Music and Recording Features

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Jay Jay French: Twisted Business: Lessons from My Life in Rock'n'Roll

Jim Austin Jan 06, 2022 First Published: Jan 06, 2022 0 comments

Jay Jay French has a book out, but it's not what you might think, or not exactly.

French earned fame in the 1980s as the lead guitarist for transvestite metal band Twisted Sister, which produced some of the most recognizableand widely licensedrock music in history: "We're Not Gonna Take It." "I Wanna Rock."

Music and Recording Features

Book Review: The Secret History Of Washington, DC, R&B

John Swenson Dec 29, 2021 First Published: Dec 29, 2021 0 comments

R&B in D.C. 19401960 (Bear Family BCD 17052 16-CD, 2021) adds a new chapter to the Bear Family Records deep dive into American popular culture. Historian/collector Jay Bruder worked with a small army of researchers and editors to compile the beautifully designed book and its accompanying 16-CD discography.

Interviews Music and Recording Features

Tom Fine: Finding The Way Home

Jason Victor Serinus Dec 10, 2021 First Published: Dec 10, 2021 0 comments

Rabbits figure frequently in chats with Tom Finenot the little creatures per se but the holes they burrow into. Because when you question Fine about matters present and past, his encyclopedic memory and fascination with all things great and small take you down what he calls "rabbit holes."

Music and Recording Features

Dance, Don't Swing: the New Jazz Scene in London and the UK

Ken Micallef Nov 10, 2021 First Published: Nov 10, 2021 0 comments

Over a long weekend in late August 2021, DJ, broadcaster, and contemporary music scholar Gilles Peterson and his Brownswood recordings label hosted the We Out Here (WOH) festival in Abbots Ripton, Cambridgeshire, 80 miles north of London. 20 stages. 15,000 attendees. Peterson called it "the British Jazz Woodstock."

Music and Recording Features

Hi-Fi Lo-Fi: 20 Years of the Best-Sounding Indie Rock

Anne E. Johnson Oct 07, 2021 First Published: Oct 07, 2021 0 comments

As the title of a fan blog puts it, indie is not a genre. It is potentially every genre. It's an attitude, an approach, a commitment to self-expression without regard to, or in spite of, mainstream demands. It's the blend that nobody can label, the outré, the ahead-of-its-time, the defiantly retro.

Music and Recording Features

Bryce Dessner: Crossing Boundaries

Julie Mullins Aug 10, 2021 First Published: Aug 10, 2021 0 comments

Crossing borders and genre boundaries is never easy, but for Bryce Dessner, it's become a familiar experience.

Dessner, 45, a classically trained guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer, has racked up multi-hyphenates over the last couple of decades of his musical career. Arguably best known for his work with indie rock band The Nationalwhere he shares lead guitar, piano, songwriting, and other duties with his identical-twin brother Aaronhe's also an accomplished arranger and producer and cofounder of two record labels.

Music and Recording Features

Rhiannon Giddens: Phoenix Rising

Anne E. Johnson Jun 04, 2021 First Published: Jun 04, 2021 0 comments

Not even a pandemic lockdown could keep Rhiannon Giddens from seeking new projects. Between making a new album with her partner, Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, and engaging in strategic planning in her new role as artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, the musician and activist seems as busy as ever even if she rarely leaves her house.

Music and Recording Features

The Harry Smith B-Sides

Sasha Matson Apr 08, 2021 First Published: Apr 08, 2021 0 comments

The Harry Smith B-Sides

Various Artists

Dust-to-Digital Records DTD-51 (4 CDs). 2020. John Cohen, April Ledbetter, Lance Ledbetter, Eli Smith, prods.; Michael Graves, audio mastering and restoration.

Few music anthologies have been as influential as Harry Everett Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways SFW 40090), which was first released in 1952 as an 84-track, 6-LP set. Without it, it is possible that many of the musicians represented would have languished in obscurityincluding such artists as Mississippi John Hurt.

Music and Recording Features

The Reservoir Story

Thomas Conrad Mar 11, 2021 First Published: Mar 11, 2021 0 comments

Full Disclosure: All jazz writers fantasize about owning a jazz label. These fantasies persist even in our post-CD, download era, when the record industry as we knew it has been laid to waste. It is reasonable to speculate that, as a reader of this magazine and therefore a music junkie, you may have had an entrepreneurial record label fantasy or two of your own. For us, it should be interesting to hear from Mark Feldman, because he actually did it. In fact, he did it twice.

Music and Recording Features

Book Review: Make More Noise!

Phil Brett Feb 04, 2021 First Published: Feb 04, 2021 0 comments

Make More Noise! Women in Independent Music UK 19771987

Various artists. Various producers.

Cherry Red Records. CRCDBOX99. 4CD set and book.

Music *****

Sonics ***

The title of this set4 CDs and a bookcomes from British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst's call to arms for women to fight for their rights: "You have to make more noise than anybody else," said Pankhurst, who died in 1928.

The first words you hear on Disc One of Make More Noise! are sung by Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, who was born almost 100 years after Pankhurst and died a decade ago, in 2011: "Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard." This opening lyric, from the song "Oh Bondage Up Yours!," is followed by a raw sax solo by Styrene's bandmate Lora Logic.