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In 2008, singer-songwriter Grace Potter and her band at the time, the Nocturnals, were on the way to play a concert in New York’s Central Park, when Potter popped a freshly burned CD into their truck’s dashboard stereo. It was her first time listening to her just-mastered solo album, Medicine, which she’d recorded over the course of two thrilling weeks at Los Angeles’s Village Studios with legendary producer T Bone Burnett and his wrecking crew of luminaries that included drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Marc Ribot. And, as she tells Gold Derby, she was “excited to start that era of my life where I, as the main songwriter in my band, was going to be able to get seen and understood as an artist, in and of my own creative forces.”

But Potter had only heard Medicine “exactly one time,” when, as she remembers with crystal clarity,...

Each week, Consequence celebrates New Music Friday by highlighting newly released albums to stream. This week has it all, from legends returning to future stars making major statements. We’re spinning new albums from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Duster, Noah Kahan, Tycho, Wunderhorse, and lots more; here are 10 new albums to stream today.

Duster — In Dreams

Fresh off a significant boost on TikTok, California slowcore legends Duster have surprise released a new album called In Dreams. The LP serves as a welcome return to their signature moving, atmospheric sound, showing that the group has plenty of gas left in the tank.

Stream: Apple Music | Spotify

Buy: Vinyl | CD

Laurie Anderson — Amelia

The incomparable Laurie Anderson has had the concept for Amelia for nearly two decades: a record fusing oratorio and old-time radio dramas to chart the course of Amelia Earhart’s doomed transatlantic final flight. With Czech orchestra...

Laurie Anderson has recruited Anohni for “India and On Down to Australia,” the latest single from her upcoming album, Amelia. Stream the new song below.

An expansive orchestral track, “India and On Down to Australia” was built from one of Anderson’s unreleased songs, “Rumba Club,” and furthers the concept album’s theme of capturing Amelia Earhart’s final flight. “We land at Dum Dum Airport Calcutta,” Anderson sings. “Streets are wide/ White bulls are walking everywhere/ Passed the many mouths of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers.”

Get Anohni and the Johnsons Tickets Here

In a statement about the track, Anderson explained it came together during “pandemic times.” The orchestra recorded their part first, followed by Anderson adding her vocals and sprinkling in electronics.

“And I thought, ‘I need to make the story a little bit bigger, so I’m going to find a bridge between the electronic viola...

Laurie Anderson will return this summer with Amelia, her first new album in five years.

Out Aug. 30 via Nonesuch Records, Amelia was influenced by aviation legend Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic who disappeared on her 1937 flight around the world. You can hear a first taste of the album, the meditative track “Road to Mandalay,” below.

“The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might think about,...

Laurie Anderson is back to announce Amelia, her first album in six years, due out on August 30th via Nonesuch. She’s also offered the album’s first preview, “Road to Mandalay.”

Amelia is a concept album comprised of 22 songs tracking the renowned aviator Amelia Earhart’s final flight. Laurie Anderson previously conceived Amelia for a performance at Carnegie Hall in 2000, and the artist recently updated the composition and performed it across Europe. She recorded Amelia with the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, who were conducted by Dennis Russell Davies — collaborators included Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota, and Kenny Wolleson.

The project tracks the origins and subsequent misfortune of Amelia Earhart’s transatlantic flight, which crashed in an unknown locale and left the pioneering pilot stranded. “The words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot diaries, the telegrams she wrote to her husband,...

Herbie Hancock, John Paul Jones, and Laurie Anderson are among the artists set to perform at the 2024 Big Ears festival. On Tuesday, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based fest announced its stacked lineup of legends.

The festival is set to be held in downtown Knoxville from March 21 through March 24 with nearly 200 events, including expositions, conversations and film presentations, along with musical performances.

Multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, band Unwound, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, bluegrass picker Molly Tuttle, hip-hop trio Digable Planets, and Samora Pinderhughes are also featured on the lineup, along with the likes of Fatoumata Diawara,...

The first time Jim Jarmusch came to Cannes was with his sophomore film Stranger Than Paradise, which played the Quinzaine in 1984. “We all shared one apartment that had no hot water, that was up the hill,” he recalls. “One day I had to be on TV and there was no water, so I had to shave with leftover tea.” Those days are long gone; Jarmusch is a fixture on the Croisette these days, and even had the dubious pleasure of opening it in 2019 with his Bill Murray-starring zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die.

This year he arrived at the festival with a piece for Cannes Classics called The Return to Reason, a work-in-progress restoration of four films by American artist Man Ray shot in Paris during the early 1920s. Featuring a live soundtrack by SQÜRL, the band Jarmusch formed with Carter Logan in 2009, it is essentially a concert movie...

Sqürl is the musical outfit featuring legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch alongside Carter Logan, a co-producer on Jarmusch’s recent movies. After releasing a series of soundtracks and EPs, the duo have just unveiled their first proper full-length studio album, Silver Haze.

Music has been an integral part of Jarmusch’s movies throughout his career, starting with his groundbreaking ’80s films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, and continuing in the ’90s with Dead Man and Ghost Dog. For his recent films, he and Logan have teamed up to compose the scores.

Now, the pair have unveiled Silver Haze, a guest-filled album that was just released via Sacred Bones Records. Among the notable contributors are Marc Ribot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anika.

Consequence caught up with Jarmusch and Logan to discuss the new album, along with its various guest musicians. During the conversation, the pair also talked about their process of scoring movies,...

Sqürl is the musical outfit featuring legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch alongside Carter Logan, a co-producer on Jarmusch’s recent movies. After releasing a series of soundtracks and EPs, the duo have just unveiled their first proper full-length studio album, Silver Haze.

Music has been an integral part of Jarmusch’s movies throughout his career, starting with his groundbreaking ’80s films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, and continuing in the ’90s with Dead Man and Ghost Dog. For his recent films, he and Logan have teamed up to compose the scores.

Now, the pair have unveiled Silver Haze, a guest-filled album that was just released via Sacred Bones Records. Among the notable contributors are Marc Ribot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anika.

Consequence caught up with Jarmusch and Logan to discuss the new album, along with its various guest musicians. During the conversation, the pair also talked about their process of scoring movies,...

Considering it’s never been more than a few years between feature films for Jim Jarmusch, here’s hoping we get news about his next project soon. In the meantime, after many singles, EPs, and score contributions to his own films, Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s band SQÜRL is now set to release their first fully-fledged album. Titled “Silver Haze,” it’ll drop on May 5 via Sacred Bones and the first single “Berlin ’87” has arrived.

With a hat tip to Brooklyn Vegan, they report the Randall Dunn-produced album also features Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Marc Ribot. Jem Cohen has also directed the music video for the first single. “He’s one of our favorite filmmakers, and with his magical hands and eyes, he somehow captures the most evocative details that most people don’t even notice,” the band said. “The images he has chosen and shaped so perfectly evoke the feeling of our music,...

SQÜRL, the duo of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, have announced their debut album, Silver Haze, out May 5th via Sacred Bones. As a preview, they’ve shared the opening track, “Berlin ’87,” and its accompanying video.

Silver Haze is described in a press release as “a poetic journey of spoken words, dynamic instrumentals, drone riffs, and distorted effects, one that features tubular bells and a cello in addition to their signature stacks of delay, encircling the listener in a warm oscillation both delicate and devastating.”

Produced by Randall Dunn, it features Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Marc Ribot. Pre-orders are ongoing. See the artwork and tracklist below.

“Berlin ’87” features heavy, droning guitar riffs first laid down by Jarmusch in his home studio while inspired by memories of living in — you guessed it — Berlin in 1987. The skeleton track was then “SQÜRLized by Carter and Randall at Circular Ruin,” according to a press release.

Dolly Parton has shared a new rendition of “The Last Thing on My Mind” from an upcoming all-star collection of covers celebrating what would have been folk legend Doc Watson’s 100th birthday.

I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100, due out April 28 and available for preorder now, finds Parton, Rosanne Cash, Jerry Douglas, Chris Eldridge, Steve Earle, Valerie June, Bill Frisell and a dozen others delivering takes on Watson’s greatest tunes.

Ahead of the tribute album’s release, Parton unveiled her tender, newly recorded version of the Tom Paxton...

About 20 years ago, Adrian Quesada was driving at night in his home base of Austin, Texas, when he heard something that made him turn up the volume: “Esclavo y Amo,” a psychedelic love song recorded in the 1970s by the Peruvian combo Los Pasteles Verdes.

“I had never heard anything like it,” recalls Quesada, the prolific multi-instrumentalist, founder of Black Pumas, and former member of Grupo Fantasma. “It sounded like a sample from a hip-hop song.”

Quesada had just discovered the world of psychedelic baladas that flourished beginning in the late Sixties,...

Thirteen years after the release of their surprise hit album Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have finally reunited for a follow-lp, Raise the Roof. It comes out on November 19th, and you can check out leadoff single, a cover of the 1998 Lucinda Williams song “Can’t Let Go,” right here.

Raise the Roof was produced by T-Bone Burnett, who also worked with Plant and Krauss on Raising Sand. It features songs by Merle Haggard, Allen Toussaint, the Everly Brothers, and Bert Jancsh in addition to their original tune “High and Lonesome.

Last month, bassist Tony Garnier was worried — and not just because there were still no 2021 tour dates on the books with Bob Dylan, his boss of more than 30 years. Garnier, who’s been a member of the American Federation of Musicians since 1973, had heard — correctly — that the union’s pension fund would be drained by 2035. “Musicians have been out of work for a year and the ones who contributed to a pension are looking at [one] that is possibly insolvent,” he said at the time. “Musicians are so screwed.”

What a...

In September of 2008, an unusual performance took place at downtown New York club Le Poisson Rouge. At stage right, opposite fellow six-string adventurer Marc Ribot, sat Lou Reed, conjuring clouds of free-rock energy from his guitar. Behind them, avant-garde mainstay John Zorn sent forth piercing, impassioned blasts of alto sax. And at the center of it all, churning with the fury of a whirlpool and dancing across his hand-painted drum kit with the control and flair of a flamenco master, was Milford Graves — the percussionist, healer, and interdisciplinary seeker who...

Richard Hell and the Voidoids will revisit their 1982 album Destiny Street as a “remastered, remixed, repaired” reissue that captures how the band’s second and final album was originally intended to sound.

Destiny Street Remixed, due out January 21st, 2021 via Omnivore Recordings, makes use of the newly discovered three of the four original 24-track masters from the 1981 sessions for the album that, in its original form, “was a morass of trebly multi-guitar blare,” Hell writes in the reissue’s new liner notes.

Never happy with the 1982 album, Hell first tinkered...

Joan Jett has shared a cover of T. Rex’s “Jeepster,” part of the upcoming tribute compilation Angelheaded Hipster, out September 4th via BMG.

Featuring Marc Ribot on guitar, Thomas “Doveman” Bartlett on piano, and Jim White on drums, Jett takes the Electric Warrior track to new heights. “You slide so good/With bones so fair,” she sings, “You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair.” Later, just after the three-minute mark, her husky voice proclaims, “And I’m gonna suck ya!”

The two-disc Angelheaded Hipster: The Songs of Marc Bolan and T.

“AngelHeaded Hipster,” a long-percolating tribute album to Marc Bolan and T. Rex — featuring U2, Elton John, Nick Cave, Joan Jett, Lucinda Williams and Father John Misty, and which is a companion to a forthcoming documentary film on the legendary rocker — is due on Sept. 4. The first track from the album, Cave’s take on Bolan’s 1971 song “Cosmic Dancer,” can be heard here.

The 26-track album, helmed by veteran producer Hal Willner — who passed away April 7 due to complications from coronavirus — features a tag team between U2 and Elton John on T. Rex’s biggest hit, “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” as well as contributions from Cave, Jett, Williams, Misty, Todd Rundgen, Perry Farrell, Soft Cell singer Marc Almond, Kesha and many others. The full track list appears below.

Both the album and documentary are from BMG, in collaboration with Who/Robert Plant manager Bill Curbishley’s Trinifold company.

Although it may not be obvious from her intricate art-rock albums, Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, is a huge Metallica fan. In fact, they inspired her to pick up a guitar in the first place. Clark was a 10-year-old violin player in Dallas when she first heard Metallica, and she immediately tried to play their heavy melodies on her instrument.

“I was like, ‘The violin fucking stinks,’” she says. Clark switched instruments and even played bass in a Metallica cover band as a teen. So she was psyched...

Head over to Greenwich Village, go up Bleecker Street, just a few blocks past 6th Avenue, and then make a left. Keep walking until you get to 42 Carmine Street. That’s where you’ll find Rick Kelly. The Long Island native with the gray hair and the slightly oversized black t-shirt might be ambling around the retail section of the storefront, which he opened up in 1990. He might be talking to his elderly mom Dorothy, who balances the books, answers the phones and dusts the framed pics of Kelly standing...

Rick Kelly with Anne-Katrin Titze at Carmine Street Guitars on instigator Jim Jarmusch: "I really like The Limits of Control because there's some of my dialogue that's in that movie." Photo: Ed Bahlman

In Ron Mann's welcoming Carmine Street Guitars (a New York Film Festival highlight in Spotlight on Documentary), dedicated to Jonathan Demme, featuring the mastery of Rick Kelly and Cindy Hulej we go into the woods.

Jim Jarmusch, along with Eszter Balint, Patti Smith's Lenny Kaye, Bill Frisell, Charlie Sexton, Marc Ribot (Alexandre Moors' The Yellow Birds), Eleanor Friedberger, Christine Bougie of the Bahamas, Wilko's Nels Cline, The Roots' Kirk Douglas, Jamie Hince of The Kills, Lou Reed's guitar tech Stewart Hurwood, Dallas Good and Travis Good of The Sadies, who also composed the music for the documentary, all appear in the shop and play guitar except one.

Rick Kelly: "I really...

In 2018, pioneering spoken-word collective the Last Poets returned with their first album in more than 20 years. Now the group — consisting of Seventies-era members Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan, along with percussionist Baba Donn Babatunde and a slew of collaborators, including renowned avant-jazz bassist Jamaladeen Tacuma — is back with a follow-up. Due May 10th, Transcending Toxic Times finds the group addressing themes it’s been tackling since its founding in Harlem in 1968, including racism, oppression and the sins of America’s past.

In “For the Millions,” which the group is unveiling today,...

“One fine morning I woke up early to find the fascist at my door,” sings Tom Waits in rough and mournful voice on “Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful),” a song from guitarist Marc Ribot’s new album Goodbye Beautiful/Songs of Resistance 1942–2018. It’s not hard to see the modern parallel to this 19th-century Italian folk song, sung during World War II by members of the Italian resistance to protest fascist rule.

Waits and Ribot’s Trump-era update is a lovely, elegiac acoustic chamber waltz on which the singer and guitarist — close collaborators since the mid-Eighties,...

It’s been a while since we had any new Tom Waits music, but he’s back with a new version of a very old song that is depressingly relevant for the world we’re in today. As reported by Pitchfork, the track is “Bella Ciao,” a collaboration with guitarist Marc Ribot for his upcoming album Songs Of Resistance 1948-2018. If…...

Jim Jarmusch, Eszter Balint, Lenny Kaye, Bill Frisell, Charlie Sexton and Marc Ribot appear in Ron Mann's Carmine Street Guitars Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the 56th New York Film Festival Spotlight on Documentary selections this afternoon. The programme includes Tom Volf's Maria By Callas; Mark Bozek's The Times Of Bill Cunningham, narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker; Charles Ferguson's Watergate with interviews of Lesley Stahl, Dan Rather, Pat Buchanan, and John Dean; Alexis Bloom's Divide And Conquer: The Story Of Roger Ailes At Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and American Dharma directed by Errol Morris.

There are 14 documentaries in all chosen by Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones, Dennis Lim, Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Programming, and Florence Almozini, Film Society of Lincoln Center Associate Director of Programming.

Tickets for the 56th New York Film...

New documentary “Carmine Street Guitars” will have its world premier at the Venice Film Festival. The Ron Mann-directed film chronicles a week in the life of Greenwich Village guitar maker Rick Kelly and his apprentice Cindy Hulej. Kelly’s method is unique: he builds his guitars out of wood salvaged from old New York City buildings constructed in the 1800s or as he calls it, “the bones of old New York.” Artists like Lou Reed and Bob Dylan have owned Kelly’s guitars, which feature parts taken from such iconic Manhattan locales as the Hotel Chelsea and Chumley’s pub.

The doc brings musicians of all stripes — including Patti Smith Band’s Lenny Kaye, Kirk Douglas of The Roots, Jamie Hince of The Kills, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline of Wilco, Marc Ribot, Ester Baling, Dallas and Travis Good of The Sadies and Dylan six-stringer Charlie Sexton — to the shop.

Yoko Ono unveiled a daring and harrowing new version of her 1995 song “Warzone,” which will serve as the title track for her upcoming album. Warzone finds Ono reimagining 13 of her own songs originally released between 1970 and 2009. The record will arrive October 19th via Chimera Music.

The original version of “Warzone” (off Ono’s 1995 album Rising) is a blistering punk salvo where Ono howls over searing guitars and drums. The new version captures that same dissonance, only it’s presented as a sparse industrial stomp peppered with eerie synths, the cry...

Attendees of the 39th annual Montreal International Jazz Festival likely all had a familiar refrain in mind: the heat is on. The fest, which runs June 28 to July 7, faced summer temperatures well into the 90s this week, but jazz fanatics, party people, families and tourists alike are braving the weather to enjoy a wide range of musical entertainment and outdoor spectacles.

High profile performers like Ry Cooder, Seal, Snarky Puppy and saxophone sensation Kamasi Washington brought their big stage shows to appreciative audiences, along with veteran jazz stalwarts like Archie Shepp and guitarist Al Di Meola. Performing American rockers like George Thorogood, Ben Harper and the jam-friendly Bela Fleck and the Flecktones were all honored with great hospitality and presented with official festival awards.

Singer/guitarist Ry Cooder appeared at the Théâtre Maisonneuve on Friday night, showcasing his unique spin on American roots music and playing the blues with style and grace.

‪The Yellow Birds‬ director ‪Alexandre Moors‬ on Kevin Powers' novel adapted by David Lowery and Ronnie Porto: "The book is beautiful. A beautiful piece of English literature." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Yellow Birds, shot by Sundance award-winner Daniel Landin (Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin) and edited by Joe Klotz with a a terrific score by Adam Wiltzie, Adam Peters and Marc Ribot, stars Alden Ehrenreich and Tye Sheridan with Jack Huston, Jennifer Aniston (also an executive producer), Toni Collette, Jason Patric, Lee Tergesen, and Olivia Crocicchia.

Alexandre Moors joined me for a conversation on his second feature (after Blue Caprice with Isaiah Washington and Tequan Richmond). The first time I heard about Kevin Powers' novel The Yellow Birds was from the director of Augustine, Alice Winocour when she was in New York for her film Disorder (Maryland) during Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in 2016. Matthias Schoenaerts played Vincent, a soldier returning from.

In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett By Tony Fletcher (Oxford University Press)

The art of writing bios is no easy feat, but for British-born/NY-based scribe Tony Fletcher, well, he makes it seem all so easy even though he's research is exhaustive. His bios on R.E.M (Remarks Remade - The Story of R.E.M.), Keith Moon (Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon), The Smiths (A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of The Smiths, to name but a few, are must-reads. His latest on the turbulent life of R&B legend Wilson Pickett -- In the Midnight Hour: The Life & Soul of Wilson Pickett -- may be his best yet. 

For the charismatic '60s crossover icon "Wicked" Wilson Pickett, Fletcher pulls no punches with interviews with his family, business partners, musicians, etc., to shed light on his troubled legacy.

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Diverse, awe-inspiring and memorable treasures that have sadly fallen off the radar

The noughties were a tough decade for film music fans. Not only was there the unprecedented loss of four great masters in the form of Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, Michael Kamen and Basil Poledouris; the nature of the industry itself began to go through some seismic changes, not all of them for the better.

With the art of film scoring becoming ever more processed, driven increasingly by ghost writers, electronic augmentation and temp tracks, prospects looked bleak. However, this shouldn’t shield the fact that there were some blindingly brilliant scores composed during this period. Here’s but a small sampling of them.

25. The Departed (Howard Shore, 2006)

When it came to the sound of his Oscar-winning crime thriller, director Martin Scorsese hit on the inspired notion of having composer Howard Shore base it around a tango,...

It's a mix of tried-and-true names along with some relative unknowns on the music version of Beck's "Song Reader." Jack White, Jack Black, Jeff Tweedy, Jarvis Cocker of Pulp, Laura Marling, fun., Juanes, David Johansen and more made the cut as collaborators on the forthcoming album. The songwriter has seen a surge of activity lately since releasing his critically acclaimed new album "Morning Phase" this year, and he's now circled back on what what was originally a sheet-music-only 20-song project. "Song Reader" is officially being dubbed a compilation by Warby Parker/Capitol, who will release the set on July 29. The eyewear manufacture worked with the songwriter previously on making special edition frames, and now the two together with donate proceeds from the album's sale to the non-profit 826 National, an young creative writers' institution. Warby Parker was also the sponsor behind limited engagements where "Song Reader" compositions were performed in L.

YouTube's subscription-based music service was originally planned for release around the beginning of 2014. Three months later, we learned that it had been indefinitely delayed, as its developers wanted release a strong product right out of the gate. This seemed like a reasonable plan; after all, some previous YouTube updates, such as its new commenting system, had been plagued by rocky launch periods. Despite this plan, YouTube's music service has still managed to draw some turbulent press right around its release. Several prominent indie labels have not yet agreed to the terms of YouTube's service, and organizations that represent those labels have stated the revenue sharing deals Google has offered are not consistent with the rest of the industry. The labels are being given no choice but to sign; if the refuse, YouTube could block ads on their channels, thus preventing the labels from earning revenue on their artists' videos. The...

The lineup for one of the largest musical festivals of the year is out — and filled with huge names! From Kanye and A$AP Ferg to Elton John and Lionel Richie, Bonnaroo has the most diverse lineup ever.

Hopefully Kanye West won’t walk off stage this time! The rapper is headlining Bonnaroo, along with Elton John, and it will be his big return to the festival since he left the stage six years ago after being booed! See the full lineup below, and get the details on where and when to get your tickets!

Bonaroo Lineup Revealed

Are you ready for this? On Feb. 22, tickets for Bonnaroo go on sale at 12:00 Pm Est, and we’ve got a feeling they’re going to go fast. You can purchase general admission tickets as well as VIP packages right here. On June 12-15th, more than 125 bands and 20 comedic acts...

The Bonnaroo Music Festival, which runs for four days in Manchester Tenn., recently announced their 2014 lineup.

Headlining the 13th annual Bonnaroo will be Elton John, Kanye West, Jack White, Lionel Richie, Vampire Weekend, The Avett Brothers, Phoenix, Skrillex, Arctic Monkeys, Frank Ocean and The Flaming Lips.

Also heading to the Great Stage Park this summer will be Neutral Milk Hotel, Wiz Khalifa, Cut Copy, The Head and the Heart, Lauryn Hill, Broken Bells, Ice Cube, Slightly Stoopid, Fitz and The Tantrums, Cake, Janelle Monae, Amos Lee and John Butler Trio.

West was a surprise choice for the festival, which hasn’t had the rapper in their lineup since 2008 when he walked onto the stage nearly two hours after his scheduled set time. Though he tried to blame Pearl Jam’s extended set, the crowd united in booing him.

For John and Richie, two veterans in the music industry, this will...

The always epic Bonnaroo — a four-day music and camping festival on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tenn. — boasts some huge names this year. The festival has just confirmed its headliners will be Kanye West, Elton John, Jack White and Lionel Richie. Watch the festival's teaser video and check out the 125 plus artists on the lineup below. The festival’s thirteenth year, which goes down June 12-15, will mark the surprising return of West, whose headlining set in 2008 turned into a disaster when his Glow In The Dark-themed light show didn’t start until after sunrise. Ye posted an angry rant on his blog blaming Bonnaroo organizers, but it seems that all is now forgiven. This year will mark Elton John and Lionel Richie’s first ever appearance. Tickets go on sale Feb. 22 at noon Est. Here’s the full Bonnaroo lineup: Elton John Kanye West Jack White Lionel Richie Vampire Weekend...

When he's not busy handicapping his own chances of replacing Jim DeMint as one of South Carolina's U.S. Senators, Stephen Colbert is celebrating the season with a slate of guests singing Christmas songs with him this week on The Colbert Report. Last night, he took a credible turn on "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" with Diana Krall and her husband, Elvis Costello, trading verses on the somber tune as guitarist Marc Ribot added to glistening piano lines from Krall. ...

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill (Reprise)

A far better album than Young & Crazy Horse's shabby Americana from earlier this year, not so much because it's songs written by Neil (certainly nobody will be impressed by the rather feeble lyrics on display here) as that he stretches out and jams with the Horse. Really stretches out, as in tracks lasting 27:35, 16:48, 8:33, and 16:26 (along with five tracks in the three- to four-minute range). He quit drugs, but he didn't quit reaching for another state of mind; I'd even say that he may be using this music as his drug. The hypnotic trips he takes here make this his best new album in over twenty years, and one of his top five post-'70s albums. Pretty good for a guy who just celebrated his 67th birthday.

David Byrne & St. Vincent: Love This Giant (4Ad)

This could have been a style rip-off.

A high point for U.S. manufacturing: Jazz genius Ornette Coleman

Shirley Clarke’s 1984 documentary ‘Ornette: Made in America’ is a portrait of music visionary and harmolodic high priest Ornette Coleman, a “free jazz” saxophonist and composer who for many decades bewildered even most free jazzers with his courageous, uncornered, acausal, ascendant, sentient sound. ‘Made In America’ provides a chance to see rare live performances of Coleman’s legendary 70’s & 80’s band Prime Time, and goes as far as could be expected in revealing a personality that will always remain, as with any wise seer, fundamentally inscrutable to mere mortals. Coleman doesn’t fit into orthodox narratives of jazz’s evolution; more Messiaen than Mingus, he has always stood apart, beyond. Or as Coleman, with his signature humility, explains, “there’s no up and down — there’s only out.”

Renowned critic Gary Giddins once wrote that, “Nothing in jazz is...

Ralph Carney's Serious Jass Project: Seriously (Smog Veil)

One of the great things about recycling old jazz is that there are so many styles to choose from. On the evidence of this CD, saxman Ralph Carney (known as a member of Tin Huey and Oranj Symphonette as well as for his contributions to records by Tom Waits, the Black Keys, Black Francis, the B-52's, Bill Laswell, Elvis Costello, Galaxie 500, Allen Ginsberg, Marc Ribot, William Burroughs, Pere Ubu, and many more) has a great fondness for small-group swing and jump blues, but taps a few additional subgenres as well. He's even more versatile as an instrumentalist, credited on this album with six types of saxophone, two types of clarinet, and flute, trumpet, English horn, lap steel guitar, and vocals, with a moderate amount of overdubbing at times.

Of course, when Carney includes "serious" in the band and album names,...

Tom Waits: Bad As Me (Anti)

This starts out as Waits getting by on gestures and timbres. That's actually pretty good, since Waits is the master of such sonic legerdemain (he uses a wide variety of voices; "Talking at the Same Time" is especially striking) and the energy exuded is infectious (the weird rockabilly hybrid "Get Lost" is hilarious). One could listen to this album solely to get off on the way the guitars sound (longtime collaborator Marc Ribot and Keith Richards both shine). Halfway through, the title track offers a solid song with amusing lyrics, and it's followed by the brilliant torch song "Kiss Me." Another quiet ballad, "Last Leaf," is even better (because the lyric uses a more original image). With this being the first Waits studio album of new material in seven years, I was hoping for more in the way of songwriting, but this'll do.

It's decades since Tom Waits had a drink and his music has just got weirder and better. With his 17th album out, he heads for his local roadhouse (for coffee) and talks about songwriting, hard living and his fear of phones

"I used to think that all great recordings happened at about 3am," Tom Waits is telling me, in the conspiratorial, wasted and wounded voice that still seems made for those early hours. "So my first studio experiences, I wanted to be recording after the bars closed. I just thought that's when it all happened. And it worked for me for a while, I guess. But I don't believe that so much any more. I realise now there's more than one way to sneak up on a herd of cattle…"

Waits is sitting in the back room of a roadhouse near his home town of Santa Rosa, where the industrialised...

Joe Henry’s latest solo set had an open-door policy. Literally. The songwriter and producer kept windows and doors open during the recording process, letting what he called “the racket” lead his backing musicians like T Bone Burnett drummer Jay Bellerose and labelmate Tom Waits’ main axe man Marc Ribot. “It was a deliberate decision to allow those sounds to be heard as music. Songs don’t happen in a vacuum,” Henry told me in an interview this week. “When you’re writing a song, there’s life coming all around you. [Musicians] try to disappear into some hermetically sealed chamber. I resist...

Our favorite growler/sewage gargling promoter Tom Waits has a new album out you guys! Spread the news! And while you do, make sure his gorgeous track "Back In The Crowd" is playing at full blast behind your shoulder, so you can attract followers like the Pied Piper. Out today on iTunes and Spotify, the track is Waits at his seductive bear-voiced best, purring through a slow, rhythmic, guitar-driven Latin ballad featuring his avant-garde guitar buddy Marc Ribot and Los Lobos frontman David Hidalgo. "If you don't want these arms to hold you," he growls at the start, prompting the immediate question: who is stupid enough not to want those arms to hold them, when they belong to the owner of that voice? Success, Mr. Waits. Characteristically, it's nothing like the album's raucous title track, "Bad As Me," which dropped on iTunes yesterday.

(via Stereogum)...

Two huge charity concerts are currently being organized to raise money for victims of the unfolding disaster in Japan.

March 27 will see Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Sonic Youth and a host of music acts including Mike Patton, Cibo Matto, Mephista, Marc Ribot, Uri Caine, Aleph Trio, John Zorn and many more play a Japan Benefit Concert at Miller Theatre at Columbia University in New York.

More than a dozen innovative artists at the intersection of indie rock, contemporary jazz, and avant-garde performance will come together at Miller Theatre to present a benefit concert to support recovery efforts in Japan.

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It would be incredibly difficult—if not downright impossible—to corral four guitar players more dexterous than Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Greg Leisz and Buddy Miller. Individually, these session musicians and solo artists tend to improve any song they play on, and their combined résumé represents a wide swathe of Americana: Steve Earle, Tom Waits, Vic Chesnutt, Madeleine Peyroux, Sam Phillips and John Zorn, among too many others to count, let alone name....

Photo by James O’Mara Talk show hosting has been good for Elvis Costello. Conversing deeply with heroes, peers, and upstarts under hot lights for Spectacle, Elvis Costello With has him looking invigorated and trim at 56. National Ransom, his second album in two years to have been recorded in Nashville with longtime cohort T-Bone Burnett, is a novelistic sprawl of jazz, both cocktail (“You Hung The Moon”) and gypsy (“Jimmie Standing In the Rain”); classic country-pop (“I Lost You”); and shadowy folk rock (“Dr. Watson I Presume”). Guests such as Marc Ribot, Dennis Crouch, Jim Lauderdale, Vince Gill, Leon Russell, and longtime Costello collaborators Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas have helped create what might be the first masterpiece of Costello’s golden age. “Woe betide all this hocus pocus,” he sneers on the headline-ripped title track, “They’re running us ragged at their first attempt/Around the time the killing...

The approach John Mellencamp took for No Better Than This, his 21st studio album, sounds gimmicky: Traveling America with a vintage portable recorder, a single microphone, and a crew that included producer T-Bone Burnett and guitarist Marc Ribot, Mellencamp recorded at historic sites like Sun Studios, Savannah’s First African Baptist Church, and the San Antonio hotel where Robert Johnson cut some of his most famous sides. It’s as if Mellencamp expected any residual magic hanging around those locations to rub off on his own music. Thing is, he might have been onto something. The direct, spare No Better ...

Chicago – We dig discovering sprouting artists at the phase where they’re just talented enough to keep their humility. That’s where we found 21-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist Sahara Smith on Friday night at Chicago’s Lincoln Hall. Her voice has been described as “a potent mix of whiskey and molasses” and the “best of what’s next”.

Music Rating: 3.0/5.0

A Texas-based performer since the age of 13, Smith’s new career has been shepherded by T Bone Burnett and produced by Emile Kelman (Burnett’s longtime studio veteran). Burnett earned recent acclaim for writing the lyrics to “The Weary Kind,” which was the theme to the new film “Crazy Heart” where Jeff Bridges won a 2010 Oscar for his leading role.

21-year-old newcomer Sahara Smith.

Image credit: Jon Pattillo

Smith’s current tour, which is aimed at helping to sell her album due out in Aug. 2010, is piggybacked with Mason Jennings and Nathaniel Rateliff.