2004

Reid Geneuar & the Assembly of Dust have annonced they will be playing a two night New Year’s Eve Bash At The Paradise Theater in Boston, MA. Touring in support of their latest release -The Honest Hour – the disc’s nine original songs are a mix of new Assembly of Dust songs and re-imagined versions of songs Genauer wrote with his former band, Strangefolk.
For more information visit the band’s website at www.assemblyofdust.com

In other New England new year’s eve news, The Jazz Mandolin Project featuring Jon Fishman will be playing a Dec. 31 gig at the new Higher Ground music club in South Burlington, VT. For more info- check the venues website at www.highergroundmusic.com

Dave Matthews Band has confirmed that its Sept. 12 free show in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park will be the second in its Live Trax series of self-released live albums. No release date has yet been unveiled for the show, which can be purchased as a 3-CD set or MP3 and FLAC digital downloads via the band’s official Web site.

The performance featured airings of the new songs “Joyride,” “Hello Again” and “Sugar Will,” the latter featuring Carlos Santana. Fans who pre-order the show online will be entered to win a framed, autographed concert poster.

DMB kicked off the Live Trax series earlier this month with the release of a Dec. 8, 1998, show from Worcester, Mass., which featured guest spots by guitarist Tim Reynolds and banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck.

Source billboard.com.

For over a decade the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey have been crisscrossing America, slowly but surely blossoming into one of the most visionary and fearless bands in improvisational music.

Vintage rock trio Cream will reunite for a string of shows next year at London’s Royal Albert Hall, sources tell Billboard.com. The group — guitarist/vocalist Eric Clapton, drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce — played its final shows at Albert Hall before splintering in November 1968. Cream has not performed together since its 1993 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Billboard.com understands the trio will begin rehearsals after the first of the year, with an eye on a week-long run of gigs at Albert Hall. It is unknown if plans call for additional shows in other parts of the world. A spokesperson for Clapton had no comment.

Source billboard.com.

A U.S. appeals court in San Francisco has handed a victory to pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys in a dispute over the musical practice of sampling, in which recording artists incorporate snippets of other songs into their own work.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined today (Nov. 9) to reconsider its decision last year allowing the group to use a six-second segment of music from jazz flutist James Newton’s 1978 composition “Choir.” The Beastie Boys used the sample in their song “Pass the Mic” on their 1992 album “Check Your Head.”

A three-judge panel of the court held in 2003 that the band had abided by copyright protections by paying a license fee for a sample of Newton’s recording and therefore did not have to pay an additional fee to license the underlying composition.

That finding upheld a lower-court dismissal of the case in favor of the Beastie Boys, and the 9th Circuit today refused to reconsider its ruling before a larger 11-judge panel.

“We hold that Beastie Boys’ use of a brief segment of that composition, consisting of three notes separated by a half-step over a background C note, is not sufficient to sustain a claim for infringement of Newton’s copyright,” Chief Judge Mary Schroeder wrote in her opinion.

Representatives for Newton and the Beastie Boys were not immediately available for comment.

The Beastie Boys helped spark the modern sampling trend in popular music with the 1989 album “Paul’s Boutique,” which incorporated bits of music from sources as diverse as Johnny Cash, Bob Marley and the Beatles to create new music. Sampling has since become a staple of many artists, especially in the rap and hip-hop genres.

Source billboard.com.