Archive: 2004

What do you get when two of the most melodically-gifted mandolinists get together? Into the Cauldron, a collaborative effort that seems almost Grammy worthy.

Rolling Stone Magazine has named their list of The Immortals

Highwire Act Live In St. Louis, recorded live in August 2003, is Little
Feat’s first-ever performance shot in hi-definition technology. As one of California’s most influential band of the ’70s, Little Feat was pretty memorable back then, and continues to stomp plenty of fresh memories today.

Scott McCaughey has been blazing pop and rock since the early 80

Elvis Costello will write a pair of books to be published by Simon & Schuster. The first will be “a series of intimate narrative chapters taking their cue from the styles, themes and characters found in a number of Costello’s lyrics,” according to the publisher. The as-yet-untitled volume is due in fall 2005.

The second book, a release for which is not yet targeted, will be “a work of comic philosophy.” That tome is already titled: “How to Play the Guitar, Sing Loudly and Impress Girls…or Boys.”

“There are few musicians with the range of Elvis Costello,” Simon & Schuster executive VP/publisher David Rosenthal says. “We’re excited about his unique and eclectic approach to present his life and artistry to the public.”

Source billboard.com.

Ireland’s most prominent West Coast-obsessed pop-rockers, The Thrills, are visiting the object of their desires once again. They’re raising eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic with their catchy vocal harmonies and laid-back, country-rock feel, drawing less comparisons to countrymen U2 and Thin L

The band’s travels begin March 27 at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston. They’ll sprint through most every region of the U.S. over the next two months, with several detours to Canada and a May 2 stop at the Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif.

They’ll appear with Phantom Planet on several April dates, and with Spymob in late April and early May. Just two days after finishing up their U.S. jaunt May 29 in Providence, R.I., they’ll head to the Netherlands for the Pinkpop Festival.

The Thrills’ debut album, So Much For The City, was recorded in San Diego and finds the band paying homage to many of their favorite West Coast locales on songs like “Big Sur,” “Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far)” and “Your Love Is Like Las Vegas.”

Source pollstar.com.

Page McConnell’s side project, Vida Blue, featuring the Spam Allstars, will be playing three select dates on the West Coast in the beginning of June before their appearance at Bonnaroo. The dates are as follows:

Thurs, June 3 4th and B, San Diego, CA
Fri, June 4 House of Blues, Los Angeles, CA
Sat, June 5 The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA

The Jazz Mandolin Project featuring Jon Fishman will open all three dates.

Source phish.com.

Theta State Productions has organized Mediate: Collaborative Multi-media Art for a Cause to be held April 2nd at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square, Cambridge, MA., to benefit the Community Art Center, Inc. of Cambridge.

Based on a concept initially developed by Boston producer/musician/multimedia artist, Brian Knoth, this night integrates the work of many talented and creative friends. Scheduled performances include Slam Poetry, featuring Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo and The Cantab Revue, Theta State (w/members of Nikulydin) – Multimedia Performance Art and Boston’s Amun Ra will play a special acoustic set.

All of the performers are proud to be presenting the night at the Zeitgeist Gallery, a space that uniquely provides an alternative venue for collective projects and benefits such as this.

The Community Art Center is a 72-year old agency whose mission is to nurture children and young adults with limited access to financial resources so they achieve personal and cultural growth and have a positive impact on their world through joyful experiences in the arts. They provide comprehensive, year-round after school programs for over 125 youth annually who live primarily in public housing.

Details: Mediate: Collaborative Multi-media Art for a Cause

Hollywood Records has announced a July 13 release date for Together We’re Heavy, the highly anticipated second album from The Polyphonic Spree. In stark contrast to The Spree’s debut, The Beginning Stages Of…, which was recorded in two days and only intended as a demo to help the young group book gigs, Together We’re Heavy is the result of over a year’s work in the studio by the band and producers Eric Drew Feldman (Frank Black, Sparklehorse, Tripping Daisy) and The Speekers. The substantial advances in songwriting and production on songs that have emerged as live favorites in the last year, including the anthemic “Two Thousand Places” and “Hold Me Now,” “Diamonds/Mild Devotion To Majesty” and the epic “When The Fool Becomes A King” mark the realization of this incredible ensemble. See below for a full track list.

Audiences will get a sneak preview of the new record during their upcoming tour with rock legend David Bowie. The much-talked-about road show begins March 29 at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia. Dates have recently been added to the tour in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Barbara and Anaheim, California; see below for the full itinerary.

The group will also perform on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno on April 21 and will perform “Light & Day” during their appearance on the April 20 episode of the hit NBC-TV sitcom “Scrubs.” “We’re all huge music fans on ‘Scrubs’ and are always looking for interesting, organic ways to incorporate music into the show,” says “Scrubs” supervising producer Neil Goldman. “When a bunch of us got a chance to experience The Polyphonic Spree live, we immediately sparked to the idea of not only featuring their music, but the band itself. We’re a show that loves to push the envelope creatively, and obviously so does the group, so it seemed like a perfect match for us.”

Tour Dates Opening for David Bowie:

March 29 – Philadelphia, PA – Wachovia Center
March 30 – Boston, MA – FleetCenter
March 31 – New York, NY – Angel Orensanz Center *
April 1 – Toronto, ON – Air Canada Centre
April 2 – Ottawa, QC – Corel Center
April 4 – Quebec City, QC – Pepsi Coliseum
April 7 – Winnipeg, MB – Winnipeg Arena
April 9 – Edmonton, AB – Rexall Centre
April 11 – Kelowna, BC – Skyreach Place
April 13 – Portland, OR – Rose Garden
April 14 – Seattle, WA – Key Arena
April 16 – Berkeley, CA – Community Theatre
April 17 – Berkeley, CA – Community Theatre **
April 19 – Santa Barbara, CA – Santa Barbara Bowl **
April 22 – Los Angeles, CA – Greek Theatre **
April 23 – Anaheim, CA – The Pond **
April 25 – Denver, CO – Budweiser Events Center
April 27 – Austin, TX – The Backyard
April 29 – Houston. TX – Woodlands
April 30 – New Orleans, LA – SaengerTheater

* headline date
** new Bowie date

See thepolyphonicspree.com for more info.

The top musicians, promoters, managers and media companies in the live music community have all pledged their support to HeadCount, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization that aims to register 100,000 new voters.

With the presidential election nearing, voter participation has become a unifying cause among musicians and their followers. Artists such as Bob Weir, a HeadCount board member and guitarist for The Dead, are calling on fans to exercise their fundamental rights as Americans to go to the polls.

“If every Dead Head in the state of Florida had voted in the last presidential election, it would be a very different world today,

The capacity crowd at the Marquee Theater was electric from the start, and Clyne

From album to album and tour to tour, Galactic has developed and redeveloped both their actual music and all the aspects of their live show to constantly reshape the direction and scope of their efforts. From the addition of a guest vocalist or lyricist, to the showcasing of new styles performed by up-and-coming supporting acts, Galactic

It’s not often you sit down at a prestigious jazz club, take off your suit coat, order a dry martini and nod in appreciation of the Black Sabbath and Nirvana covers bellowing off the exposed brick walls. That was, of course, until The Bad Plus began infiltrating the jazz scene with their melodic pop twist […]

Aretha Franklin was hospitalized over the weekend with an undisclosed ailment and remains hospitalized Monday, her publicist said. The hospital where she was taken was not disclosed. She turns 62 on Thursday.

“No other information on her illness is available at this time,” her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn, said in a statement.

The Queen of Soul has energized audiences for more than four decades, is best known for her 1960s smash hit “Respect,” but she has had countless other hits, including “Chain of Fools” and “Baby I Love You.”

Franklin has won 16 Grammy awards, including a lifetime achievement award in 1990 and most recently, an award this year for Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for the single, “Wonderful.”

Source cnn.com.

Sony Electronics says it will be shipping drives in about two months that accept blank DVDs with two data layers. Philips Electronics will start selling a similar drive in Europe in April, but is not saying when it will be available in the United States.

The write-once discs can store up to 8.5 gigabytes of data, or about 4 hours of DVD-quality movies, twice the capacity of regular blank DVDs. This means capacities for computer-burned DVDs are catching up with prerecorded movie DVDs, many of which are already dual-layer.

The new technology is sure to appeal to those who back up or copy movie DVDs, since they often have to reduce image quality or remove special features to fit a copied movie onto a single-layer disc. With a dual-layer drive, an exact copy on a single disc should be possible.

The two layers of the new discs are accessed from the same side — there is no need to flip the disc over to record to the second layer. Instead, a laser beam shines through the first layer to record on the second.

Sony will sell an internal drive for $230 and an external one for $330. They will be marketed only for Windows PCs, but the external one should work on Macintosh computers with the proper third-party software.

Philips will sell two internal drives with somewhat different features, both for PCs. U.S. prices have not been set.

The drives will be able to burn regular write-once and rewritable DVDs and CDs as well.

The Sony and Philips drives will use somewhat different discs. Sony calls its variant DVD-R DL. The Philips equivalent is DVD+R DL. Both disc types should be readable in standard DVD drives and players.

Sony estimates the blank discs will cost $5 to $6. Philips does not have an estimate yet.

The dual-layer discs will be slower to burn than single-layer discs — the drives will be rated as burning at 2.4 times faster than playback speed, versus eight times for single-layer discs.

A full 8.5 gigabytes will take about 45 minutes to burn.

Source cnn.com.

Heavenly Mountain Resort straddles the California/Nevada border and offers several dozen trails for any level of skier and snowboarder, all with a regal view of Lake Tahoe that

Photos by Adam Foley at The Jammy Awards from the Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York City on March 16th, 2004.

Toying from the past and fine tuning with the present, Gary Jules makes Trading Snakeoil For Wolftickets, an all-around winning work of songwriting and arranging that should not be missed.

Night of Joy is the first of three new live albums to be released by Widespread Panic over the couse of 2004, a year in which the hardworking band is taking their first break in 18 years. This release stars the The Dirty Dozen Brass Brand on horns and rhythm and features some new and old Panic favorites.

OutKast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” won two awards, including R&B/soul or rap album of the year, to lead the winners at the 18th annual Soul Train Music Awards.

The Atlanta duo, who won the Grammy last month for best album of the year, also scored the Michael Jackson Award for best R&B/soul or rap music video for “Hey Ya!” on Saturday.

The awards, named after the long-running television show, honor recording artists in R&B, hip-hop, rap and gospel music. They were held at the International Cultural Center and televised live via syndication.

OutKast was the lone multiple-winner at the ceremony hosted by Alicia Keys and producer/songwriter Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.

Soul crooner Luther Vandross was the night’s sentimental choice, winning best R&B/soul single, male for his “Dance With My Father.”

Vandross, recovering from a debilitating stroke, continued a victory streak that saw him take home four Grammy Awards and four NAACP Image Awards at ceremonies in the past two months.

The Soul Train Music Awards celebrates artists in R&B, hip-hop, rap and gospel music.

The awards are chosen by a group of radio station professionals, talent managers and performers.

Source CNN.com.