Concord Records has been reissuing the Stax Records catalog since acquiring it in 2004, but if it’s releasing them in a systematic way, the system has eluded me. Nonetheless, I scored a yahtzee one day last week when Rufus Thomas’ Do the Funky Chicken (1969), the Dramatics’ Whatcha See is Whatcha Get (1971) and Shirley [...]
Tag Archives: Review
New from Piety: Faithfull and Laurie
September 2, 2011 – 2:18 pm
Last year, Marianne Faithfull and actor Hugh Laurie (star of House) made pilgrimages to Piety Street Recording to cut albums, each with some measure of New Orleans beyond the studio they were cut in. Faithfull’s Horses and High Heels was cut with a core band of Carlo Nuccio on drums, George Porter, Jr. on bass, [...]
Marquee Girls? Some Moon?
August 30, 2011 – 3:05 pm
While New York tries to clean up from Hurricane Irene’s devastation—newspaper boxes almost tipped over!—it seems appropriate to review two New York-centric entries in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series: Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman and Some Girls by Cyrus R.K. Patell. The two NYU professors conceived of their books as loosely paired, one looking at [...]
The ‘Q, That’s Who?
August 22, 2011 – 10:19 am
One of my favorite post-Jazz Fest shows was an NRBQ show at Jimmy’s that began with the room so packed that I was sitting on top of a videogame by necessity not choice for much of the opening act. When the ‘Q came out, they played a challenging, obstinate set, and once they’d cut the [...]
Always More Bob
July 27, 2011 – 5:33 pm
At this point, it feels a little obsessive to scrutinize yet another Bob Dylan show. Still, it’s hard not to because there’s always something there worth thinking about afterwards, even in a show as conventional as last night’s at the Lakefront Arena. The setlist was as close to a greatest hits set as I’ve seen [...]
Britney’s Crowd and Charisma Make the Show
July 18, 2011 – 9:32 am
Friday night’s Britney Spears show at the New Orleans Arena was weird in the way only famous people can be weird. Someone had the idea that the show should have a “plot”—and though I think scare quotes are used far too often these days, they certainly belong in this case—so the show was framed by [...]
Shorty vs. Prince in Montreal
July 1, 2011 – 2:22 pm
The Montreal International Jazz Festival offers a broad palette of styles covering disparate jazz formats, and, like the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and most other “jazz” festivals in North America, adds a significant dose of popular music acts to boost attendance. Last year, the festival staged a mock Mardi Gras parade that ran [...]
Hangout Festival Day 1: Jam Lives
May 22, 2011 – 11:22 am
The Hangout exploded from a little-known beach festival in 2010 to the sixth largest U.S. outdoor weekend festival in one year, and the ticket lines show it. The intersection of Highway 59 and Ocean Beach Boulevard in Gulf Shores, Alabama—normally a resort town with a few thrift shores displaying tie-dyed pashminas and batik tapestries along [...]
