Noise: Author Archive

“I want to take you into my practice room,” Chick Corea told the audience at the Hopkins Club on the Johns Hopkins University campus Monday night. He wanted to take us away from the big stages where he performs on a battery of electric and acoustic keyboards with Return to Forever or his other...
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Del McCoury may have gotten his start with Bill Monroe and may lead the best bluegrass band of the past 20 years, but he has never allowed himself to be trapped within his own genre. He has recorded collaborations with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Steve Earle, and when he hosts his annual...
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The frustrating thing about Nicholas Payton’s career is that he’s still a terrific jazz trumpeter. He proved as much in an exhilarating set with the Fleur Debris Superband in the Jazz Tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Saturday afternoon. But Payton, frustrated that jazz trumpeters don’t get rewarded the same way...
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Raul Malo, a Cuban-American from Miami who loved Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley as a kid, has spent much of his life trying to integrate Latin music and country music, often with glorious results. His best known vehicle has been the Mavericks, a group that scored five top-25 country singles on Billboard in the...
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“Since they call me old-school,” C.J. Chenier told the Sunday afternoon crowd at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, “I’m going to do some real, old-school zydeco.” Chenier, who comes to Maryland’s Common Ground on the Hill Festival July 14, is touchy about the “old-school” tag, because he’s actually one of the more...
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The problem with a lot of retro R&B acts is that whenever they sing, they sound more in love with their record collection than with the lover they’re supposedly addressing. You get the sense that they’re more worried about sounding like their heroes than they are about convincing a wayward spouse to come home....
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The news out of New Orleans in January was surprising. At the end of 2012, the year Locked Down became his first top-40 album since 1973 and won a Grammy for Blues Album of the Year, Dr. John (a.k.a. Mac Rebennack) fired his longtime band, the Lower 911, and managers. Both the singer-pianist and...
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Kelly Hogan’s I Like To Keep Myself in Pain was the best covers album of 2012, a demonstration that punk/new-wave songwriting is as worthy of inspired interpretive singing as the songwriting of any other era. On Thursday afternoon, during the Blurt magazine day party at the Gingerman Pub in downtown Austin, Hogan made the...
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In the mid-‘80s, the True Believers were the toast of Austin—a a rock’n'roll quintet that seemed to marry the Border rootsiness of Los Lobos with the power-pop of the Replacements. In 1986, after opening many shows for Los Lobos and Green on Red, the True Believers released a Jim Dickinson-produced, self-released album that was...
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You hear at lot of complaining from musicians at South by Southwest. They complain about declining CD sales, meager download royalties, dwindling live venues and younger audiences who don’t appreciate “good music” (i.e. their music). But all these complaints seem petty compared to the troubles of the band Terakaft. In the Saharan desert of...
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“The problem with most protest songs,” Billy Bragg said Wednesday afternoon, “is people spend all their time on the protest and not enough on the song.” The British singer, who has written more than a few protest songs of his own, was standing on the rooftop deck of the Hangar, enjoying the view of...
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South by Southwest can be a terrific experience in many ways, but it has the effect of dropping a curtain between out-of-towners and the real Texas, which is a pretty mind-boggling place. If you can tear yourself away from the official showcases, panel discussion, day parties and show-biz schmoozing and drive out beyond Austin’s...
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The Austin music scene has an ambivalent attitude towards the South by Southwest circus that takes over the town for spring-break week every March. On the one hand, they appreciate the attention it brings to the state capital as a major music center, but they resent the way it often eclipses the qualities that...
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On Saturday morning, the British filmmaker Danny Boyle was interviewed before a large theater of South by Southwest badge holders. Boyle couldn’t screen his new movie Trance–the tale of a stolen painting, hypnotism and violent revenge—because the producing studio Pathe had the rights to the world premiere later this month. But Boyle did screen...
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A few minutes after his new film, Much Ado About Nothing, had finished screening at the South by Southwest Film Conference, Joss Whedon climbed atop a riser in front of the screen. Surrounded by almost all of the film’s large cast, the director explained that he had shot this modern-dress version of William Shakespeare’s...
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The South by Southwest Conference got underway yesterday with SXSW Film, one leg of the tripod extravaganza that also features Interactive and Music components. Twenty-two different movie were shown on 13 different screens, and the surest sellout was Sound City, the new documentary by the Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl. Sound City Studio, located in...
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THE VIRGIN MOBILE FREEFEST At the Merriweather Post Pavilion, October 6 Perhaps it’s no longer sufficient to call the Alabama Shakes the year’s best new rock ‘n’ roll band. Maybe we should just call them the year’s best band. Period. When the Alabama Shakes took the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion stage at...
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For a young jazz musician, it’s not enough to be really good; you have to find a way to get people to notice that you’re really good. One time-honored method is to join a band led by an older musician who’s already well known. Baltimore pianist Lafayette Gilchrist has done that by joining David...
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Jerry Leiber, who was born and raised in Baltimore before becoming one of the greatest lyricists in rock ‘n ‘roll history, died of cardio-pulmonary failure in Los Angeles Monday. He was 78. Leiber’s lyrics, almost always set to music by his longtime partner Mike Stoller, were recorded by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Aretha Franklin,...
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I’ve seen Charlie Chaplin’s 1924 silent film The Gold Rush more than a dozen times, and I never get tired of it, for it is one of the half-dozen greatest motion pictures ever made. And yet, except for the first time I saw it in a college classroom, it never affected me as deeply...
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