Archive: 2009

Multiple Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Norah Jones has announced U.S. tour dates in support of her critically-acclaimed new album The Fall, which was released by EMI’s Blue Note Records on November 17. The 36-city tour will kick off March 5, 2010. Please find all tour dates listed below. A select number of shows will […]

 Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck will bring their acclaimed co-headlining concert series to North America in early 2010 for at least three shows. The mini-trek starts with a February 18 performance at Madison Square Garden in New York, NY, before heading further north for gigs on February 21 at Air Canada Centre in Toronto, ON, […]

For the second episode in the Jazz in the Present Tense series here at Stormy Mondays, we’re pointing our ears across the Atlantic to hear what Europe has to offer. First is beat master/keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft, who is featured in the Icons Among Us documentary that was the inspiration for this series, with the late […]

With Thanksgiving now behind us and Hanukkah and Christmas quickly approaching, we thought we’d get into the holiday spirit. While there isn’t too much we’ve found this year in the way of hipster holiday music, we will put our stamp of approval on Bob Dylan’s oddly enjoyable first foray into the realm of yuletide tunes […]

Jim DeRogatis has a long-held reputation as a firebrand, and he’ll be the first to remind you he’s more than a bit of a contrarian. But we’ve always found those labels a little disingenuous, especially for someone so obviously passionate about not only music, but about being as much reporter and informed critic as opinionated scribe.

In a music critic landscape circa 2009 that’s as much lazy, laurels-resting old hands as unedited, brutally overwrought bloggers, credit the man for valiantly bucking both trends. He’s best known as the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but DeRo is also a prolific author, blogger and, with Greg Kot, his opposite number at the Tribune, host of Sound Opinions, to us one of the few music radio talkshows that’s as informative as it is passionately music geeky.

This fall came his latest book, a visual history of the Velvet Underground called The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Voyageur). We caught up with DeRo a few weeks back on that and other pressing topics.

HIDDEN TRACK: Being a well documented Velvet Underground fanatic, this must have been a fun one for you. Tell me about the genesis of this book.

JIM DEROGATIS: Voyageur Press has been doing a number of coffee table art books devoted to bands and memorabilia. They did one on Led Zeppelin and I’d contributed an essay on “Houses of the Holy” to that. They had this notion of doing a Velvets art book and they called me up and said could you do the connective tissue historical essay and corral some other writers, and I said, well shit yeah, Merry Christmas. They’ve very generously put my name on the cover.

I have a shelf full of a dozen if not more Velvets and Lou Reed and John Cale books, but being even a huge fan as I am, there is a tremendous amount of artwork in this book that I’d never seen before. It’s nice to be given that context to do some of the writing. The goal wasn’t to do a definitive history for fans, it was to show them a lot of the art they hadn’t seen before, rounded up in one place.

READ ON for more of Chad’s chat with Jim DeRogatis…

On Thursday morning at 9AM, you’ve got a tough choice to make. Hopefully you’ve got DVR and won’t have to pick between Biography’s profile of Jerry Garcia and Palladia’s airing of The Last Waltz. If you don’t have DVR, watch The Last Waltz at 9AM and catch the Garcia Biography re-airing at 3PM. Monday, November […]

We thought we’d help you ease your way back into the work week with this hilarious video of The Muppets covering Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody… [youtube]tgbNymZ7vqY[/youtube] The Muppets – Bohemian Rhapsody

After two completely different shows in Albany, Phish kept fans on their toes once again tonight at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, ME. While there weren’t the crazy 20-minute-plus jams of Saturday night’s show, there were plenty of bust outs and fan favorites. The quartet played Meat for the first time since the […]

When you have a group of Phish-loving friends, you find all sorts of differing viewpoints on what and how Phish should play. Among the camps, you have those Phish fans who like anything the band does, you have those who are only impressed by the bust outs and those who couldn’t care less about the songs and just want the band to jam. Outside of a few instances of far-reaching improvisation – namely the Susquehanna Sand and the Merriweather 46 Days – Phish hasn’t strayed too far off script since their return in March…until last night’s second of two concerts in Albany.

Following a fun first set that contained a number of rarities and well-played originals, the band started the second set by jumping into the deep end of the pool – two 20-minute-plus songs that contained more peaks than the Alps. The set started innocently enough with Seven Below. After jamming on the main theme of the tune for a few minutes, drummer Jon Fishman changed the beat he was laying down while the other members of the band went off in different directions as well, leading to a bit of spacey dissonance. I thought the Seven Below jam had just fallen apart and that the quartet were about to end the tune, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After a few quick minutes of each member traveling their own path, guitarist Trey Anastasio linked up with bassist Mike Gordon on a few gorgeous patterns of notes that got Fishman’s attention. What had been a dark, minor key jam had been transformed to a pretty major key jam as only Phish could do. At this point, Fishman, Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell started to follow Anastasio’s lead, patiently building the gorgeous “butter jam.” That’s not to say the other members of the band rolled over, they each added all sorts of dark accents to add some depth to what Big Red was laying down.

READ ON for more of Scotty’s thoughts on Phish in Albany…

With Power Patriot, the realigned Garage a Trois attempt to answer the musical question: "Is there life after Charlie Hunter?" The seven-string samurai has been part of this band's lineup since its inception a decade ago and his replacement by Marco Benevento fundamentally alters the sound of the quartet. This music is definitely less dependent on groove though it carries just as much visceral impact (and in your face, not through insinuation).