The French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg created a myth of a poet, rascal, provocateur, lady’s man and maverick, using French pop music as a platform. He redefined the concepts of beauty, cool and sexy. His influence has seeped into a wide variety of contemporary musical genres, from Air and Stereolab to Jarvis Cocker, Luna and Beck. […]
Music
Coverage of the music scene in Humboldt County with upcoming shows from locals and out-of-town acts, reviews, interviews and more.
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Ragamuffin Buskers
Hitting the street after Darius and Rose’s cool jazz benefit at the Jambalaya last Friday, I came across a ragamuffin stringband called Treefingers busking in the alcove in front of Garden Gate. They’d come up from Temecula, a not-so-little town halfway between L.A. and San Diego for a show this Friday, June 26, at the […]
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Balf Quarry
"What if you play guitar the way a girl jerks off?" asks left-handed six string slinger and singer Elisa Ambrogio, one half of the noisy free rock duo Magik Markers. The duo’s most recent release, Balf Quarry displays an alarming, compelling and sultry sound. Relentlessly improvising in all the right ways, M/M have exchanged their […]
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My World
Chicago-based reissue label Numero Group has released a number of collections of excellent out-of-print and never-released soul singles from the late 1960s to the early ’70s in their Eccentric Soul series. It begs the question why some of these artists, such as Richard Cook (on the Atlanta-based Tragar/Note label) or Renaldo Domino (on Chicago’s Twinight […]
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Who is Jacob Fred?
There was some sort of time zone mix-up when I called Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey leader/pianist Brian Haas in Tulsa, his home since he was four. When we connected later I learned he was in a meeting with some people from the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra to plan a concert for early next year, in which […]
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Music for the People
The title track of the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars record boils it down: "Living like a refugee is not easy." That’s an understatement, especially when you look at the life of someone like the group’s young rapper/drummer, who calls himself Black Nature. He’s no longer a refugee, in fact he’s currently living in San […]
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The Eternal
Sonic Youth provides the bridge between 1970s post-punk experimentations (and noise) and the contemporary noise-core and Black Metal movements, while including an eclectic variety of musical genres flowing beneath its span. So it’s no great surprise to discover that Sonic Youth drew on some of those contemporary influences, within the band’s own evolution, for their […]
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Viva La Juerga
Looking for something cool to do in San Francisco on a Friday night, we somehow ended up at The Rickshaw Stop, where bicycles hung from the ceiling and a band called Diego’s Umbrella was on stage. I’d heard about the S.F. band’s cross-genre mash-up; they’d played their "Mexicali Gypsy Pirate Rock" in Humboldt a few […]
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Hansel and Gretel
Kids’ dance productions are about that: kids dancing. Artistic director Victor Temple’s version of the siblings sent to the woods fairytale gave a lot of kids a lot of chances to dance up a storm. His choreography, appropriate to the abilities of the children, gave them their proper placement in the oeuvre of classical ballet. […]
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Actor
St. Vincent is an unusual character. Berklee College of Music dropout, Polyphonic Spree alumnus, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter, Annie Clark adopted her stage name, "St. Vincent," from the New York hospital where poet Dylan Thomas died (hours after being carted out of the White Horse Tavern). In 2007, after touring with Sufjan Stevens’ band, Clark […]
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101 Milestones
It doesn’t get any more Humboldt than Bill Morrill, creator of 101 Milestones. Morrill wasn’t exactly born here in Humboldt County, but he moved here in ’72 so forget about it. He’s been here for days. Some time ago, back in 2004, Morrill came up with the 101 Milestones concept. Morrill recognized how rich the […]
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abstract dissident
He calls his new album Newspeak, a reference to George Orwell’s 1984 that’s far from accidental. Ivan Ives was born in Russia, son of a dissident artist. "My dad’s still not welcome there," he told me, calling from L.A. "Even though it’s kind of a democracy now, there’s still a lot of KGB around and […]