Stephen Colbert visited Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night for a special April Fools’ Day rendition of Rebecca Black’s Friday backed by The Roots. Colbert’s performance capped a week
In our continuing effort to keep you up to date on the summer festival season, we bring you news about The Roots Picnic. The one-day fest, hosted by The Roots,
This past Thursday night the stars came out at Carnegie Hall for the XXI Annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. Curated by Tibet House Vice President Philip Glass, the night included a beautiful duet with Taj Mahal and his daughter Deva, The Roots delivering a fantastic cover of Neil Young’s Down by the River with a stirring outro of Hendrix’s Hey Joe and Philip Glass soloing on piano with The Flaming Lips for Do You Realize.
R.E.M. fans got a special treat as Michael Stipe performed Every Day is Yours to Win for the first time live and went into full story behind Saturn Returns. Patti Smith then led her band in covers of the Youngbloods’ Get Together and Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away. The night ended with all the participants joining on stage together for a rousing People Have the Power as Patti Smith reminded the assembled that as people have risen up for their rights in Egypt, Libya and Wisconsin it can happen everywhere.
James McCartney: Angel, Old Man*
Angelique Kidjo: Malaika, Africa
Tenzin Choegyal: Snow Line, Hi Chung
Jesse Smith, Michael Campbell & Patti Smith: Springtime
Angelique Kidjo & the Roots: Move On Up!
The Roots & Taj Mahal: Why Did You Have to Desert Me?
The Roots: Down by the River*
Taj Mahal & Deva Mahal: Lovin’ in My Baby’s Eyes
Taj Mahal: Blues with a Feeling
Philip Glass & Hal Wilner: Roosevelt After Inauguration
Michael Stipe: Saturn Returns, Every Day is Yours to Win**
The Flaming Lips: Feeling Yourself Disintegrate, Do You Realize***
Patti Smith: Get Together, Not Fade Away
All (group finale): People Have the Power
*Neil Young Cover
**First Time Played
*** w/ Philip Glass on piano
READ ON for a full gallery of Jeremy’s Tibet House Benefit photos…
Last year, Soulive helped to celebrate the month of March with a ten-show, guest-laden residency at Brooklyn Bowl that was cleverly dubbed Bowlive. For the second year in a row,
It’s looking like 2011 is going to be a banner year for new music as you can now circle May 10 on your calendar, because you’re going to want to
With no immediate plans for more sustained touring, the members of the String Cheese Incident have announced plans for another special weekend-centric run of shows with their Winter Carnival, which
The Roots, completing all of this and more while performing night after night on NBC as the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, a successful role to which they celebrated their one year anniversary of in March. So what better a way to celebrate 2010 and ring in a new year than an all-night three set marathon Roots show at the Brooklyn Bowl?
For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.
To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…
25) Sleigh Bells – Treats
Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars
Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders
The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.
READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…
On July 20 and 21 of 1991, Phish played a two-day stand at Arrowhead Ranch in Parksville, NY, which was part of a short tour where the band was joined
In an age of Facebook, Twitter and any number of social media outlets capable of documenting the minutia of your day to day life, sometimes something as simple as the lost art of the phone call serves as the best way to connect with someone on a personal level. For their latest social activism campaign, HeadCount is doing just that by taking a back to basics approach in order to remind people to head to the polls to exercise the Constitutional right to vote in next Tuesday’s mid-term elections.
The non-partisan organization, that was founded in 2004 by Andy Bernstein and Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein, and has helped register over 175,000 people, has enlisted a impressive roster of musicians from the indie to jam world, that includes Jim James (MMJ), Willie Nelson, ?uestlove, Matt Berninger (The National), Jon Fishman (Phish) and Warren Haynes (ABB, Gov’t Mule) to not only pre-record reminder messages, but also make live personal calls to a select number of the approximately 25,000 people who have made a “Pledge to Vote” via HeadCount.
In a media conference call yesterday to talk about the inventive initiative, HeadCount board member Bob Weir (Grateful Dead/Furthur) stressed the importance of a “Vote For You” mentality, saying that young people need to take the future into consideration and participate instead of letting a bunch of “crusty old folks” made the decisions that have direct impact on their lives and those of future generations. Weir, who joked that his call list was so large he better get to work on it immediately, said that would seize the opportunity to talk to people to help figure out where the organization’s efforts will be centered in the future.
READ ON for more from HeadCount’s conference call…
