BY ZIVIT SHLANK JAZZ CORRESPONDENT Wizardly guitarist/composer Marc Ribot defies classification. By his own admission, he’s spent his entire career trying to fit into one box or another but always failed miserably. He’s played with the likes of Chuck Berry, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Medeski Martin & Wood, The Black Keys and Philadelphia’s own McCoy Tyner, among countless others. Ribot’s own recorded works have explored the nether regions of Afro-Cuban jazz, noir blues, abstract rock, sweet soul, prickly post-punk, and exotic world styles — to which he brings his incandescent improvisatory six-string magic. You may have heard his otherworldly guitar […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR Though he’s directed only five feature films, Alexander Payne has built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers. His movies find comedy in the crises of his flawed protagonists — among them Matthew Broderick as a high school teacher in Election, Jack Nicholson as a widower in About Schmidt and Paul Giamatti as a struggling author and wine snob in Sideways, for which Payne shared an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Payne’s latest film is The Descendants, which is set in Hawaii and stars George Clooney. He plays a Honolulu lawyer named Matt who stands to […]
BBC: Amy Winehouse Was Planning Jazz Super Group With ?uestlove Of The Roots
BBC: Singer Amy Winehouse had been planning to record material with a “supergroup” before she died, music producer Salaam Remi has revealed. Remi said the singer had planned a jazz album with Questlove, of The Roots, and saxophone player Soweto Kinch. “There were a bunch of other names bouncing around,” he said, at a press playback for her posthumous album. Remi has worked on all three Winehouse albums, including Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which is out next month. The producer said he knew of Winehouse’s “super group” plans because “she had written down everything she wanted to do”. Questlove features several […]
WORTH REPEATING: Let It Bleed
CHARLIE PIERCE: There will now be a decade or more of criminal trials, and perhaps a quarter-century or more of civil actions, as a result of what went on at Penn State. These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about “closure” or about “moving on.” And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university “heal.” (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.) This wound should be left open and gaping and raw until the very last of the children that Jerry Sandusky is […]
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Q&A With Adam Gopnik
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Longtime New Yorker staff writer, author, essayist, children’s novelist and Philly homeboy Adam Gopnik will be at the Free Library tonight to promote his new book The Table Comes First: Family, France & The Meaning Of Food. Earlier this week, I got Gopnik on the horn and we discussed writing, food, crime and punishment, the necessity of factory farming, the slow dissolve of print into the digital ether, the uncertain future of the New Yorker, the secret world of children’s literature, the enduring power of Tolkien, seeing Hendrix and the Incredible String Band at the Electric Factory, […]
SIDEWALKING: The Dream Police
Retired NYPD Philadelphia Police captain Ray Lewis, Zuccotti Park, NYC, last night RELATED: Inside Job
TONITE: The Human Fly
THE WEIRD WORLD OF BLOWFLY (2010, directed by Jonathan Furmansky, 89 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC First time director Jonathan Furmanski deserves kudos for shining a dirty light on the weird world of the lascivious 1970s proto-rapper Blowfly in a new documentary so deep it peripherally captures something important about the weird world in which we all live. Nobody could be Blowfly all the time. The costumed sex fiend’s secret identity is Clarence Reid, a cornerstone player of the dance music hit machine that came out of Miami in the early 1970s. Reid wrote tunes and acted as […]
TONITE: Flogging Mali
RELATED: Tinariwen was founded by Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who at age four witnessed the execution of his father (a Tuareg rebel) during a 1963 uprising in Mali. As a child he saw a western film in which a cowboy played a guitar. Ag Alhabib built his own guitar out of a tin can, a stick and bicycle brake wire. He started to play old Tuareg and modern Arabic pop tunes.[citation needed] Ag Alhabib first lived in refugee camps and later resided with other Tuareg exiles in Libya and Algeria. In the late 1970s Ag Alhabib joined with other musicians in […]
NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When U Can’t
FRESH AIR “Almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans,” writes Rolling Stone political correspondent Tim Dickinson. “Most of their plans, which are presented as commonsense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor.” On Wednesday’s Fresh Air, Dickinson explains how the tax policies pursued by the Republican Party have changed in the past 14 years — and says those changes have led to greater economic inequality in our country. He explains that […]
MEDIA: Life After Death Magnetic
INQUIRER: “The music industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that,” says Magnet editor Eric T. Miller, who in 1993 cofounded the magazine. (John Cusack was reading it in publicity shots for the 2000 movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “And then the magazine industry was in the toilet, and we were able to weather that — for a while.” And then, in 2008, the economy crashed. “You’re able to weather 90 things going wrong, but 100 things . . . .” In a shrinking market where online music sites and blogs such as Pitchfork […]
EARLY WORD: Village Green Preservation Society
[illustration by ALEX FINE] Do us all a favor: Cue up “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks. Ah. Don’t you feel better already? Music in the left speaker, vocals in the right-totally old-school. That twinkling strum of brotherly guitar and gently piddling snare, those drowsy sha-la-las drifting upward while the bassline tumbles downward, and the comforting sentiment that even the shittiest day on earth ends with a glimpse-of-paradise sunset. That, my friend, is the sound of your father’s Britpop. They don’t make singles like that anymore — Damon Albarn has long since stopped even trying. Sadly, the Gallagher brothers haven’t. As […]
DROOLING BANJOS: Q&A With Bela Fleck
BY MEREDITH KLEIBER Anyone who views the banjo as strictly a bluegrass instrument clearly hasn’t been introduced to the music of Béla Fleck — or his new banjo concerto (you never expected to see those two words together, did you?). Since cutting his teeth in the music industry in 1979 with the release of his first solo album, the 12-time Grammy winner has re-proven his ingenuity time and again. He continues to surprise audiences with complex compositions and innovative approaches to the banjo, and Rocket Science, his new release with the Flecktones, is no exception. The new album features the […]
Seattle Cops Pepper Spray 84-Year-Old Occupier
Seattle activist Dorli Rainey, 84, reacts after being hit with pepper spray during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011 at Westlake Park in Seattle. Protesters gathered in the intersection of 5th Avenue and Pine Street after marching from their camp at Seattle Central Community College in support of Occupy Wall Street. Many refused to move from the intersection after being ordered by police. Police then began spraying pepper spray into the gathered crowd hitting dozens of people. Photo: Seattlepi.com, Joshua Trujillo / AP MORE