Music Industry News

Spotlight: Un Systema Para Todo, Tumbao Bravo

Source: The Latin Jazz Corner by Chip Boaz
August 14, 2008

Un Systema Para Todo Tumbao Bravo PKO Records Jazz is a collaborative art form, but many modern jazz projects form around an individual rather than a group. The bandleader becomes the primary songwriter, the featured soloist, and the projects public face. The individual musician may have a hired band or even a regular working ensemble, but the bandleader remains the artistic ringleader. Subsequent recordings or performances follow one persons artistic vision with the other musicians providing ...

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Jazz at Lincoln Center Seeks 10 Quartets for International "Rhythm Road" Tours

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
August 14, 2008

Jazz at Lincoln Center is seeking 10 quartets to promote American music in other countries through “The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad", a partnership between JALC and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. According to the Rhythm Road Web site, the program “is designed to foster cultural exchange with audiences worldwide through performance and educational outreach. Selected ensembles tour to such regions as Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East for ...

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The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra

Source: Michael Ricci
August 13, 2008

The modern French horn, with its complex tubing and finger keys at the center, has come a long way from its hunting party origins. Orchestral instruments don't come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra. At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the ...

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Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Branches out to New York

Source: Michael Ricci
August 13, 2008

On a blocked-off street in SoHo on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood with Billy Joel, the veteran music executive Clive Davis and officials from the hall, to announce that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened its flagship building in Cleveland in 1995, would open a New York annex in November. “This is where Ed Sullivan met the Beatles, where Lou Reed took a walk on the wild side," the mayor said. Artifacts that will ...

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Jazzman Frishberg Charts Own Tuneful Territory

Source: All About Jazz
August 13, 2008

One of the great joys of L.A. jazz, from the mid-1970s to the mid-'80s, was the blossoming of jazz pianist Dave Frishberg into a singer-songwriter of quirky, yet warmly satisfying, material. His tunes navigated a pathway that sidestepped melodramatic cabaret material on one hand and self-absorbed pop music on the other. Frishberg created a growing catalog of songs that took a jaundiced view of the era and had stylistic ties to earlier masters like Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. His ...

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Herb Geller, Activist

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
August 13, 2008

At eighty, Herb Geller is playing alto saxophone even better than when he was a key jazz figure in the 1950s and '60s. He is performing not with the gravity of Brahmsian old age but with full vigor. Nor has he lost the force of his convictions, witness this political song for which he wrote words and music. In the interest of fairness, the Rifftides staff searched long and hard on the internet for John McCain campaign music to balance Geller's ...

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Stony Plain Records Signs Joe Louis Walker

Source: All About Jazz
August 12, 2008

Stony Plain Records has announced the signing of multi-award winning singer/guitarist Joe Louis Walker and the release of his label debut, Witness to the Blues, on 9/30. Produced by fellow Stony Plain artist and award-winner Duke Robillard, Witness to the Blues features a scintillating duet by Walker and Shemekia Copeland in a reprise of the Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson R&B classic, “Lover's Holiday." Stony Plain Records is distributed in the U.S. by Koch Entertainment; in Canada by Warner ...

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Rollins on Rollins

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
August 12, 2008

In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades...

...because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could go into all of my wild dreams.

...and why ...

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