Annals of regional identity: Big brains, the value of the South, and who wants to secede from whom

I certainly wasn’t thinking about regional identity, or music, or really about anything much at all when I started idly clicking around the Web site that’s been leaking messages from what was a private listserv called Journolist. Maybe you’ve heard about that? It’s a big scandal in media/pundit circles because the media/pundit members (there were [...]

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Bounce, around

Obviously, there’s nothing at all new about grassroots forms of cultural expression, grounded in musical innovation, bubbling up from the streets of New Orleans. And there’s not even that much new about “bounce” as an example. (Here’s an article from the NY Times, from 2000, about bounce.) But it’s relatively recent (you know, compared to [...]

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Chilton

Well quite an outpouring online to the surprising and sad death of Alex Chilton. This is no surprise, as it was one of those cases where the reaction “What a loss” is acutely true. There’s certainly not a lot of wisdom for me to add on this subject, but I’ll pass along a few links [...]

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Saints, “Saints”

I listened to her stories about her team with a mix of pity and fascination. It was the first time I saw fandom as a form of faith rather than a method for receiving a regularly scheduled reward. This pleasing two-paragraph mini-essay includes a link to James Brown’s cover of “When The Saints Go Marching [...]

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Quick links

1. I was asked to write an essay for exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Art called Rewind Remix Replay, basically about the intersection of designed objects and music. They’ve put that up, for some reason they’ve made it available on in PDF form. Weird, eh? Anyway it’s called “Site And Sound: One Home, 16 [...]

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Song Decoders

It occurs to me that some of  you (anybody out there?) might be interested in this recent day-job article: I had a piece in the New York Times Magazine about Pandora, the  Internet radio service. My interest was/is in their “Music Genome Project,” the engine that underlies what music you hear when you use the [...]

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Some New Orleans music on NPR

Both Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, and JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater featured New Orleans artists this week. Piano Jazz was guest-hosted by Elvis Costello, and guest-guested by Allen Toussaint. It’s a nice listen — here’s the link — even if to my great disappointment he doesn’t play “SJI.” Toussaint is such a fascinating guy, I [...]

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Whoa, that’s a lot of Bo

On a decidely more upbeat note, friend of no notes Mr. Fine Wine turns over an entire one-hour episode of his Downtown Soulville show to the music of the recently departed New Orleans legend Eddie Bo. Check it out here.

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Another spin on field recordings

Continuing the (not exactly linear) series of musings and posts here about field recordings, technology, and so and so forth: I was interested to see that friend of no notes Disquiet had a post titled “Wavespan’s Field Recording-Inspired MP3s.” These are not field recordings of traditional musicians. The raw material is field recordings of more [...]

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A profile in obsession

I somewhat belatedly have read this profile of Phil Schaap in The New Yorker. Back in the NYC days, I would come across this guy on the radio dial from time to time, and actually I would make it a point to listen sometimes, too. He was always fascinating, but sometimes in a way that [...]

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