The SF Jazz Collective just began their month-long Spring 2012
tour. Each year since 2004 the eight musicians have selected a composer to honor — including many of the usual suspects: Coltrane, Hancock, Monk, Shorter, Tyner. (In 2013 it will be Chick Corea) This year, changing things up a bit, they've decided to showcase the music of
Stevland Hardaway Morris.
[more inside]
posted by LeLiLo
on Mar 4, 2012 -
3 comments
There was a historic music festival in the summer of 1969. But it's not the one that took place in Bethel, NY. The
Harlem Cultural Festival ran from
June 29 to August 24 that summer, presenting a concert every Sunday afternoon in
Mount Morris Park (known today as Marcus Garvey Park).
Three hundred thousand people turned out for the
six free concerts, hearing acts like
Nina Simone , Sly & the Family Stone (the only act to play both Woodstock and the "black Woodstock"), Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, The 5th Dimension, Moms Mabley and. Speakers included Jesse Jackson and "blue-eyed soul brother" Mayor John Lindsay. Security was courtesy of the
Black Panthers, since the NYC police refused to provide it. Filmmaker Hal Tulchin recorded
over 50 hours of concert footage, which has remained unreleased.
Historic Films seems to hold the footage; it was supposed to be made into a movie to
premiere at Sundance 2007, but its
release seems to be continually delayed for reasons unclear.
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posted by Miko
on Aug 20, 2009 -
19 comments
Ahmet Ertegun was profiled by George W. S. Trow in The New Yorker in a classic piece back in 1978. Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to the US and he remained behind in D.C. studying medieval philosophy at Georgetown. Instead of devoting himself to his studies he founded Atlantic Records with his friend Herb Abramson. Trow charted how Ertegun moved from tramping through muddy, Louisiana fields in search of hot new sounds to the whirl of Studio 54. Below the cut are links to the songs mentioned in the article, as best as I could find, in the order in which they appear.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 17, 2009 -
25 comments
Ramsey Kearney was a teenage country music prodigy
nicknamed the Dixie Farmboy, a rockabilly singer with
the Jimmie Martin Combo, a
songwriter for Brenda Lee, and a producer of the most cloying
Elvis tribute single ever recorded. Kearney would have almost no connection to alternative music whatsoever until John Trubee,
a notorious crank phone caller and sideman for
Zoogz Rift, found an ad in the back of the
Midnight Globe tabloid from Kearney's
Nashco Records label, a
song-poem company offering to
put his words to music for a small fee. Trubee sent his own
disturbing LSD-fueled lyrics to Nashco, but to his surprise, Nashco accepted the lyrics after taking a $79.95 fee from Trubee. Kearney tweaked the lyrics slightly in order to avoid a
lawsuit from Stevie Wonder, but the end product was the cult classic novelty song,
Blind Man's Penis. (more inside)
posted by jonp72
on Aug 3, 2006 -
12 comments
