Jane Monheit has good reason to be smiling from the cover of last month’s Down Beat. She recently left the world of indie labels behind to release her latest album on Sony. At a time when jazz is not exactly flying off the shelves at music stores and record labels are dropping veteran players, there’s […]
Music Features
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Old is new again
“I’m a chance taker, you might say,” says Geno Delafose from his ranch in Eunice, Louisiana. “Traditional tunes are what I do best and nobody else was doing them. I play the music that I love. I believe in myself.” Delafose is talking about a decision that he made in 1994 when he took over […]
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‘It’s Saturday night, it’s you, and it’s them’
Down in the night-life trenches where the real bands slug it out, exposure is the filthy lucre doled out by club owners in lieu of cash — or respect. If you’ve ever ventured into a nightclub clutching an instrument, with a song in your heart, stars in your eyes, and nothing in your pockets, then […]
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Cash Mattock catharsis
A stranger walked up and handed me a package. It was a standard press kit stuffed with CD, photo, and bio. I waited for the big pitch that usually follows, but it didn’t come. “This is not me,” he said simply. Needless to say, I was intrigued. “This is Cash Mattock,” he said. Cash Mattock […]
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Last minute tune-up
Diane Schnier Before Cowboys Basemental Cowboys effectively unseats Ben Folds as the heir to Elton John’s legacy of gorgeous lyrical piano in a pop setting. Unsullied by even a hint of hipster irony, Schnier’s tenderhearted, almost precocious vulnerability is a marvel. Ditto on the sophisticated arrangements. She’s underground, but not for long. Catch her when […]
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‘Prepared to spend a lifetime’
Earlier this year, before the Republican and Democratic parties had selected their presidential candidates, folk singer-guitarist Ani DiFranco talked to City about the dilemma facing those who had voted for Nader in 2000. This time around, there was a growing sense among progressives that they would have to vote practically instead of support the candidate […]
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Sinister strain
The neck on Colin Tyranny’s Gibson SG has been broken at least six times and apparently reaffixed each time with model airplane glue. The bridge was reinstalled crooked after he added a whammy bar. It looks like hell. Yet, plugged in and turned up it sounds incredible. Tyranny strikes the opening note on the opening […]
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The pipes are calling
Jim Malcolm, the singer and guitarist with the Scottish band Old Blind Dogs, is going to church before he plays at one of our local watering holes. In his online tour diary, Malcolm describes himself as being too ‘Presbyterianized’ to feel comfortable in the red-light districts of German cities where he plays, but it isn’t […]
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The font of consummation
The Tragically Hip is getting back to its roots. The band’s eleventh album, In Between Evolution, hearkens back to the quality and sound of earlier records, before the generally panned Music @ Work and In Violet Light of recent years. It may have seemed that the quintet was running dry after 20 years of writing […]
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Cult thing
If you’re a novice Cramps fan, or completely in the dark, the band’s new CD, How To Make A Monster, on their own Vengeance Records label, ain’t for you. “It’s the kinda thing our fans really dig,” says guitarist, Poison Ivy. “If somebody had never heard The Cramps and that’s what they picked up, I […]
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Back to the future
The four members of the Atomic Swindlers who gathered on a recent evening to talk about their new album are no strangers to CD releases. Different combinations of them have played in New Math in the early 1980s, Jet Black Berries in the mid 1980s, and the Raw MaGillys in the 1990s. “If we’d made […]
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Curious music in the great outdoors
There’s a new way to enjoy the outdoors in upstate New York. Composer Robert Morris is showing us the way through his own artistic genre, which amounts to a new form of recreation: park-music. Morris, professor and chair of the Eastman School’s Composition Department, composed for the outdoors before. Eastman’s student-run New Music ensemble, Ossia, […]
