For the past year, I have had a series of insightful conversations with Los Angeles-based visual artist and poet Emmanuel Whyte about art practice, travel as study, and about a series of his...
Read onMusic 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 individual musicians who have never profited from their...
On March 15, 2015, the Washington Post published a typically buzzworthy article titled, “Is the Internet Giving Us All ADHD?”. The article begins with the usual litany of start-of-days, most likely familiar to anyone who works at a desk...
Amassing 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...
Everything you need to know about GRAMMIES’ new record GREAT SOUNDING can be found in its gloriously stupid title. The album constantly inverts itself, offering up increasingly next level instrumentation, song craft and emotional depth to an altar...
My Brightest Diamond & Goapele Live Show Reviews: Twin Nights of Powerful Females at Doug Fir Lounge
This week, I found myself at Portland’s Doug Fir Lounge three days in a near row. While it is perhaps my second must frequented venue after Holocene, rarely do I have the chance to go so many times in one week, and to observe such varying acts...
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...
"If you're basing your career on likes and plays and how many hits a particular video has, it's really impersonal. But when it's that grassroots thing, you get so much more mileage out of looking someone in the eye and having them tell you, 'Wow...
>When it's summer, I want to hear blisteringly hot dance numbers or mellow jams from the torrid regions of the world. I've based this mix on artists from Latin America and the Caribbean; some of it's hot, some of it's mellow, and all of it is good...
What’s in a name? When they say Adult Jazz, are they referring to the easy-listening, dulcet sounds of Chuck Mangione or Kenny G? A brief observation of the knotty tones and convoluted song structures of Gist Is, the debut LP from the Leeds...
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...