Results for "Music Industry"

The Good Times Stop Rolling: Vegas Meets the Recession

December 29, 2008

With Las Vegas in the grips of its worst economy since the early 1980s, the snowstorm that dumped four inches on top of the desert metropolis in mid-December felt like piling on. The city's cocksure swagger is gone. Gaming revenue in Clark County, which includes downtown Las Vegas and the Strip, is down 8.5% for the ...

WSJ: The Best Musicians Span Continents, Generations

December 29, 2008

Jazz these days has no one single source or sound, and that's a good thing. Many of the musicians on my top-10 list have been covered in these pages during the course of 2008 -- guitarist Lionel Loueke, clarinetist Evan Christopher, singer Cassandra Wilson, pianist Guillermo Klein, the Microscopic Septet. But here are five more -- ...

Weekend Extra: Lester Young

December 29, 2008

With so little video of Lester Young, every foot of him performing on film is precious. Loren Schoenberg calls attention to a performance by Young that showed up recently on You Tube. Whoever submitted the clip from a kinescope of Art Ford's Jazz Party television program provided no information beyond Young's name. Ray Bryant is the ...

Oscar Peterson Said It

December 29, 2008

Post Story Says Downtown St. Louis Will Get New Jazz Venue in March

December 29, 2008

According to a story in yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch, downtown St. Louis will be getting a new live music venue called the St. Louis Jazz Cafe in the spring of 2009. Business columnist Joe Whittington's December 25 entry included an item saying that the venue “will occupy the space that once housed the Red ...

Songs from the Heart of a Marketing Plan

December 28, 2008

IN Creator, the rawest track on Santogold’s debut and self-titled album, the singer Santi White boasts, “Me I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar.” It’s a bohemian manifesto in a sound bite, brash and endearing, or at least it was for me until it ...

Longtime Customers Say Goodbye to Sportsmen's Lodge

December 28, 2008

After thousands of receptions, weddings and other parties, the San Fernando Valley landmark is about to change. Ringing out the old. On New Year's Day, the Sportsmen's Lodge and its collection of well- known eateries, including the Caribou Restaurant, Muddy Moose Bar & Lounge and a handful of banquet rooms, will be temporarily shut down for ...

Soul Bearers

December 28, 2008

You weren’t supposed to hear the struggle. At least that was the idea with most Motown artists during those breadbasket years of the ’60s, post- J.F.K., pre-Tet, more AM than FM. The plan, as dreamed up by Motown’s founder and the architect of its sound, Berry Gordy Jr., was not so much to make black music ...

Farewell to L.A.'s Shuttered Clubs

December 26, 2008

THE YEAR IN NIGHTRANGER: FAREWELL TO L.A.'S SHUTTERED CLUBS, GREETINGS TO THEIR REPLACEMENTS It may have been the year the recession tightened its grip on households nationwide, but, in L.A. anyway, there were always a few bucks left in the budget for booze, beats and bashes in ’08. Truth be told, the escapist energy of our ...

Cheney's Legacy of Deception

December 26, 2008

A CNN poll released this week rated Dick Cheney as the worst Vice- President in history. In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although firmly ensconced, even in the popular imagination, as an example of ...