[contextly_auto_sidebar] IF you live long enough and write for a living, there's a pretty good chance you will end up "curating" -- to use the current term - your own youth. That's what happened to me when I tried recently to make sense of where "alternative" or indie rock was 20 years ago today. I see it as a cultural high point, and its making -- as well as unmaking -- remain fascinating … [Read more...]
Classical Music and The Echo Society
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOMETIMES -- certainly not always -- it makes sense to take a chance and see something you have very little sense of. Because I had the night free and knew/ liked some of the people involved, I went Sunday night to the final concert of a weekend-long chamber-music festival (or something) in Los Angeles's Silverlake Hills. I figured there'd be a cocktail party for a few … [Read more...]
Lauren Greenfield and “Generation Wealth”
[contextly_auto_sidebar] GENERALLY, I think the art world has missed the opportunity to address the Great Recession and the amping up of income inequality and the one percent that followed. But some visual artists have made strong and eloquent statements, and one of them is longtime Los Angeles photographer Lauren Greenfield. I caught her Generation Wealth late in its hometown run at the … [Read more...]
Billy Bragg and the Rebel Power of Skiffle
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Back in the mid-'80s, I was in a Calculus class when a friend I knew mostly from our shared love of punk rock handed me a hand-labelled cassette of a musician I'd never heard. When I got home, I played this selection of songs by Billy Bragg -- A New England, Greetings to the New Brunette, It Says Here -- which reminded me of the Clash in their political force and Dylan … [Read more...]
Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Darker Than Ever
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST night, seeing Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings play their last real LP, 2011's The Harrow and the Harvest, at the Orpheum in downtown LA, I realized that this was not just a record that I liked, or one that had made me play around with a couple of its songs on guitar, but one of the finest and most timeless albums of the last decade. It's got songs like Scarlet … [Read more...]
Patti Smith in All the Poets
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me down intellectual alleyways I did not expect to go, which is even better. … [Read more...]
Tom Petty at the Hollywood Bowl
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST night, Tom Petty concluded a lengthy tour with the third of three shows at the Hollywood Bowl. The tour was designed to look back at 40 years with his band, The Heartbreakers, and is rumored to be the group's last go-round together. As a music fan who grew up in the '80s, who heard song after Petty song on both AOR and the local "modern rock" station, it was like a … [Read more...]
The Artistry of Siegfried Tieber, Magician
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THE other night I was invited to a private session at the Magic Castle in Hollywood with a young magician. Siegfried Tieber -- his real name, apparently, with no relation to the lion-baiting duo -- practices close-up magic, which typically involves cards, rings, dollar bills, and other things that can be observed in small rooms with no smoke and mirrors, no rabbits, … [Read more...]
Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile at the Ace Hotel/ LA
[contextly_auto_sidebar] IN some ways, this pairing makes absolutely no sense -- a jazz pianist and a bluegrass mandolinist, playing together? But in another, it's nearly inevitable. And, the other night, not just a natural union but often a spectacular one. Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile are not just universally well-regarded musicians but also virtually parallel figures. Both are (still) … [Read more...]
The Literary Richard Thompson
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FEW living musicians fascinate me as much as Richard Thompson, the London-reared, Los Angeles-dwelling, Fairport Convention-founding guitarist and songwriter whose recording career just hit the 50 year mark. I've been listening to Richard's work for three decades now -- since I first heard "Valerie" and "A Bone Through Her Nose" on WHFS as a teenager -- and have been … [Read more...]