Music

Marie Daulne has come a long way since 1990, when she founded the all-woman a cappella quintet Zap Mama . And it’s not just that she’s been around the world several times. The Zap Mama sound has evolved from an amalgam of African and European vocal styles to incorporate touches of jazz, hip hop, funk, […]

The first time I met Tevya "Wisdom" Jones, years ago, he was selling T-shirts along the road into Reggae. I bought one emblazoned with his logo — a red, green, gold and black pyramid/eye inside a flaming circle. The next year, stickers with the logo showed up on outhouses all over the concert grounds. A […]

College is almost back in session, the students are back in town and it’s time for another CenterArts season. The local concert juggernaut kicks off a stellar ’07-’08 season on Sunday, Aug. 19, with a show at the Van Duzer featuring what is likely the most successful old-timey band working today, Old Crow Medicine Show […]

UB40 Back in the days when my main income came from restaurant work, the sound system of choice in the kitchen was a food-encrusted boombox, typically with auto-reverse so the music would play on when things got going and the stoned dishwasher’s attention was elsewhere. I turned one such dishy into a reggae fan starting […]

The first weekend in August is upon us. Here in Humboldt, that means just one thing: Yes, it’s time for Wildwood Days! No, just kidding. It means we batten down the hatches for another Reggae, that massive gathering that’s been bringing thousands of visitors to SoHum from far and wide for 23 years. Most years, […]

He was half of the duo Gang Starr, but the smooth rapper known as Guru was never a gangsta type, not in his style and definitely not in the socially conscious content of his lyrics. At the end of the ’80s, Gang Starr — Guru and producer/partner DJ Premier — pioneered the use of jazz […]

If you dig African music, you probably don’t need to know much more than the fact that saxophonist/bandleader Femi Kuti is the eldest son of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the undisputed Godfather of Afrobeat. If you know that, then you know you want to hear him play on Monday. Femi quit school in 1978 to take […]

It was one of those parties. A wild one. My friend Gregg was moving out of a ramshackle place in Blue Lake into classier digs elsewhere and had a backyard bash to celebrate. Gregg has definite pyromaniacal tendencies and included a flaming limbo dance as part of the affair, followed by fireworks and a bonfire […]

The Jamaicans are coming! You’re thinking, what’s new about that? Humboldt is a dread zone, a reggae magnet, and Caribbean musicians come through constantly. But this contingent is a bit larger than most with almost two dozen guys from Kingston, JA, coming in for two shows. In SoHum Friday, July 6, at the Mateel, there’s […]

Lila Nelson was asking for requests on her KHUM radio show “Meet Me in the Morning.” Mine was for anything from the new album she’d been talking about earlier, Good Night Darling , by Huckleberry Flint. She picked the opening track on the disc, “Carpenter,” a mellow number about building a home penned by guitarist […]

Dennis Wilson once said, “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. We are his messengers.” Brian Douglas Wilson, the principal songwriter, producer, arranger, composer, architect and mastermind behind the Beach Boys , turned 65 on Tuesday, June 20, just two days after the birthday of one of his primary musical rivals and equals — Sir Paul […]