Music Industry News

Pop Music Critics Embrace the Mainstream

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

SHAMELESSNESS IS not a problem for pop critics. The job used to require ego and a disdain of the establishment. Ego remains but many now embrace the mainstream. Is it good? They all have opinions.

Quite the opposite: It's a daily practice. Invented by rebel newspaper staffers (most notably, Ralph J. Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle) who stayed out late and never came into the office, codified by freaks and attitudinal New Journalists, the pursuit of passionate ...

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Rolling Stones Switch Labels

Source: Michael Ricci
July 27, 2008

Ending months of speculation in the music industry, the Rolling Stones have left EMI, the record label that has released the group's music since the early 1990s, and signed a long-term recording deal with the Universal Music Group, the company announced on Friday.

The worldwide contract covers three new albums and the rights to release the band's valuable catalog of music recorded since 1971 for about five years, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations who were not authorized ...

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Compatible Quotes: Composing

Source: All About Jazz
July 26, 2008

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today--Aaron Copland

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful--David Del Tredici

I don't hate work, composing is ...

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Chamber Music America Awards over $660,000 in Grants to Ensembles, Presenters and Festivals

Source: All About Jazz
July 25, 2008

Support for Community Residencies, New Works, and International Collaborations provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and CMA's Endowment Funds (New York, NY) Chamber Music America (CMA) announced today that it will award $664,534 to fund 64 ensemble music projects conducted by artists and presenters throughout the U.S. and in France. Twenty-eight of the grants will support community-based residencies through CMA's Residency Partnership Program, 19 are commissions awarded through the New Works: Creation and ...

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Ah Paris, Beacon of Freedom, City of Jazz

Source: Michael Ricci
July 25, 2008

With all the theater out there, how inspiring it is to be reminded how invigorating an Off Broadway play can be with just two appealing performers, compelling music and a searching, intelligent script. Lenelle Mose, a poet, playwright and performer, has written, composed and stars in “Expatriate," a two-woman production at the Culture Project that delivers on all counts. In the first act the play follows the best friends Claudie (Ms. Mose ) and Alphine (Karla Mosley) from childhood in ...

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Sylvia Syms

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
July 24, 2008

In a 1995 Jazz Times review of a Sylvia Syms CD, I wrote:

Sylvia Syms had a vibrato like a telephone wire in a breeze. She sometimes slid around both sides of a note before she settled on it. She often added the syllable “uh" to the end of a word ("ridin' on the moon-uh"). She could pounce on a consonant and ignore the vowel next door. Some of her power notes were pure brass and there were ...

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Ghostlight Dominates Nielsen/Soundscan Broadway Chart

Source: Seth Cohen PR
July 23, 2008

The Numbers Speak for Themselves: Ghostlight is #4, #5, #6, #18 and #22 of Top 25 on Nielsen/SoundScan Broadway Chart

Legally Blonde Single Debuts in Top 100 on iTunes

Ghostlight Records is proud to announce that it has secured five of the Top 25 slots on this week's Nielsen/SoundScan Broadway Chart: #4 for Passing Strange, #5 for Legally Blonde, #6 for In The Heights, #18 for [title of show] and #22 for Drowsy Chaperone.

In addition, Ghostlight's single release of ...

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Ledisi: Once Lost, Now Found

Source: All About Jazz
July 23, 2008

It got to the point where R&B/jazz singer Ledisi was close to giving up on her musical dreams. But then, after years as an independent artist, she finally scored a record deal. Shortly after that came the buzz and acclaim for her 2007 album Lost & Found. Then she earned two Grammy nominations in 2008 for Best New Artist and Best R&B Album. Now she's on a high profile tour, landing interviews on national television, and even appearing in films ...

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