Tom Piazza sits in a car waiting for Jimmy Martin to come out of Jimmy Martin’s house. Jimmy Martin, in case you didn’t know—and Jimmy Martin would have been painfully aware that in many cases, people didn’t know—was a bluegrass legend, as memorable for his smash-the-table-against-the-wall temper as for singing and stringing. Jimmy Martin is [...]
Behold, Mike McGonigal’s curated a second set of obscure, raw, raving, and maybe even revenant gospel sides. This one lacks the assurance of the first one, Fire in my Bones (proceeds from it benefit the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund), but you’ll want it anyway. Anybody with an interest in African-American culture could and should [...]
Updated Listen to Lee Ann Womack take the early lead on “I Was a Burden,” wavering from each pitch like a fast, heavy car struggling through a curve—painful, unpredictable, the least-likely superstar voice in recent years. Then hear the Blind Boys of Alabama back her up—always certain, but always shifting within that certainty, building twice [...]
Booker T. Jones, still occasionally of Booker T. and the MGs, reminded us of his mastery of the Hammond B3 two years ago with Potato Hole, which satisfied all Memphis R&B receptors in the human mind and body. Jones always shows us how less is more—a lesson still lost on many musicians, not to mention [...]
A friend I know as intellectual and a roots music aficionado waved off Satchmo, saying the man’s main interests “were pot and Swiss Kriss.” When I told her that the late Louis Armstrong gave Eisenhower the finger, metaphorically, she lightened up a bit: “I would have given him the finger too.” For those who don’t [...]
I was fine with this until the sort-of title track—“Sweetblood Call,” two words, versus the album title above—and then I couldn’t carry it anymore. That’s the song about sticking a gun in a woman’s mouth and threatening to pull the trigger. I thought about it, but I just can’t carry that. Damn shame too since [...]
Gotta be the succulent-est book to feature the Axeman of New Orleans. If you don’t know the Axeman of New Orleans, feel free to look him up while I wait here, but be warned: you’ll probably go off your feed. Dave Thompson’s written over 100 books, sayeth Wikipedia; this one’s surely the first featuring recipes, [...]
Nick Tosches wrote a whole book on Lewis and proclaimed him elsewhere, “the last man to have been touched by the Holy Ghost of Gnosis.” Does that leave everybody else (even Sun Ra) stumbling in the Spiritual Dark for the Light Switch? Tosches goes on to say that Lewis has never made a great album. [...]
I was lucky enough to catch Joe Henry, one of Solomon Burke’s “older” producers, (Don’t Give Up on Me, from 2002), at a conference. We ended up likening Solomon Burke with mid/late period Klaus Kinski—a sensation, already assured the “legend” word in his obit, saying, in effect, “Take that big bag of money and drop [...]
David Stricklin Louis Armstrong: The Soundtrack of the American Experience (Ivan R. Dee) Scott Allen Nollen Louis Armstrong: The Life, Music, and Screen Career (McFarland and Company) Louis Daniel Armstrong lies buried in Flushing, Queens, but his heart belongs to the Crescent City. Practically and spiritually, he belongs to the planet, and measuring the full [...]
