music

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 […]

Whild Peach guitarist David Whild wasn’t quite sure what the band was doing in Bozeman, Mont. "We’re further and further from home everyday," he said when I called him at a Bozeman motel. Home is Atlanta, Ga., and has been since Whild and his musical partner Peach moved there from Dallas in 1994. "The thing […]

It may be obvious if you follow this music column, I’m a sucker for Gypsy-ish violins, accordions, café music, retro-Euro stuff and for mixers and mergers who leapfrog genres.That said, I love Portland’s who touch all of the above to craft a sound that defies categorization. From the title of the band’s most recent album, […]

Unless your knowledge of geography is far greater than mine, it’s likely you have no idea where the Comoros Islands are, and thus would also have no clue what it means when the singer Nawal is described as "the voice of Comoros." First the geography: The Union of the Comoros is a collection of islands […]

There’s a scene somewhere near the end of The Matrix trilogy where the motley rebel force in Zion celebrates victory with wild revelry in a cavern deep underground. It would be easy to imagine Heavyweight Dub Champion providing the soundtrack to such a party. That’s what came to mind at last summer’s Reggae, when the […]

I’d never really heard of East Nashville before reading something on songwriter Amelia White’s webpage about one of her songs showing up on a double-disc compilation called The Other Side: Music from East Nashville . Amelia is not strictly from Nashville — she moved there from Boston a few years back to make her way […]

Everywhere I go lately people ask, “What’s up with Reggae?” They wonder which show they should buy tickets for, Reggae on the River or Reggae Rising, or if the whole thing is going down in flames. While I’ve been following the battle pretty closely, I honestly don’t know. I talked with Carol Bruno the other […]

I caught Jason Webley‘sact a few years ago in an unlikely place: a sports bar behind the now defunct Arcata Denny’s. (The Placebo put on shows there for a spell.) What I remember most is him jumping up on a table with his accordion to lead the crowd in one rollicking sing-along after another. Webley […]