Posts by Dan Alford

It’s a great groove mix this week on Stormy Mondays, kicking off with John Scofield’s A Go Go, the title track of the album that single-handedly initiated the New Groove revolution near the turn of the century, helped in no small part by his band for the album, MMW. It is one of the true […]

To help you cope with the heat, this week’s Stormy Monday is a very cool full Burning Spear festival set from 1999 in France. It’s loaded with his best known material including great versions of The Youth, Christopher Columbus and Door Peep, and has a long African Postman > Happy Day encore that will leave […]

Since Furthur began their summer tour with a gig at All Good and a pair shows in New York state, it seems like the perfect time to offer up a favorite first set from the Grateful Dead catalog: June 15, 1990 at Shoreline. Brent’s final year with the band is loaded with extremely strong performances, […]

A bit of midsummer jazz this week, starting off with Cannonball Adderley in the 1970’s doing a live version of Primitivo, followed by New York based pianist Marc Cary with Minor League. Cary’s recent Focus Trio Live album is a fantastic listen, by the way, and certainly worth hunting down, especially if you’re into Jason […]

Medeski, Martin and Wood celebrated their 20th anniversary on Saturday night with a free gig in Central Park sponsored by their label Blue Note. Always a favorite trio to my ears, I want to spend some time over the remaining months of the year exploring the music of the band, and I want to start […]

Memorial Day weekend is coming up and that means it’s time for Volume VIII in the ever popular Stormy Monday Acoustic Mix series. This time around we open with an early Surprise Me Mr. Davis performance of Rolling Home back when the band was a folksier offshoot of The Slip rather than the Americana rockers […]

The Wayne Shorter Quartet is widely regarded as the greatest improvisational jazz group on the planet right now, and it’s fair to say that history will bump that status up to “of all time.” Featuring Shorter on tenor and soprano, Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drumz, all of […]

This week’s Stormy Monday is a selection of hard rocking material floating around for free on the internet. The opening track is a sample from the upcoming Europe ‘72 set from the Grateful Dead, a great Playing In The Band from April 14, 1972. I’ve always been especially fond of Playing’s from this era because […]

Later this week Phish is releasing a remaster of the 7/31/99 Fuji Rock Fest show to benefit Japanese disaster relief, and to set you in the right frame of mind, this week’s Stormy Monday is a suite from the previous day at the same fest: a laid back Funky Bitch into a lengthy Ghost into […]

This week’s Stormy Monday is a spring mix to get the season started right, opening up appropriately enough with Rain by The Beatles. Following that is The Mother Hips with This Dream, a track that didn’t make it onto Pacific Dust but sure is pretty enough. Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band, who are at the […]

The Stormy Monday Rhythm and Soul Review opens with James Brown from 1971, Brother Rap > Ain’t It Funky Now, including a great solo from Fred Wesley. Next up is Taj Mahal with Ain’t That A Lot of Love and the free sample of the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Bound for Glory. With that release and […]

While Trey Anastasio still has five dates to go on this winter tour, it’s fair to say that this run of shows will remain memorable for years and years to come for its acoustic sets. I’ve never considered Trey a particularly good acoustic guitar player – certainly not compared to his contemporaries who regularly strap on a wooden ax: Warren, Bobby, Jake, Chuck, Al and the like. He mostly just strums a bit and plays mellow tunes – remember his sit-down request at Phish’s Festival 8?

[Photo by Andy Hill]

Seeing him play acoustic has always been fun, but nothing too special, but this tour changed all that. He’s been out there every night playing a killer selection of songs – many of which have slight to bold changes in arrangement – singing his heart out, having the crowd sing its heart out too, and playing his guitar beautifully. It’s been magic.

With that in mind, here’s a mix of some highlights so far, a little something from every night. Especially noteworthy is the B-side here, the three-song run from early in the show at Albany. No audience has been so entirely right there with Trey and he responded in kind, just slaying the room with a glowing Number Line and the truly amazing risk of Limb By Limb on the fly – that was trust. And following that is the slick, nasty, reworked Cavern and stunning Harry Hood from Columbus. It’s a long one this week, so settle in and as always, enjoy!

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READ ON for a look at this weekend’s TAB setlists…

There have been a bunch of ’80s Jerry Garcia Band shows circulating lately, both acoustic and electric. I’ve been digging into 1984, not a year I’m particularly well versed in as far as Garcia’s solo projects go, and keep coming back to the first set from 3/10 at Keystone. It’s a four song affair, opening […]

This week’s Stormy Mondays is a little something to get the blood going in these cold winter weeks: good old fashion guitar rock, starting out with Widespread Panic covering Travelin’ Light, followed by Neil Young and Crazy Horse doing C’mon Baby Let’s Go Down Town. Next up is Mr. Hendrix covering Mr. Dylan’s Positively Fourth […]

On New Year’s Eve Fareed Haque played his final gig with Garaj Mahal. As a founding member of the group, Fareed was front man and lead guitarist alike, a jazz master at his funky finest. In the collectivist spirit of the band, they all wrote material and every night’s set list was a round robin […]

As we do every year at Stormy Mondays, we celebrate the arrival of the new year with the music of John Coltrane. This time around we’re looking back to Trane’s collaborations with Miles Davis, and I use that word deliberately. It’s been said that Miles did three things for Trane: hired him, fired him and […]

While your ears will likely already be filled with plenty of Phish this week, why not add another heaping helping? This week’s Stormy Monday is a mix of vintage Vermont goodness drawn from three show in the early nineties: 4/25/93 in Geneseo, NY; 12/31/92 in Boston, MA; and 5/14/92 in Port Chester, NY. The first […]

2010 has been a big year for tenth anniversaries, and one of the last is also one of my favorites. Medeski, Martin & Wood’s fall tour, which featured guitarist and singer Oren Bloedow, whose album featured the trio as the session band, and percussionist Cyro Baptista, made its way to Upstate New York at the […]

Welcome back to the latest edition of the ongoing Jazz in the Present Tense series here at Stormy Mondays. This time we’re checking out a triptych of recent recordings starting out with two stellar piano trios. The first is Jason Moran and Bandwagon who released Ten on Blue Note over the summer, celebrating their decade […]

That favorite holiday weekend is coming up, so sit back and celebrate with Volume VII in the Stormy Mondays Acoustic Mix series. Far and beyond the jammiest version to date, this one opens with Mike Gordon and Trey Anastasio giving a different and fun reading of Wilson, followed by Warren Haynes delivering a wicked cover […]