Celebrating Community
Rock and Roll Priestess Patti Smith Returns to SummerStage (photo by Marissa Blitz) I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Patti Smith. On the street in the West Village one momentarily thrilling winter afternoon, but besides that, in concert, more than a half dozen times, and most of them outdoors. She gives to New York. The first was at […]
It’ll be four days into the fall, but the Last Taste of Summer Festival is set to squeeze the last drops out of the season while raising money for food relief. The evening, presented by Humbler.co, Chelsea Records NY & Sustainable United Neighborhoods (S.U.N.) will start at 7:00 pm at The Bushwick Generator and run until the last of the […]
Pretty much since the start, there’s been a debate over just what jazz is. The etymology of the term is itself unclear. Jazz was first called “jas” and “jass,” and those look to be connected to the mid-19th century slang “jasm,” (yes, you know what that is) transmuted in a 1916 article in the Daily Californian to “jaz-m.” Close by […]
Next month will mark the 40th anniversary of the Exploited’s first record, on which they declared (in title and opening track) that “punk’s not dead.” Even at the time it felt a bit defensive but the song coined a slogan that has continually been graffiti’d ever since. Forty years is almost as long as the lives of Darby Crash and […]
On January 10, I stayed home and near the stereo to catch as much of WKCR’s annual Max Roach birthday broadcast as seemed reasonable. After so many fantastic records from the Charlie Parker Quintet and the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet, the DJ started spinning Max Roach Plus Four, pretty much the Roach/Brown Quintet but with Kenny Dorham replacing the at […]
I don’t know what you were doing in 1983 but I know what the Melvins weren’t doing is making this record. “Melvins 1983” is whispered like it’s some kind of incantation, like it’s the name of a beast with no name, like it’s something you’d better be careful not to wish for, like it’s a monkey’s paw keychain. Or at […]
Doug Brod’s They Just Seem a Little Weird examines KISS, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Starz and the making of ‘70s rock megastardom. Eric and I didn’t have much to go on, but we didn’t need much, either. We were desperate tweens ready to rock. It didn’t matter that we didn’t know the band that was playing. They had the look and […]
You have to wait until nearly the end of the scrolling credits to see who the musicians are who represent the on-screen characters in Disney’s new animated movie, Soul. The movie is about a jazz pianist, Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx), who snags the gig of a lifetime, dies in an accident, and then strives to return his soul […]
Hifi Provisions, located at 237 36th Street in Industry City, Brooklyn, is now open. Upon entry, customers will notice wooden racks, hand built by owner Matthew Coluccio, with records old and new for sale. At the back is a cozy area with velvet, art-deco chairs and an impressive, vintage Bang & Olufssen music system, which he acquired from a psychologist […]
When my first sister told me that her adolescent son had discovered David Bowie, something powerful struck me. My nephew, I realized, had joined the legion of outsiders. He had recognized (on some level) that the world was a complicated place, that in the inescapable realms of majority rule, you usually don’t get to choose to be on the winning […]