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Various Artists: Blues Kings of Baton Rouge
by Jakob Baekgaard
Any musical genre gets its own regional twist, and this is especially the case with the blues. Just think of Chicago blues, Memphis blues and Detroit blues. However, a regional variant that has not been examined sufficiently is the blues of Baton Rouge. This fault is corrected by Blues Kings of Baton Rouge, a 2CD-set curated by blues expert Martin Hawkins, released on Bear Family. The set follows two other major Baton Rouge projects by Hawkins, the definitive ...
read moreVarious Artists: The Bakersfield Sound
by Jakob Baekgaard
Think of country music and the city that immediately springs to mind is Nashville, but for a while Bakersfield became a capitol of country music in its own right, and its importance as the originator of the Bakersfield sound is examined in a massive box set from Bear Family Records, The Bakersfield Sound: Country Music Capital of the West 1940-1974, containing 10 CDs and a 224-page book written by Scott B. Bomar with a foreword by Chris Shiflett of the ...
read moreLefty Frizzell: An Article from Life
by Jakob Baekgaard
To a singer of popular music, one song can make the difference. For country singer/songwriter Lefty Frizzell that song was “If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time." The song was recorded on Frizzell's first session for Columbia Records on July 25, 1950, and was the second of four songs recorded that day, the other three were “I Love You A Thousand Ways," “Shine, Shave, Shower (It's Saturday)" and “Cold Feet." They were all Frizzell classics, but “If You've ...
read moreJohn Blair: Rumble at Waikiki. The John Blair Anthology
by Jakob Baekgaard
There's something fundamentally life-affirming about surf music. Maybe it has something to do with the images the music conjures: swaying palms, hot sunshine, warm sand and blue waves. It's not a coincidence that the recordings sometimes include sounds of weather: piping wind and splashing waves. Surf music is mood music, occasionally used in films, but it also has the attraction and zest of rock 'n' roll. There's an immediate energy and enthusiasm present in the music. Much of this has ...
read moreVarious Artists: Woody Guthrie - The Tribute Concerts
by Jakob Baekgaard
Tribute concerts are often a mixed bag, especially if the idea is to bring a group of stars together to pay homage to an influential musical figure. The recent tribute to the wonderful singer, Tony Bennett, Tony Bennett Celebrates 90 (Columbia, 2016) is a sad case in point. There is no shortage of stars on that particular album, but the aesthetic understanding of Bennett's music is so limited that it reduces rather than expands the scope of his musical legacy. ...
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