Music preservation efforts go beyond strictly archival functions. They challenge our understanding of certain genres that have been historically associated with just a few major cities. For...
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Zeb LarsonAmassing rare and forgotten music is a peculiar sort of hobby — one that slowly transforms into an addiction. It’s not that I don’t love mainstream music. It’s just that the thrill of listening to some forgotten gem that...
Musicians tend to attract quirky nicknames, and more than a few of them stick for life. Louis Armstrong was Satchmo, Coleman Hawkins was Bean, Charlie Parker was Bird, and Lester Young was known as Prez or Tickle Toe. Sometimes they take over an...
Jayme GoldsteinOutside Lands is one of the top summer music festivals on the West Coast, hosted amongst the greenery of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and selling out annually. While headliners like Kanye West, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, and The Killers...
Vee Hua 華婷婷"A lot of the symbolism is all centered around the ideas of unity and transcendence, death and rebirth, and the infinity of everything. When I first heard the song, I kept seeing this movement of traveling through multidimensional space and...
Folklorists like to romanticize blues music as being a pure expression of culture, but recorded blues music was carefully marketed to its intended audience from its very beginning. As early as the 1920s, music aimed at African-Americans was labeled...
On January 9, 2014, we lost one of the most eloquent voices of the freedom fight, Imamu Amiri Baraka, the man formerly known as Everett LeRoi Jones. Amiri Baraka was one of the most published and respected artists of the Black Arts Movement, and his...
The “blind bluesman” is perhaps the dominant image of the genre, and one that evokes a number of associations. As noted by scholar Joesph Witek, the idea of the “blind genius” dates at least as far back as Homer. Given that...