The Bazaar Cafe is a songwriter’s showcase with an open mic Thursday nights. Laura and Kai have been grinding out originals at a fair clip lately, so they signed up last week and did two of their strongest numbers. They were such a hit that they were asked to come back this week. Lilly shot [...]
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Come to Fruition
We spent a gratifying number of hours at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival this weekend. On Friday we saw the Jerry Douglas band, and then Allison Krauss and Robert Plant. Everything about the show was perfect, but the best part was T-Bone Burnett laying his spooky, unsettling vibe over everything. Here’s Laura’s take.
On Saturday we [...]
Beginning band
Laura’s middle school band had been playing their instruments for about 4 months when they recorded this. We voted to tax ourselves a bit extra a couple of years ago to pay for arts in the schools, and the proceeds started to flow in last year, just in time for Laura’s 6th-grade year. Suddenly her [...]
Class leader
It’s rare to see a story about Venezuela in the U.S. press that does more than summarize the chatter at the last upper-middle-class cocktail party the correspondent was invited to. Hard to get good help these days, what with the housemaids getting so uppity, that kind of thing. On a few widely-spaced occasions, however, the [...]
A Tribute to Woody Guthrie
Here is a site with an online multimedia show about Woody.
TheMoMI.org — Exhibition: Bound For Glory: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie
Kinderbanjo
Well that was interesting. I was just at Lilly’s kindergarten class for a song-and-snack to mark her birthday. When I walked into the classroom, an African-American boy named Durrell took one look at my gig bag and said, “That’s a five-string.” A five-string what, I asked him. “I don’t know. A five-string.”
After the songs and [...]
Hoedown
When I got back from India, Mary and Laura picked me up at the airport and we hauled ass to the Playmates preschool harvest festival, where Laura and I were booked to do some pickin’ and grinnin’ with our friends Breck and Stanley. We played a few tunes and had a blast, even though I [...]
Playmates Preschool Harvest Festival
Laura and her backing band furnish a set of tunes in the early afternoon. More info here.
Song and dance
Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.
I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can [...]
New Lost City Ramblers
I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother [...]
Berkeley Old Time Music Convention
We’re in the youth showcase at 11:00 a.m.
New Lost City Ramblers
And the Stairwell Sisters.
St. James Sessions
Here are some magnificent tunes recorded live in the 1920s. Lynn Point made MP3 files of them so they can be downloaded.
My only quibble: Why they were transferred to cassette tape first, and then to MP3, I don’t know. Seems like there would be a noticeable quality cost there, even with good audio equipment. It’s [...]
Look away
I’ve always got an eye open for musical role models that Laura might like. She has pronounced likes and dislikes already, but she hasn’t heard all that much. (She digs Arlo Guthrie enormously, and she’s been liking the very impressive Abigail Washburn CD we got recently, to give you an idea of how her tastes [...]
Banjo hangout
Oh, for my birthday I got a very nice gig bag to make it easier to carry my banjo around. Maybe one or two times a week I sneak out of the office with the banjo and a lawn chair and I sit on the grass by the little marina nearby and practice my breaks. [...]
Profanity
To know me even slightly is to know I’m an insufferable snob about Cuban music, which is unquestionably the chief manifestation of God on Earth. Not just a snob, a bit of a purist. I frequently sit around snooty hipster parties bragging, falsely, that I never buy any recordings made after about 1955. (Truth: one, [...]
Wall of sound
Everyone has some terrible thing their parents did to them that they can never forgive. Mine is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad had an old Ford LTD wagon in 1976, which came with a couple of 8-track tapes containing Herb’s greatest hits. We made liberal use of the infinite-replay feature of 8-track [...]
Peace page
The Children’s Music Network is building up a list of kids’ songs and books about peace on their new Peace Page. Laura and I were at the Network’s annual gathering last month up in Marin County. We went there to hear some new tunes (Laura really likes her freedom songs) and to see our friend, [...]