same spot as always, recognizing that you're the one carving the cushioning into your specifically molded ass shape. You can't fight it and you can't help but feel that your couch is better off with you having been there many times previously. That's the music, but the lyrical writing done by the pair is splendid in its seeming contrast, begging for answers to some of the more dizzying questions that tend to occupy heavy hearts, not those that occupy those kissed upon hearts at leisure, when a day's asking for nothing other than carefree floating time. You have lovers continually asking if they're missing something, if they're just forgetting or refusing to see something so obvious. It could just be that lessons have been learned the hard way over the years, but there's a healthy dose of skepticism that these emotions are all built upon the sand and there's no sense in getting too partial to any of them, or the people who are offering them. There are frequent mentions of hands, and an emphasis on the indisputable fact that most everyone has two of them and they each can be doing opposite things at the same time - with enough coordination and skill. Lortz sings on the album's lead-off track "Hands," "One hand gone and the other trying to hold on," and later on the record about a woman holding him, but there exists an ominous tone, "In your heart, there's another man and I just think that's wrong." There's a duplicity to these sugars and to these bitter strains of cruel medicine that ultimately still equate to a delicious sweetness.-Sean Moeller

Sweetly,

Ashley

1-31-2011 Playlist

2011-01-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

1. Ole Man Trouble-Otis Redding

2. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy-Marlena Shaw

3. Wade in the Water-Ramsey Lewis

4. Pushin On (f/ Alice Russell)-The Quantic Soul Orchestra

5. Big Easy (f/ The Infamous Young Spodie & The Rebirth Brass Brand)-Raphael Saadiq

6. Love Is Alright (Bonus Track)-Mayer Hawthorne

7. Love Comes And Goes-Lee Fields & The Expressions

8. Slippin-Quadron

9. Meet Me By The Water-Saturday Looks Good To Me

10. Gimme Little Sign-Brenton Wood

11. Let Me Be Good To You-Carla Thomas

12. Mr. Lee-The Bobbettes

13. It Won't Be Long-Clarence "Frogman" Henry

14. We Can Work It Out-Stevie Wonder

15. If You're Ready (Come Go With Me)-The Staple Singers

16. Good Lovin'-Betty Wright

17. We're Doing Fine-Dee Dee Warwick

18. You Are Mine-Eddie Ray

19. Never Gonna Give You Up-The Black Keys

20. I Can't Hear You-The Dead Weather

21. The Mother-Xavier Rudd

22. El Monte-Girl In A Coma

23. Seen It All Before-Amos Lee

24. I Believe I'll Dust My Broom-Robert Johnson

25. Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out-Bessie Smith

26. Love In Vain-Robert Johnson

27. Born Under A Bad Sign-Albert King

28. My Bebop Gal-Dr. Isaiah Ross

29. Standing-Patty Griffin

30. The Birds They Circle-Karen Elson

31. Cripple Creek-Leo Kottke

32. Embryonic Journey-Jefferson Airplane

All the best,

Ash

~La Boheme~

2011-01-31T08:19:00.000-08:00

Originally written in 1962, Kaukonen composed this instrumental piece as an improvisational exercise at a guitar workshop in Santa Clara. Ethereal, whimsical, and oh-so-sweet.

Enjoy!

Ash

Lost & Found

2011-01-31T08:07:00.000-08:00

Nearly thirty years after the label closed its doors, a mysterious box of tapes turned up at an estate sale in Columbus, OH. Originally thought to be the lost Prix masters, it was instead discovered to be dozens of demos, rehearsals, and a few unfinished songs recorded in Harmonic Sounds' prime. The tape boxes were for the most part unmarked; creating a puzzle that would require some time to solve. Penny & The Quarters' "You and Me" is a random rehearsal by a group no one can remember, but one more song we wouldn't let be forgotten.

Best,

Ash