When The Village Voice described New Orleans’ Soul Rebels as “the missing link between Louis Armstrong and Public Enemy,” they got it only half right. The Soul Rebels were deeply influenced by hip-hop, but Armstrong? Not so much. The Voice overlooked a more relevant phenomenon: Marching bands. The marching show bands represent and animate the [...]
Tag Archives: interviews
‘Tis the Season: Julian Koster and the Saw’s Song
December 12, 2011 – 9:39 am
One of the great recent additions to the library of Christmas music is Julian Koster‘s The Singing Saw at Christmastime. It’s hard to imagine that it’s the first album of Christmas songs played on a saw—it seems like someone must have cut such an album for a regional label in 1940s or ’50s—and it’s a [...]
YouTube du Jour: Nicholas Payton
December 8, 2011 – 12:01 pm
Tonight, Nicholas Payton performs a free show with his trio supported by the Tulane University Big Band at Dixon Hall on the Tulane campus at 7 p.m. Payton is the Jazz Artist-in-Residence at Tulane, and he recently ruffled the feathers of the jazz world when he declared that jazz died in 1959 in a blog [...]
YouTube du Jour: Cosimo Matassa
December 7, 2011 – 9:47 am
Legendary New Orleans producer and engineer Cosimo Matassa will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Saturday, April 14, 2012 along with producers Tom Dowd and Glyn Johns. In 2004, OffBeat contributor Jeff Hannusch interviewed Matassa and drummer Earl Palmer, who played on many of the sessions at Matassa’s J&M Studios that [...]
Mojo Nixon Is Back and He Has a Bobblehead
December 2, 2011 – 11:44 am
If you remember shows with Mojo Nixon, Dash Rip Rock and the Dick Nixons, you were doing it wrong. Mojo doesn’t, or not well, anyway. “Some of the New Orleans stories with [Dash Rip Rock's] Bill Davis are about psychedelic mushrooms,” Nixon says. “I can remember it but I don’t know what happened. It’s not [...]
How Coco Robicheaux Turned Up in Dr. John’s “Splinters”
November 27, 2011 – 8:39 am
In 2008, writer/musician Ned Sublette interviewed the late Coco Robicheaux for Bomb Magazine. In it, he speculates on how Dr. John came to sing Coco’s name in “I Walk on Guilded Splinters”: There’s a spot on “I Walk on Guilded Splinters,” the track that put Dr. John on the map in 1967, where you can [...]
Weird Winter: Interview with Greg Farley of The Felice Brothers
November 9, 2011 – 6:07 pm
Testing the boundaries of contemporary folk music is what The Felice Brothers do best. These boys are sonic tinkerers—they put on lab coats, dive into an unconventional studio, and start mixing sounds like chemicals. They’ve transformed chicken coops and empty high schools into creative laboratories, and their instrumental experimentation has led to some explosive music [...]
Robin Zander of Cheap Trick
November 1, 2011 – 12:28 am
“Thank you so much for this interview because normally, I get pushed out of the way for interviews,” Cheap Trick singer Robin Zander says. “It’s usually that freaky white motherfucker with a baseball cap,” he says, referring to guitarist Rick Neilsen. Sean Yseult—formerly of White Zombie, now working on a new project, Star and Dagger—has [...]
Soundgarden After the Break-Up: Interview with Kim Thayil
November 1, 2011 – 12:13 am
Soundgarden defined grunge. It’s not the band that made it huge, but it’s the band whose sound comes to mind when you think of the word. 1989’s Louder Than Love opens with a solid, thudding, nodding groove, over which a guitar played up the neck buzzes in your ear. It settles into a methodical riff [...]
Wild Flag is a Band, Not a Project
October 25, 2011 – 9:47 am
Wild Flag created more buzz with the announcement of its existence than most bands manage with years of touring. The reason is simple: the lineup is an attention-grabbing who’s who of female indie-rock talent featuring Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss from Sleater-Kinney, Mary Timony of Helium fame and Rebecca Cole, best known from Elephant 6 [...]
