Music

The p.r. e-mail hooked me with its description of The Luminescent Orchestrii as: "a gypsy tango klezmer punk acoustic string band from New York City." There was a link to the band’s webpage; I spared no time and immediately downloaded a few luminescent MP3s – brilliant shimmering songs with complex driving rhythms, amazing East-Euro-style harmonies […]

Considering the fact that we’re something of a rural backwater, Humboldt County certainly plays host to a lot of music in a wide range of styles. Sometimes there are just way too many choices of where to go and what to do. Check this week’s calendar section for a rundown on this weekend’s classical overload. […]

In my younger days I spent many happy hours in a dive bar on the Arcata Plaza called The Boot Club, where the No. 1 favorite on the jukebox was a tune by Freddy Fender, "Wasted Days and Wasted Nights." While the leader of Dave Gleason’s Wasted Days was still in elementary school when the […]

The blues. Who’s the audience for it in this day and age? Who are the players? At a time when plenty of young musicians are sawing on fiddles and picking up and picking on mandolins and banjos old timey style, a scant few seem interested in playing the blues, and if they do, it’s more […]

Trouble, oh we got trouble, right here in the Friendly City! With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool, that stands for pool. We’ve surely got trouble! Right here in the Friendly City. Gotta figger out a way to keep the young ones moral after school! Trouble, trouble, trouble, […]

Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945 at Nine Miles, Saint Ann, Jamaica. Legend that he is in the world of reggae, his birthday is still commemorated long after his death, and most years the Bob Marley celebrations stretch through the entire month. The Ragga Muffins Tour is one such Marley-esque congregation, a string […]

The CDs arrive in an unending stream. The mailman sticks them in the slot in my front door; FedEx and UPS drivers block the street in front of my house to drop them off; promoters leave them on my porch or mail them to the Journal office; bandmembers slip them to me at shows. I […]

Not long after Los Lobos’ Louie Perez called me last week, we got to talking about our kids. He has several, and spoke of his oldest son who, when he graduated from high school, announced that he was moving out of the house. His plan was to spend a couple of years "concentrating on the […]

It’s a Sunday morning and Hello Stranger is off the road for a change. Lead singer/keytar player Juliette Commagere is supposed to be finishing up a new song for band practice that afternoon, but, admitting she’s a procrastinator, she’s more than willing to put the task off to chat. She’s at home in West L.A. […]

The metaphor was unfortunate, even if it did declare itself a metaphor. The subhead in the Times-Standard preview of Wednesday night’s Winter Ruckus 4 promised "six exciting acts that plan to metaphorically burn the place down." Of course the hardcore hip hoppers, Tech N9ne, Potluck, LCA, Subnoize Souljaz and Blaze Ya Dead Homie do not […]