Monthly Archives: November 2020

VIA PRESS RELEASE | New Orleans’ world famous music venue Tipitina’s, today, announces SAVE TIP’S, a free live streamed event benefiting the historic venue during the pandemic shutdown.

​An innovative livestream and fundraising event, the three+ hour event will take place on Saturday, November 14th at 9PM EST/8PM CST/6PM PST and will feature performances and exclusive backstage content from more than 35 of the most legendary musicians to ever grace the stage at Tipitina’s. These artists join Tipitina’s to help keep the music going at the world renowned venue by helping raise much needed funds necessary to keep the club alive. Beginning today, Monday November 9, fans can donate directly to the venue as well as participate in special fundraising sweepstakes offering prizes chosen by the staff at Tipitina’s and its supporting artists.

“In late 2018, our band took a huge leap of faith to purchase Tipitina’s,” said Robert Mercurio, owner of Tipitina’s and member of the band Galactic.“ It was not because we wanted to own a venue, it was because we had a chance to save our favorite one in the world. But now we could really use some help to keep saving this national treasure. So in true New Orleans fashion we decided to throw a hell of a party to celebrate this musical institution.”

Tipitina’s has been a vibrant hub of New Orleans’ culture and music for over 40 years and has hosted some of the most legendary acts in the world while attracting hundreds of thousands of fans from across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing regulations have had a heavy effect on the legendary venue putting its future in peril as it, like thousands of other independent rooms, hasn’t had any revenue since being shuttered by the pandemic

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Black Stone Cherry is anything but your typical rock and roll band. Founded in 2001, Chris Robertson, John Fred Young, Jon Lawhon, and Ben Wells have a long and storied history together as childhood friends with deep Kentucky roots. Today, they’re a well-oiled rock and roll machine creating inspirational music that challenges both the mind and soul.

We recently caught up with the band’s frontman Chris Robertson to discuss their latest release in stores, The Human Condition, life in lockdown, and of course Chris’s most prized vinyl possession.

Chris, how did you get your start in music?

I grew up around music my whole life. My dad plays music still to this day. He does cover band stuff on the weekend—it’s what he’s always done. So, I’ve always been around that. My grandpa used to build acoustic guitars and instruments. He’d build them in an old shop out here on the farm, and he did that up until just a few years before he passed away. He played a lot of bluegrass and stuff, so I was always around music.

My grandpa built me a guitar when I was 10 and I tried to play it but just couldn’t. And then around about seventh grade, we had a talent show and John Fred brought a drum set and played a drum solo. There was also a guy there that played guitar, and I told John Fred at the end of the talent show, I said, “I’m going to get a guitar for my birthday and I’m going to learn to play better than him so we can start a band.” And we’ve played music together ever since.

How did Black Stone Cherry get its start?

As friends, we would jam off and on from 13 on. In early 2001, after some time off, we decided to start jamming again. We wanted to start writing some music, but we didn’t have a bass player. So, I called Jon Lawhon and was like, “Hey man, I know you play guitar, but how about you play bass because we need a bass player?” And he was like, “Okay, that’s fine.” So, Jon transitioned over to bass and the three of us continued to play together focusing on the blues.

A short time later, we were having a little get together and had a bunch of friends down. We had written a couple of songs, but nobody actually sang. That evening, we found out that one of the guys (Ben Wells) actually played as well. We finally talked him into jamming with us. Throughout the evening, people kept switching off instruments in the practice house. The three of us snuck outside and I was like, “Hey man, we need to get this guy in the band.” And John Fred said, “Yeah, he’s got a thing.” And the next day we started the band and it’s been the four of us ever since.

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First a bit of history. When my older brother fled home in the mid-Seventies to escape the horrors of small town life, he left behind his record collection, which included this Three Man Army LP he picked up for 99 cents at a J.G. McCrory cutout record bin in nearby Hanover. A rock critic in embryo, I listened to every one of his left-behinds–including a Strawbs LP I intuitively knew would suck–but this one. Not only had I never heard of Three Man Army, I couldn’t escape the sneaking suspicion that whatever was on Three Man Army Two would scar me for life.

I needn’t have worried. 1974’s Three Man Army Two isn’t likely to land you in a PTSD therapy group. It’s merely the workmanlike product of a trio of Brit journeymen flailing about in search of a sound they could call their own. As you can tell by that 99-cent sticker price, they didn’t find it.

Three Man Army Two includes a song whose title they stole from Sun Ra, a song about the vision-impaired, an instrumental whose apparent inspiration was a guy named Irving, a song about a polecat woman which I doubt was meant as a compliment and leads me to suspect the boys weren’t averse to a bit of hot and sweaty bestiality, and a couple of other songs of a generic nature too boring to mention. Personally, I think they’d have been better off writing more songs about the joys of interspecies fornication. I’d have happily coughed up the money for a single called “Fruit Bat Lady.”

Three Man Army’s problems were two-fold. First, they were a musically talented but utterly faceless power trio whose specialty lay in writing serviceable but remarkably unremarkable songs. There isn’t a single truly bad track on Three Man Army Two, but aside from “Polecat Woman” I have a hard time remembering a single one of them.

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Here in the 21st Century we’ve foolishly convinced ourselves that we are all knowing. This certainly applies to the canyons of music that is lazily available at our streaming fingertips. However, one of the reasons that record collectors collect records is because they know this misguided assumption of complete access isn’t true: countless amounts of music and media have yet to be digitized and released to the general public. Some of it – if it still exists at all – must be discovered, cleaned up and shared with the masses. Record collectors shed jealous tears when their secret favorites are “discovered” by all, but for the artists who’ve been stuck in the shadows, such releases spell a new lease on their creative life.

Van Duren grew up in the fertile 1970s Memphis, Tennessee music scene and rubbed elbows with another band who dealt with long-delayed critical acclaim, Big Star. Van Duren’s relationship with Big Star wasn’t cursory, in fact he even auditioned to join the band…twice! He also had performed with drummer Jody Stephens and Chris Bell in an attempt to create a new group after Big Star disbanded. Van Duren’s first two albums, Are You Serious? (1978) and Idiot Optimism (1980) have both become highly sought after and expensive items in the record collecting world. Now, they are finally seeing a new remaster and reissue by Omnivore Records thereby giving them the care and appreciation they rightfully deserve.

We join Van Duren, still in Memphis, and discuss these two fabled albums and the bumpy showbiz road that Van Duren traveled on the way to their creation. We talk about Emmitt Rhodes, secret cassette tapes, authentic American rock and roll, and private recordings that still remain undiscovered.

It’s hard to remember that feeling the first time you heard your favorite band, or song. The way the music surged through your veins in a way that was simultaneously new yet familiar. We play our favorite music over and over through the years, and while we still love it, that sensation of hearing those songs takes on an ever so slightly melancholic sheen, it’s just never the same as the first time you heard it. Well, if you’ve never heard Van Duren before, get ready because you might just become an instant fan. I know I did. Here comes that feeling again…you’re welcome.

Evan Toth is a songwriter, professional musician, educator, radio host, avid record collector and hi-fi aficionado. Toth hosts and produces The Sharp Notes each Saturday evening at 6pm and TVD Radar on Sundays at 5AM on WFDU, 89.1 FM. Follow him at the usual social media places and visit his website.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Verve/Impulse! Records/Universal Music Canada, the country’s leading music company, and podcast creative studio PopCult are pleased to announce Verve Presents: Monk Goes To School, an innovative podcast that tells the story of Thelonious Monk’s storied visit, concert, and subsequent recording at Palo Alto High School in 1968. The Podcast is available on all major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, and more. The album Palo Alto was released on September 18.

​In the fall of 1968, a sixteen-year old high school student named Danny Scher had a dream to invite legendary jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and his all-star quartet to perform a concert at his local high school in Palo Alto, CA. In a series of twists and turns, against a backdrop of racial tension and political volatility, that concert was recorded by the school’s janitor and finally released in 2020. Verve Presents: Monk Goes To School tells this story in innovative detail, interweaving the voices of Danny Scher, Thelonius Monk’s son T.S. Monk, monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley and engineer/mixer Grandmixer DXT with narrator Anthony Valadez from KCRW.

The podcast is unique in that there is no hosted interview segment—it takes the listener on an immersive journey featuring the voices of the cast, sound design, and music clips from the record throughout. PopCult Founder/Creative Director Dennis Scheyer says, “Once we heard the story of how the record came to be we felt that it deserved more than the usual ‘interview-based’ portrayal. It’s the kind of show we created our company to produce, and Verve fully supported us.” Recorded entirely “at home” with high-quality microphones across the United States, this podcast deftly weaves through multiple voices, telling this story of Thelonious Monk, the unexpected concert, and of course, uses the music to illustrate this important part of musical history.

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The history of jazz is dominated by events transpiring in New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, California, and of course New York, but all the while the music was thriving elsewhere in a variety of styles. As evidence one need only inspect the outstanding new compilation The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970-1983; collective improvisation, full-bodied fusion, post-Fire Music free wailing, consciousness raising spoken word, and advanced composition for large ensembles all helped shape the scene. It offers an exhaustive amount of info in an 80-page book, and is available on 2LP and CD from Cultures of Soul.

Many thousands undertook the migration to well-ensconced cultural centers in hopes of adding to the jazz discourse and achieving something immortal; a few did, the vast majority did not, and yet their accumulated sonic narrative is still a formidably mountainous accumulation of sound. A percentage of those in the early navigation stages of the established jazz canon might find Cultures of Soul’s latest compilation a daunting item to be soaked up only after contending with a few hundred records of higher profile.

This is a questionable approach. For starters, the canon isn’t going anywhere, and The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970-1983’s standard of quality is likely to get absorbed into the annals of important jazz recordings anyway. Furthermore, Mark Harvey’s extensive notes do a fine job of illuminating the specifics of the city’s jazz environs (particularly venues and educational avenues) and relating them to the East Coast and Midwest scenes while providing background into the larger avant-garde and pinpointing a succession of noteworthy Boston players in the style.

Admittedly a wide field, Harvey details the early Boston avant motions of pianist Cecil Taylor and multi-instrumentalist Makanda Ken McIntyre, moves into groundbreaking work of pianists Lowell Davidson and Ran Blake (both of whom cut albums for ESP-Disk in 1965), bassist John Voigt (sessions with guitarist Joe Morris, saxophonist Jameel Moondoc and more), and The Fringe, a trio formed in the early ‘70s comprised of saxophonist George Garzone, bassist Rich Appleman, and drummer Bob Gullotti (their self-titled debut emerged in 1978).

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The EFG London Jazz Festival will be going ahead as a huge range of shows and special events online, with live concerts now streamed from venues across London and remaining an integral part of the programme. There are a host of streams and online events in the Festival, many available free to view: new work, new collaborations, unique performances, bespoke productions from international artists, talks, family events and interactive sessions, bringing this exceptional 10-day event to audiences across the world.

​The Festival’s signature Jazz Voice (Friday 13 November) opens both the programme and the EFG Elements Series. Streamed from Cadogan Hall, it features China Moses, David McAlmont, Zara McFarlane, Luca Manning, Cleveland Watkiss and Vanessa Haynes, musically directed by Guy Barker and hosted by Jumoké Fashola. The EFG Elements Series also includes performances from Judi Jackson (Saturday 21 November) and Kansas Smitty’s House Band (Sunday 22 November), alongside a special concert live-streamed from the Barbican by Cassie Kinoshi’s SEED Ensemble, with special guests Shabaka Hutchings, Ashley Henry, Richie Seivwright and Yahael Camara-Onono (Saturday 14 November).

The Barbican will also host a live-stream of Shabaka Hutchings with Britten Sinfonia (Wednesday 18 November), whilst Dinosaur (Sunday 15 November), Yazz Ahmed (Thursday 19 November) and Binker Golding (Saturday 21 November) will present online concerts from Kings Place.

A new partnership between the festival and Mixcloud will host a series of shows, including Emma Jean Thackray (Friday 13 November), Sarathy Korwar (Thursday 19 November) and Rosie Turton (Saturday 21 November), all filmed at Total Refreshment Centre. Mixcloud will also present the concerts from the Between the Lines Festival: a night curated by Leafcutter John (Tuesday 17 November), Erased Tapes featuring Anne Müller, Daniel Thorne and Hatis Noit (Monday 16 November) and The Spectacular Empire featuring Loraine James, GLOR1A and more (Wednesday 18 November). Tenderlonious Presents the Music of 22a (Sunday 22 November), a night featuring Ruby Rushton, Nick Walters, The Piccolo and a DJ set from Dennis Ayler, and PALATIUM, presented by GAIKA with Azekel & Miink (Friday 20 November) will also be hosted by Mixcloud.

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There was a time, believe it or not, when Grand Funk Railroad were the biggest live act in America. Your parents may have seen them–if you’re of a certain age, you may have seen them. Hell, had I been a bit older, I probably would have seen them. Which is why the band’s 1970 double LP Live Album is so important a historical document. It’s a testament to our bad taste.

Grand Funk Railroad were the American version of Led Zeppelin. Not insofar as their meat-and-potatoes-without-the-meat hard rock went–they weren’t fit to lick Jimmy Page’s double-neck Gibson. But they were amongst the first bands to appeal to a new generation of primarily working class teens who came of age at the receding tide of the hippie subculture. Bob Dylan didn’t mean jack shit to them, and The Beatles were ancient history–all they wanted to do was gobble Mandrax and fuck in the back seat of their Chevy Camaros.

Rebelling against the music of your older brother, who at 25 may as well be in a nursing home, is as natural as falling flat on your face after downing four ‘ludes–you have to take out puberty on somebody. But whereas Led Zeppelin raised the musical bar forever, Grand Funk’s sole claim to immortality is the iconic anthem “We’re an American Band.”

I count three, only three, keepers on Live Album, and one of them isn’t even a song. On the 52-second “Words of Wisdom,” vocalist/guitarist Mark Farner stops the music to say, apropos accepting strange drugs from other concert goers, “Brothers and sisters, there are people out there who look just like your brother. But they’re not!” But what if, in fact, said brother really is your brother, as in you share a bathroom and regularly pool your pennies to buy a bottle of Romilar? Are you supposed to turn him over to security? Whatever happened to come on people now?

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UK | Inside Record Store Day UK’s battle with the pandemic in 2020: After Record Store Day’s final drop of 2020 gave the vinyl market a welcome boost, organiser Megan Page has appealed to record companies to line up a special selection for next year’s event. Reflecting on the three-part Record Store Day 2020 in a new interview with Music Week, Page attributed a “substantial portion” of vinyl growth to RSDUK. With a second lockdown due to start tomorrow (November 5) record shops will be shuttered once more, but Page has paid tribute to their resilience. Read on to find out how Record Store Day 2020 rolled with the punches and delivered some good news for retail and labels alike. “…We estimate that RSD sales were in the region of 45,000 to 50,000 units across the three days, though it is difficult to gauge due to the volume of independents selling through via mail order which are not tracked. Looking at the individual weeks, overall performance in the first drop showed vinyl album sales were 70,000 units up compared to the same week the previous year (+96%) and in the second drop vinyl sales were 40,000 units up compared to the same week in 2019 (+49%).”

Wilmington, NC | Get groovy: These 5 Wilmington record shops just keep spinning: Back in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Eddie Todd worked at the long-since closed Record Bar music store chain on Oleander Drive, where the PPG Paints store is now. Little did he know that some 35 years later he’d be working at The Record Bar again, albeit a much smaller version a few miles down Oleander toward Wrightsville Beach. Todd, a longtime Wilmington musician and former record store owner (the old Eddie’s Discs in Wallace), just started working at the new Record Bar, which is owned by Wilmington CPA and record collector Tony Stroud, about three weeks ago. Branding itself as “an old name with a new spin,” the cozy nook is a music head’s dream, with wooden bins packed with both old vinyl and new vinyl releases. And the Record Bar is far from the only shop in Wilmington peddling vinyl, a format that’s shown an upswing in popularity among hardcore music lovers in recent years. Pandemic or no, you’ll find plenty people browsing the stacks at the five Port City record shops below.

VT | Soundbites: November Is Local Music Month in Vermont: …a number of local record stores are raffling off five Golden Ticket packages to shoppers who purchase local music or merch this month. The prize includes a $100 gift card to South Burlington nightclub Higher Ground and a one-night stay at Hotel Vermont. (You might have a while to wait before you can use that HG gift card, though.) After you make your purchase of either a Vermont-made album or piece of band merch, share it on social media with the aforementioned hashtag for a chance to win. Participating stores include Barre’s Exile on Main Street; Brattleboro’s Turn It Up!; Montpelier’s Buch Spieler Records; the Queen’s City’s Burlington Records, Pure Pop Records and Speaking Volumes; Winooski’s Autumn Records; and Rutland’s the Howlin’ Mouse Record Store. (Be on the lookout for a check-in with the Howlin’ Mouse in an upcoming edition of this column, as part of my untitled, ongoing series on Vermont’s record stores.) But wait, there’s more! The bands mentioned in said social media posts and represented in your purchases will themselves be entered to win a $400 screen-printing package from Fletcher-based artisan shop Calamity & Crowe’s Trading Post.

Banbury, UK | Banbury records shop sees online sales more than double since first lockdown: A Banbury records shop has seen its online sales more than double since the first lockdown started while the town centre shop remains closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Strummer Room Records, a small record shop hidden away in Church Lane, only just opened a few weeks before the first lockdown. Chris Oakes, the record store’s owner, said: “We opened our doors at the end of February supplying a wide range of (mainly) second-hand vinyl records and CD’s of all genres. We also stock a limited amount of new vinyl and CD’s. “Unfortunately, three weeks after opening, Covid-19 hit and we had to close (like everyone else) for around three months. We re-opened in mid-June and have remained open on a limited basis (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) ever since (until the second lockdown). Chris also runs a growing online business from home, buying and selling vinyl and CD’s all over the world. He said: “Pre-lockdown, we were selling a reasonable amount of records on an online marketplace specific to the vinyl records, cassette tapes and CD market. “However, after lockdown was enforced, the online sales started to increase initially doubling within a couple of weeks and has continued to grow steadily ever since to a point where this side of the business is more sustainable than the physical shop.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | The 1970 debut album from Kool and the Gang announced the arrival of a new force on the funk and R&B scene.

​The 1970 debut album from Kool and the Gang scored a couple of hits with “The Gang’s Back Again” and the title cut, but more importantly, it heralded the arrival of what was to become a juggernaut on the R&B scene. This all-instrumental record is years away from the commercial successes of “Jungle Boogie” and “Celebration,” and a few light years away stylistically, too. But that unique mixture of jazz, funk, and R&B punctuated by those tremendous horn arrangements (and some great drum breaks) that characterizes Kool and the Gang at its best is here in full force.

That’s why original copies of this record go for a “kool” sum. For its first U.S. vinyl reissue in decades, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this R&B masterpiece, we’ve pressed up 1,250 copies in “creamy” vinyl. A funk classic you need to check out if you haven’t heard it lately! R.I.P. Ronald Bell.

Excelling at protest material before honing an introspective approach that’s been naggingly underappreciated over the years, Phil Ochs stands as one of the essential folksingers of the 1960s. Live in Montreal, 10/22/1966 combines his pointed takedowns of authority and injustice with early solo readings of his less explicitly political songwriting, and the combination illuminates the artist’s range and commitment. 

The mixing of music and politics has often inspired snorts of derision from those who feel that art should serve a loftier purpose than didacticism, sloganeering, persuasion, or protest. I’ll confess up front to having occasionally expressed this view, mostly when the music was unsubtle or sanctimonious, but the tenor of the times has surely adjusted my thoughts.

The putdowns of yours truly used to be targeted at scads of hardcore kids obsessing over Reagan or Bush père and/ or fils, or at rock stars preaching about injustice from the comfort of their gilded mansions, but indeed, current events have taken such a severe turn toward the shitty that I’m unreservedly pining for an onslaught of young upstarts chanting slogans of dissent as they call out the oppressors by name. Furthermore, any wealthy celebs who want to get in on the action, please step right up.

Of course, ranting to the converted regularly achieves little more than bucking up morale, while upper-class activism often breeds alienation and the codification of opposing viewpoints. Listening to Live in Montreal, 10/22/1966, it occurs to me that I’m really hoping for a musician (or a few) who can cut through the ugliness to call out the bullshit with clarity and beauty.

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“My love for music developed well after my formative years, and for the most part predicated my creative participation as opposed to being a consumer.”

“I purge melody, dance, and lyric from an internal feeling more than strictly the mind, though the brain is a necessary tool for articulation once the connection is made. The term “channeling” is how I would best describe it. I have created music without having an extensive musical education, I’m not classically trained and there is a lot of music people would be surprised to know I’m ignorant of. I don’t like the idea of certain influences clouding my spirit, however over the years I have increased my knowledge.

Perhaps my father’s success with The Commodores desensitized me to an appreciation of music early on—I was more into sports back then, however eventually, like for most of us, music found its way to my heart. It wasn’t until late in high school that I started to pay real attention to music. Tupac was first, Nas shortly after that, then Bob Marley. I remember it clearly.

I used to live a few blocks away from Tower Records. Back then Tuesdays were the day of new releases. Every Tuesday after school I would swing by that yellow and red building and spend hours. I felt like I was part of a club because we were all there for the same reason. Varied genres attracted a variety of outspoken attitudes from the expressions, struts, spiked mohawks, dreadlocks, tattoos, jumpsuits, velour suits, and tattered rags. There was culture and it was a scene.

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