Archive: February, 2009
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
It’s a great music weekend in town, starting during the day Friday when Jason Isbell does the free-at-noon at World Café Live (then comes back to do full set at night). Here’s a six-part sampling of three days particularly strong in international sounds, with a playlist at the bottom.
1. Jason Isbell, “Dress Blues.” Friday at the World Café Live. Ex-Drive By Truckers singer and guitarist, a mighty fine songwriter and storyteller and fat toned guitar player whose sound leans towards ‘70s rock.
2. Magic Slim, Live from the Chicago Blues Festival. Not-slim magic man born Morris Holt who’s grown into his role as a crowd pleasing elder statesman of the Chicago blues scene. Friday and Saturday at Warmdaddy’s.
3. Thievery Corporation, “The Time We Lost Our Way.” D.C. production duo Rob Garza and Eric Hilton, who bring a jazz and world rhythm sensibility to chilled out electronic grooves. Saturday at Electric Factory.
4. Juana Molina, “El Perro.” The former Carol Burnett of Argentina builds up an ethereal, bewitching mélange of acoustic and electronic elements, mischievously turning the stage into her own sound lab. Sunday at the World Café Live.
5. Blitzen Trapper, “Wild Mountain Nation.” Excellent, all-over-the-place Portland, Oregon indie-rock band. Sunday at the First Unitarian Church.
6. Mariza, “Rosa Branca.” Portugese fado singer who looks like she stepped out of an El Greco painting, and makes beautifully melancholy music. Sunday at the Kimmel Center.
friday
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
Bruce Springsteen had a pretty good week this week, winning his dispute with Ticketmaster over the concert ticket behemoth's practice of directing buyers to their legalized-scalping TicketsNow site. Here's something else good that the guy who was singing live at the Super Bowl (while the E Street Band were on tape) did recently: Play Slo-Mo, the Philadelphia band led by lap steel mastermind Mike Brenner and rapper Mic Wrecka, during his second spot as a guest DJ on Sirius XM E Street Radio.
Shackamaxon - Slo-Mo Bruce Springsteen "The Wrestler" - Official Video
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
The new U2 album, No Line On the Horizon, which comes out on Tuesday, is streaming on MySpace. Hear it here. I'll have a review in the Inky on Sunday.
U2 - Get On Your Boots
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
My interview with Asleep At The Wheel leader Ray Benson and his pal Willie Nelson is here and in today's Inquirer. Tonight at 10 Nelson and Benson and the rest of AATW will play live from Carl's Corner, Texas, broadcast on Willie's Place on XM Satellite Radio 13 and Sirius 64. Here's Willie and the Wheel doing "Hesitation Blues" on Letterman last week. Beneath that, a taste of the Willie And The Wheel disc, on Benson's Bismeaux label, which can be had here.
willie and the wheel
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
Conan O'Brien did his last show from New York on Friday, closing it out with a performance by The White Stripes, who've been on his show many times before. Meg's on guitar instead of drums on a folkie, halting and heartfelt "We're Going To Be Friends."
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
“I tried to leave you, I don’t deny,” Leonard Cohen slyly sang after skipping back on stage for his third encore, towards the end of his marvelous nearly three-hour show at the Beacon Theater in New York on Thursday.
But the dapper 74 year old Canadian song-poet just can’t quit us, baby. The Beacon show – which, yes, included the deliciously apocalyptic “First We Take Manhattan” – was Cohen’s first in the U.S. in nearly 15 years, an absence he alluded to when he quipped: “It’s been a long time since I stood onstage in New York. I was 60 years old – just a kid with a crazy dream.”
In the interim, Cohen joked, he’d taken a lot of "Prozac, Ephedrine and Tylenol, full strength” and while immersing himself in Buddhism, “turned to a study of religion and philosophy, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”
That cheerfulness was inescapable at the refurbished Beacon, where Cohen came across as the most munificent of bandleaders. He typically took off his fedora to humbly bear witness each time a solo was taken by member of his terrific sextet, whose members included Barcelona bandurria player Javier Mas, Hammond B-3 ace Neil Larsen and many of many wind instruments Dino Soldo.
Their prowess, and Cohen’s surprisingly strong, sepulchral voice, was augmented by the femme chorus of Cohen collaborator Sharon Robinson, plus Webb sisters Charley and Hattie, who also played harp and guitar, and during one playful moment during “The Future,” responded to an altered Cohen lyric about “white girls dancing” by doing cartwheels.
Cohen must be doing a lot of yoga these days – he dropped down on his knees to please more times than Carlos Ruiz in the course of the evening, and he did literally skip on and off stage at intermission and between encores. His state of mind seemed remarkably sanguine, too, for a guy who, he has alleged, has been bilked out of as much as $5 million from an unscrupulous former business manager.
That need of cash may well be why the versifier of wounded romanticism is out of retirement and back on the road, with a live album due in March, and a U.S. tour this spring with a Philadelphia date at the suitably classy Academy of Music on May 12. Tickets go on sale March 2 at 10 a.m at the Kimmel Center web site.
But whatever brought him back to Broadway, the assembled 2800 – who included Rufus Wainwright, Harvey Keitel and Adrian Grenier of HBO’s Entourage (none of whom joined Cohen on stage) - had plenty of reasons to be delighted, as Cohen surveyed a four decade plus career, moving from gypsy jazz to Euro disco to stately folk-rock.
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
Last weekend his kids Rufus and Martha played the Kimmel Center on Valentine's Day, and tonight pater familias Loudon Wainwright III gets his say-so at the Sellersville Theater.
Below, witness the various stages of Loudo. Circa 1972, he's desperately pleading for someone to save his life, at least for one night, in "Motel Blues," a song he reprised on the new Joe Henry-produced Recovery.
And on Austin City Limits in 2004, he's singing abut Rufus, and his own dad, Life magazine journalist Loudon Wainwright Jr., on "A Father And A Son," from his 1992 Wainwright family masterstroke, History.
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
I'm not sure what that means, but it rhymes with "I saw the ghost of Lena Zavaroni," who, in an unintentional theme that's emerged on this blog this week, is a former child star whose life came to a bad end. I hadn't heard of her until I started paying attention to the words of "Knickerbocker," the deadpan Kraftwerk jam on Light Bulbs by Fujiya & Miyagi, the British threesome partly named for the Karate Kid sensei. Of course, all of Fujiya & Miyagi's songs are deadpan Kraftwerk electro-funk jams, usaully accompanied by cool looking videos, like the one for Knickerbocker below or the domino-dancing clip for "Ankle Injuries." And I'm not sure if any of their songs make literal sense, or if "Knickerbocker" drops the name of Zavaroni, the Scottish singer who sounded like Ethel Merman when she was on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show when she was 10, and who died in 1999, for any other reason than that it sounds good. This is a roundabout way of saying that Fujiya & Miyagi are at the Troc tonight, along with School of Seven Bells, the indie-prog trio consisting of Ben Curtis of Secret Machines and twin sisters Alejandra and Claudia Deheza.
Dan DeLuca, Inquirer Music Critic
Best Flight Of The Conchords episode of the season yet this week, thanks in part to Eternal Sunshine/Be Kind Rewind director Michel Gondry. No disrespect to Mel's "Dreams," but it boasted the best song of season two, too, in Jemaine's lonely man lament "Choir Of Ex-Girlfriends," otherwise known as "Carol Brown." (She took a bus out of town, by the way, unlike Tiffany, who had an epiphany, or Mona, who told Jemaine she was in a coma.)
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