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JOE LOVANO INTERVIEWED (2008): Life is in the learning
At 55, Joe Lovano is one of the leading saxophonists of his generation, and has a career notable for its diversity. He has played straight ahead and swing, worked with Cuban musicians and orchestras, done an album of Sinatra songs, and has enjoyed two longtime musical relationships: one is with guitarist John Scofield whom he met at Berklee in the early 70s; the other is with drummer Paul... more >>
Added: 19 Oct 08
OTIS REDDING: The lost legacy of a soul genius
The life and death of Otis Redding is replete with ironies. The man who displaced Elvis in the British magazine Melody Maker as top male vocalist in ’67 – knocking off the King after an eight-year straight residency – could barely crack the top 10 in his homeland. Yet after his death in December that year – his plane going nose-down into a Wisconsin lake –... more >>
Added: 19 Oct 08
JOHN SCOFIELD INTERVIEWED: Has guitar, will travel . . . and travel, and travel
Looking back now it is hard to recall how it all started and who we should blame – but suddenly in the mid-70s there they were, electric guitarists spitting out notes faster than shells from an Uzi. “Fingers scampering across the fret board like a mouse on Meth,” was how Playboy described a 1975 Jeff Beck album, and the sheer speed of warp-factor five guitarists like John... more >>
Added: 18 Oct 08
EGBERTO GISMONTI: Guitarist with a much-stamped passport
They say truth is where you find it. For Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and composer Egberto Gismonti it was there among the Indian peoples of the remote Xingu region of the Amazonian jungle back in the late 70s. For a month, far removed from the urban world he knew and with no common language other than music, Gismonti lived and played music with the Indians, particularly their chief... more >>
Added: 17 Oct 08 
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BILL CHAMBERS INTERVIEWED (2003): Call of the big country
When Bill Chambers tells it, with a smile at the corner of his lips and in his leisurely Australian drawl, it sounds the most natural thing in the world. But it's kind of strange. He's talking about the mid-70s and what he was doing then, having grown up on country music and playing in bands. "I was a bit of a cowboy hippie, long hair but a cowboy hat. I had a long beard and the... more >>
Added: 16 Oct 08
DIAMONDS AND ROUGH IN A BOX: Nuggets; Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 considered
There's an interesting local observation to be made about this four-CD box set of what is essentially low-rent, lo-fi American garageband rock. But first, a little history. Back in 1972 Lenny Kaye - later guitarist in Patti Smith's band - released the original double-vinyl compilation Nuggets. In a garish psychedelic cover (faithfully reproduced here across the four discs,... more >>
Added: 14 Oct 08
RAHSAAN ROLAND KIRK (1936-77): Just a wild'n'crazy guy?
Nobody talks about Rahsaan Roland Kirk much anymore. Maybe it’s because his recording career was too erratic, maybe because this sometimes fright-inducing multi-instrumentalist (literally, he could play three saxophones simultaneously) went kinda strange from time to time. You know what some listeners are like – they are dullards who like things linear and consistent. Guys like... more >>
Added: 14 Oct 08
DAVID SANBORN JAZZ AND ELSEWHERE SAXOPHONIST INTERVIEWED (1992): Where it's at, wherever "at" is at.
A little over three years ago an American magazine profiled alto saxophonist David Sanborn and included a selected discography. It made terrifyingly impressive reading. Aside from almost a dozen albums under his own name – and a pretty high count of Grammy awards among them – there were the albums where he’d had a guest spot. That distinctive sandpaper sax you remember... more >>
Added: 11 Oct 08
GILLIAN WELCH INTERVIEWED (2004): That ol' time contemporary music
For someone whose stark songs sound like they have come from the impoverished rural underbelly of Depression-era America, Gillian Welch seems as lively as a June-bug. She laughs readily and doesn't come across as a woman who sings death ballads and has the signature song Orphan Girl. But Welch surprises on many levels. Those who have heard her spare singing on the soundtrack to O Brother,... more >>
Added: 7 Oct 08
CHARLIE HADEN, JAZZ BASSIST AND COMPOSER: Like dreamers do . . .
By rights, 71year old bassist/composer Charlie Haden shouldn’t be around in jazz today. Like so many of his generation he had a heroin addiction in the early 60s and often wouldn’t show up on the bandstand until midnight, and even then only be half there. But there’s also another reason. Haden was born in Shenandoah, Idaho – hardly a hotbed of jazz innovation... more >>
Added: 4 Oct 08
AMERICA'S DEWEY BUNNELL INTERVIEWED (2007): Upstarts up the charts
Among people whose musical credentials you wouldn’t question would be the Beatles’ producer George Martin. Or if you want a more contemporary reference maybe alt.country rocker Ryan Adams, James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins, or guys from the indie bands My Morning Jacket and Nada Surf. And the link -- possibly the only one -- between these diverse people is an unexpected one:... more >>
Added: 2 Oct 08
JOE LOVANO, A CAREER CONSIDERATION (2004): Sax in every direction
About a month ago I was in New York and spoke to Bruce Lundvall, head of the Blue Note label. Lundvall is a jazz man from way back and has been a major player in shaping careers. He worked the jazz catalogue at Sony back when it was called Columbia, left to start the Elektra Musician label for Warners and has been helming Blue note for two decades. He signed Wynton Marsalis to Sony,... more >>
Added: 1 Oct 08
MUSIC IS MY MADNESS: Ego, drugs and minor chords, musicians who lost the plot
The world of music is populated by creative people -- and those around them who offer musicians absurd amounts of money, pampering for their inflating egos and medication for their every ailment, real or imagined. The surprising thing is that more musicians don’t follow Elvis, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty into that netherworld of self-delusion, eccentricity... more >>
Added: 1 Oct 08 1 Comment
KEITH JARRETT'S THE MELODY AT NIGHT, WITH YOU (1999). Distilling genius
These days, Keith Jarrett gets as much space, sometimes more, in jazz encyclopaedias as the great saxophonist John Coltrane. That irritates some people, it would be like Van Morrison getting more than Sam Cooke in a dictionary of soul. But there’s a reason: they’ve lived longer, done more. When Coltrane died in 1967, he’d had an effective playing career... more >>
Added: 1 Oct 08
THE DOORS, ON AND OFF THE RECORD: Still opening and closing
I only saw the Doors once, in a packed club on Sunset Strip. That was five years ago. Jim Morrison had been dead 35 years but there they were -- or at least an excellent replica -- going through their hits as the leather-clad singer exuded menace, animal sexuality and seduction. The crowd -- mostly people not born when the Doors peaked in the late 60s -- included other Morrison... more >>
Added: 29 Sep 08
DAVID BOWIE INTERVIEWED (1993): Black tie, white noise and the duke bounces back
David Bowie is a pain. Or more correctly perhaps, “his people” are. Eighteen months ago, when he was keen to plug his uneven, already forgotten but not uninteresting Tin Machine II album (the follow-up to what we might have charitably called “a side project” in a long career) he was a pushover. Oh, just wait by the phone “his people” said and... more >>
Added: 29 Sep 08
LEE SCRATCH PERRY IN THE 90s: Getting dub'n'reggae through time tuff
By the early 90s - a decade on from the death of Bob Marley - the consciousness reggae movement he headed was floundering internationally. In New Zealand, where reggae is one of the bloodlines, it was disappearing from radio and aside from well attended appearances by Judy Mowatt and Ziggy Marley concerts it really was “time tough,” as Toots once said. But there was also a... more >>
Added: 28 Sep 08
DAVID GILMOUR OF PINK FLOYD INTERVIEWED 1988: Us and Them Lawyers
Rock stars shouldn’t talk this way, not in these well-rounded vowels and carefully constructed, oh-so English sentences. But then, this is David Gilmour from Pink Floyd – and as rock bands go Pink Floyd are no ordinary band at all. Here is the band which presents astonishingly visual concerts, every couple of years unleashes a monster of an album and then disappears into... more >>
Added: 27 Sep 08
JUDY MOWATT INTERVIEWED (1990): Reggae's reigning queen
Judy Mowatt wears her unofficial title “the queen of reggae” easily. A striking figure of regal bearing she holds her head high, and, as a member of The Twelve Tribes of Israel, talks as easily about the Queen of Sheba in ancient times as she does about Yellowman, DJ dancehall stars in Jamaica today and shows a canny knowledge of chart placings for various reggae artists. In... more >>
Added: 27 Sep 08
MILES DAVIS, A TRIBUTE TO JACK JOHNSON: And a fighter by his trade . . .
An inch over six feet and usually weighing in just under 200 pounds. Jack Johnson was perfectly proportioned for a heavyweight fighter. But as a kid in Galveston, Texas in the 1880s, he let his older sisters fight for him. At 12, Johnson jumped a ship for New York, returning a year later to work on the docks where he had his share of beatings. So he took boxing... more >>
Added: 26 Sep 08
