Under the shady oak in a courtyard at Isidore Newman School, young musicians from all over the city are playing old jazz favorites, composing new songs, discovering their musical personality, and sometimes breaking for a quick game of basketball. This is a typical morning at the New Jazz School, a free music camp now in [...]
Although not originally sprung from the swamp of Louisiane nor any true rose of Spanish Harlem, Los Po-Boy-Citos are stirring up dance parties all over our fair city with the boogaloo, a short-lived but widely spread phenomenon of the mid 1960s, is built on strong Cuban rhythms, featuring congas and brass. Their debut album, New [...]
Music seems to be played around the clock and all year long in New Orleans, imbuing this city with a constant beat that can’t be found anywhere else in the world. Even so, the Big Easy can be a hard place to be a musician. With that in mind, a group of die-hard New Orleans [...]
Fleet Foxes have been heavily praised for knocking some harmony and mysticism back into the young folk music scene, and are legitimately and impressively striking heroic chords with many numbed indie and folk hearts. While they do tread lightly on the heels of like bands—Band of Horses, Grizzly Bear—Fleet Foxes’ genre-bending doesn’t feel scene-based but [...]
Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III was one of the most anticipated albums of the year and has proven to be the big-selling, fame-threading machine Wayne predicted. His first week sales were the best of 2008, selling a booming 423,000 copies on the day of release, outselling the previous top-selling album of the year, Kanye West’s [...]
Two hours down the road in our sister city of Mobile, Alabama, Tom Waits stomped into his first number, “Lucinda.” Dust curled from the circular wood stage as he galumphed and hushed the audience with that familiar, surly bellow. Given his affinity for the sound and majestic comedy of old time circus haunts, he arrived [...]
Todd Sickafoose’s new record Tiny Resistors is a rich megabyte of jazz collaboration. I say megabyte to emphasize the weird, expansive world where this album exists—somewhere between the real and the virtual, the past and the coming life, and even between Sickafoose’s bass and the rest of his indie orchestra. Working with folks like Alan [...]
