The greatest band in New Orleans rock history (the Radiators)
The Radiators are the greatest rock band in the history of New Orleans music, hands down! There may be some strange backlash in New Orleans itself against this observable fact. As someone who has actively written about New Orleans music since the late 1960s I have to say I have been frustrated in a number of attempts to write about the Rads over the years. The current piece in OffBeat came out well, but an awful lot of the interview didn't make it in. I was told there would be an online version at offbeat.com but no extended online version is in fact offered. My only recourse is to offer an expanded version on my blog. I will be following this up with more material about an American band whose importance will certainly make it into the annals of history even though it is shunned in the elitist passageways of fashion.
Soundcheck Blog: A New Orleans Diary
View a slideshow of images from New Orleans
Soundcheck contributor Jessie Torrisi shares her recent experience in New Orleans
In New York – which is all about the money, the recognition, the write-ups in the Sunday Times – music can start to feel very serious. But visit Vaughn’s, and you’ll see Kermit, with his white brim hat and boyish grin, waving a trumpet in one hand, and throwing his free arm around a pretty girl. You can’t fake that kind of good time. It breeds spontaneity and creativity. It brings people together. And it reminds you what music is all about.
Sunday night, when Allen Toussaint played "Yes We Can Can" for Democratic convention delegates in Denver, the song sounded tailor-made for the Obama campaign. But he wrote it in New Orleans, in 1970, inspired by a different era of change.
No wonder. New Orleans musicians have for more than a century anticipated and articulated just what this country needs. Now, three years past the floods that followed Katrina, Mr. Toussaint and other bearers of the city's unique (and uniquely American) culture -- jazz musicians, brass-band members, Social Aid & Pleasure Club second-liners, and Mardi Gras Indians --call on the country to respond to their needs, for the good of us all. We must recognize this culture as essential to New Orleans recovery, not to mention the restoration of our damaged national identity.
Musicians urge presidential candidates to back coastal restoration
Dozens of musicians from Louisiana and beyond have signed a letter from the Gulf Restoration Network urging John McCain and Barack Obama to attend a Google/YouTube presidential forum in New Orleans on Sept. 18.
Home of the Groove's "K-Doe's Final 45 Revelation"Today's rare find is something else, done much later in the game when the singer was in his 50s, and quite unlike anything else he committed to vinyl. It should have had more commercial impact; but, by the late 1980s release date, the 7" 45 rpm record was already an artifact of old technology - almost everybody was selling and buying their music on cassette tapes and the new marvel, CDs . So, as a marketing move, this single was dead in the water from jump - tragic, because, amazingly, it was one of K-Doe's few recordings that ever edged close to the feel and appeal of his whirling dervish, anything can happen, live performances.
Tom Morgan’s New Orleans Music Show #11
Telling N’Orleans Story in Brass Band Music
The Hot 8 Brass Band plays the kind of music that moves feet, body and soul. Founder of the group Benny Pete says it’s music that “makes you remember, makes you hold on, gives you hope and lets you heal.”
If From the Reach is the CD that finally catapults Louisiana guitarist Sonny Landreth out of cult status and garners him recognition as the guitar-playing equal of Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, it will have something to do with the star power and six-string chemistry those iconic rockers lend to Landreth's ninth album.
On "River is Waiting, " the John Fogerty-penned song that opens Irma Thomas' new "Simply Grand" CD, her voice is as radiant as the lyrics: "The river is waiting, come rise up/A new day is coming, come rise up/We'll be sailing at first light, come gather/Set our course for the crossing together." She continues, "Gonna leave all my sorrows behind me, lift my face to a new day, I'm rising."
Three years after Hurricane Katrina's floodwater devastated her home, nightclub and city, Thomas is clearly looking to the future. At this stage of her career, 40-plus years removed from her best-known songs, she is well-established as an especially classy elder stateswoman of New Orleans rhythm & blues.
Since its 2002 inception, Instruments A Comin' has distributed $1.8 million worth of gear to more than 50 area schools. Tonight Tipitina's hosts the "Instruments Have Come!" street festival and presentation ceremony to celebrate the arrival of the 2008 allotment of 488 instruments.
"Instruments A Comin'" puts music in the hands of students
The numbers are impressive. Some 1500 students from 39 New Orleans area schools have enjoyed the fruits of the Tipitina's Foundation's "Instruments A Comin'" endeavor. Now in its seventh year, the program's annual, springtime benefit concert raises money to buy band instruments often at drastically discounted prices. Tubas, trumpets, saxophones and more are ceremoniously dispersed at another of the Foundation's festive shows, "Instruments Have Come."
'Somethin's Wrong' with Southern Gothic lounge singer and pianist Bobby Lounge on his new CD
Things are still not right in Bobby Lounge's neck of the woods.
The title track of the McComb, Miss., pianist's new CD, "Somethin's Wrong, " gives voice to his usual cast of obsessives, misfits and miscreants. One of them attempts to carve Barry Manilow from a block of cheese, "but it looks like a big ol' squirrel."
Retro Redux: Singing About Sickness In New Orleans
Huey 'Piano' Smith grew up in the Crescent City too and he had the piano-playing and singing talent to fit right in with the rest of the local guys who were transforming early rock and roll, but his career took a different route. He began conventionally enough, playing piano for local legends like Guitar Slim and Little Richard, but eventually formed his own group, the Clowns, which also featured singer Bobby Marchan.
New Orleans Still Struggles—In Song—With Katrina
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? If you live in the Crescent City, you won't know what it means to miss that song: Along with "Louisiana 1927," it has become an almost-inescapable civic anthem, as sentimentality and paranoia—"They're trying to wash us away"—reach new heights in a city that has often been prone to both.
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