News

George Scott, founding baritone of gospel vocal group the Blind Boys Of Alabama, died yesterday (March 9) at his home in Durham, N.C., according to a statement. He was 75.

“We’re grateful to the Lord for letting us have George for as long as we did,” says Blind Boys leader Clarence Fountain, who was one of the last people Scott spoke to before his death. “He and I grew up together and sang together from little boys to old men. George was a great singer, he could sing any part in a song. We loved him and he was one of the ‘Boys.’ He lived a life of service and now he’s gone on to his reward.”

Born George Lewis Scott in Notasulga, Ala., the artist met Fountain and Jimmy Carter in 1936 at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind. Three years later they formed the traditional gospel singing group, which Scott also accompanied on guitar.

In recent years, the group enjoyed a resurgence in popularity and recently won the best traditional soul gospel album Grammy for “There Will Be a Light” (Virgin), recorded with singer/songwriter Ben Harper. The set featured Scott singing lead on the album’s opening track, “Take My Hand.”

Though Scott retired from touring last year, he continued to record with the group and will be heard on its new album, “Atom Bomb,” due Tuesday (March 15) from Real World Records. No changes are planned in the Blind Boys touring schedule, which picks up again with a March 18 showcase at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas.

Funeral services will be held March 15 at Monumental Faith Church in Durham. His family has asked that mourners make donations to the American Diabetes Association or send flowers to the city’s Holloway Funeral Home.

Scott is survived by his wife Ludie Lewis Mann Scott, his mother Hassie Lou Scott and his sister Benzie Jackson.

Source billboard.com.

For sale: perhaps the world’s finest and biggest pictorial history of jazz and American music. Must be kept together.

Frank Driggs, a former jazz journalist and record producer, started buying jazz photos from collectors more than half a century ago. After word got out he was a top collector, musicians often gave him pictures.

“For filmmakers who often visit hundreds of tiny archives to make a documentary you can’t appreciate enough the value of a collection that contains so many photos,” documentary filmmaker Ken Burns told Reuters.

Driggs was the single biggest supplier of pictures for “Jazz,” the 17-hour television series by Burns.

Driggs’ nearly 80,000 photos range from 1898 shots of ragtime’s Scott Joplin and Tom Turpin to portraits of big bands at since-closed Harlem and East Village haunts of the 1950s.

To read more, please visit yahoo.com.

Cartoon quartet Gorillaz will on May 24 release its sophomore Virgin album, “Demon Days.” A video is in production for first single “Feel Good Inc.,” featuring De La Soul. Album track “Dirty Harry,” which features what sounds like a children’s choir, has been making the rounds on the Internet for several weeks.

The brainchild of Blur frontman Damon Albarn and “Tank Girl” creator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz comprises the characters Noodle, Murdoc, 2-D, and Russell who inhabit a virtual world on Gorillaz.com.

The 15-track “Demon Days” is the follow-up to Gorillaz’s worldwide smash self-titled debut, which has sold more than 1.54 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and six million worldwide, according to Virgin.

Accurately described as “darker” and “more intense” than its predecessor, but no less eclectic, the album was co-produced by Albarn and Danger Mouse. “Last Living Souls” is marked by acoustic strumming and piano melodies, while “Kids With Guns” threads a sample of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” through a multi-faceted musical backdrop.

The collective puts a weird spin on seductive soul with “Every Planet We Reach Is Dead,” while “White Light” starts off in similar territory as Blur’s raucous “Song 2” before being interrupted by an angelic interlude. For an extra dash of oddness, actor Dennis Hopper offers spoken-word intonations atop “Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head.”

The London Community Gospel Choir can be heard on the title track, while guest spots by Blondie’s Deborah Harry, rock legend Ike Turner, the Happy Mondays’ Shaun Ryder and underground rapper MF Doom are sprinkled throughout other cuts.

Here is the track list for “Demon Days”:

“Intro”
“Last Living Souls”
“Kids With Guns”
“O Green World”
“Dirty Harry”
“Feel Good Inc.”
“El Manana”
“Every Planet We Reach Is Dead”
“November Has Come”
“All Alone”
“White Light”
“DARE”
“Fire Coming Out of a Monkey’s Head”
“Don’t Get Lost in Heaven”
“Demon Days”

Source billboard.com.

The 10,000 Lakes Festival is proud to announce Widespread Panic and Trey Anastasio have confirmed a weekend of headlining performances for the 2005 event. Widespread Panic returns to the 10,000 Lakes Festival for the second time with two special headlining performances on the Main Stage Friday, Saturday, July 22, 23. Closing this year’s festival Sunday, July 24 is Trey Anastasio, the guitarist and founder of the seminal band Phish.

The third annual 10,000 Lakes Festival is scheduled for July 22-24 at the scenic Soo Pass Ranch in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The 10,000 Lakes Festival showcases over thirty artists and bands on four stages, including the Barn Stage on a shady hill overlooking the concert bowl, the Field Stage where the audience can spread out and soak up some sun, the Saloon Stage for intimate concerts and late night jams, and the Main Stage where everyone gathers in the evening for the major concerts featuring Widespread Panic and Trey Anastasio.

Multi-Day Tickets starting at $110 are available now through the festival website: 10klf.com

The event ticket price includes all band performances and camping under the stars adjacent to the most beautiful outdoor concert venue in the nation. The 10,000 Lakes Festival held at the 600-acre Soo Pass Ranch in beautiful Northern Minnesota contains numerous campgrounds, built specifically for people to enjoy their camping experience in a spacious, friendly and comfortable setting.

Festival-goers can relax in beautiful Lake Sallie Campground with over 3,000 feet of shoreline or settle into the magnificent forest of the Northwoods campground. VIP Camping is located directly behind the Main Stage. The campgrounds are well groomed with permanent roads and real showers and are suitable for virtually any kind of camping vehicle. Every campground is within easy walking distance of the concert site.

Modern amenities on site include clean, permanent restrooms facilities with running water; additionally, internet access and a wide variety of high quality food and beverages will be available.

Additional bands playing the event will be announced in the coming weeks.

On the heels of last year’s deluxe reissue of its debut album, the Cure will give similar treatment given to the subsequent three releases that put the band at the center of the 1980s modern rock movement. Due April 26 via Rhino, remastered versions of 1980’s “Seventeen Seconds,” 1981’s “Faith” and 1982’s “Pornography” will each emerge with an extra disc of rarities.

In the case of “Seventeen Seconds,” the second disc comprises 15 songs, including studio and live renditions of “I’m a Cult Hero” and “I Dig You” released under the pseudonym Cult Hero. Other goodies include demos and live versions of songs that appear on the original album.

The “Faith” reissue adds the cassette-only B-side “Carnage Visors” to the first disc’s original eight tracks. The second disc boasts 15 tracks, such as demos of “Faith” and “Doubt,” outtakes of “Primary” and “A Normal Story” and live versions of “The Drowning Man” and “Forever.”

“Pornography” gains 14 tracks on its bonus disc, including instrumental demos of “Demise” and “The Figurehead” and live versions of “A Short Term Effect,” “Cold” and “Siamese Twins.”

Each package will be bolstered by booklets with lyrics, photos from singer Robert Smith’s personal collection and track-by-track commentary by U.K. music journalist Johnny Black.

The full track list for each reissue can be found on the band’s official Web site.

Source billboard.com.

Harmonized Records is proud to announce the signing of DJ Williams Projekt., the label which includes such artists as Lotus, Perpetual Groove, The Motet, and Garaj Mahal is looking forward to a great year, and many more announcements in the weeks to come. A ground breaking instrumentalist and self-taught guitarist, DJ Williams has established a unique sound in acoustic & electric guitar. The Richmond, VA-based performer is amazing crowds everywhere with his guitar wizardry backed up by his 6-piece “Projekt,” the roots of which can be heard on the first self-released Projekt album, Wrong Notes Write.

The newest album, Projekt Management, is a thoroughly funky exploration of jazz, fusion, and soul grooves with inherent heaps of experience and diversity among the performers. Williams’ smooth, innovative songwriting and playing is the centerpiece around which orbits a fiery formation of brass, drums, bass, and keys. With the energetic Gordon Jones on sax, the infinitely capable drumming of Dusty Simmons, huge swells and thumps of bass from Todd Herrington, colorful trumpet excursions from Mark Ingraham, and masterful keyboard additions from Brian Mahne, the Projekt has truly come to fruition.

“I just hope to keep expanding and sharing what I believe is a new kind of sound that is progressive and always full of surprises,” says Williams. Although they are new to the hard-touring scene, The Projekt will be presenting their sound at festivals such as California’s High Sierra Music Festival, Florida’s hot Langerado Music Festival, the eclectic Haymaker Festival in Virginia, and North Carolina’s long-running Smilefest. With Projekt Management ready to be heard by the masses on June 28, 2005, DJ Williams Projekt will soon find success behind their careful planning.

Moby kicks off his North American tour in support of his new album,

Z-Trip, UNKLE and Everything But The Girl’s Ben Watt have been added to the lineup for the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, to be held April 30-May 1 at the Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif.

After making his Coachella debut in 2002 with a near-legendary set featuring a surprise appearance by Beck, Z-Trip acknowledges the difficulty in topping it this time around.

To read more visit billboard.com.

G. Love & Special Sauce and Particle are among the artists who will perform on the inaugural Xingolati Groove Cruise. The three-day, three-night charter will depart Los Angeles Oct. 14 en route to Ensenada, Mexico, on board the Carnival Cruise Lines’ ship Paradise.

The event will feature sets by the John Popper Project featuring DJ Logic, the Everyone Orchestra, DJ Greyboy, the Mutaytor, DJ Laird, Perpetual Groove, Lowpro Lounge, Soul Rebels Brass Band and Delta Nove. Organizer Guy Grand Productions (GGP) is also promising performance art and circus theatrics to amuse 2,000 fans.

For more Xingolati information or to reserve a space, visit Xingolati.com.

More than a year-and-a-half after first revealing plans for the project to Billboard.com, Ry Cooder’s musical portrait of a lost Los Angeles Mexican neighborhood will finally see release in late spring. Across the 15 tracks of “Chavez Ravine,” the artist brings back to life the hillside community that was destroyed by developers in the 1950s and since 1962 has been home to Dodger Stadium.

“It’s a story/concept record about Chavez Ravine,” Cooder told Billboard.com in November 2003, “our L.A. classic Hispanic Pachuco tale of woe, corruption, politics, the Red Scare, the little and the big, neighborhood vs. corporate, all rolled into one.”

The songs on “Chavez Ravine,” due June 7 on his own Perro Verde Records imprint through Nonesuch, are sung in Spanish and English. Helping Cooder weave the pastiche of conjunto, corrido, R&B, Latin pop and jazz are Chicano music great Lalo Guerrero, late Pachuco legend Don Tosti, singer Little Willie G. (Thee Midniters), Ersi Arvizu (The Sisters) and veteran East L.A. band El Chicano.

“I think we did a pretty good job at using this music to demonstrate a lot of things about daily life and good ways,