When is a murder ballad high art? Certainly when filmmaker and musician Anthony Ladesich and his creative compatriots get hold of it. Ladesich was kind enough to speak with me at length about a wonderful film project that he brought … Continue reading →
TINDRA and KROKE Live in Førde Talik 93 www.talik.no On the face of it, this collaboration between the Norwegian folk trio Tindra and Kroke, one of Poland’s leading klezmer bands, seems unlikely. But, as this … Continue reading →
THE ATOMIC DUO Broadsides The Atomic Duo www.theatomicduo.com The Atomic Duo are Silas Lowe and Mark Rubin. They hail from Austin Texas and you may recognize Mark as a co-founder of the band The Bad … Continue reading →
HANK WILLIAMS The Legend Begins: Rare and Unreleased Recordings TimeLife 26414D www.timelife.com/ www.hankwilliams.com/ A terrific set of hard-to-find, material from one of the undisputed masters of the early days of country music. The first two … Continue reading →
Molly Ringwald OK, admit it. After the last post, this is not the face you were expecting to see in our next installment. But, if you were the Psychedelic Furs, what better song to be the B-side of “Pretty in … Continue reading →
Bobby Darin I fear I’ve become a bit of a crank. My previous post likely creates the impression that I insist that somehow all songs that involve crime or murder must be serious, and that there’s no room for a … Continue reading →
LIZ FRAME and THE KICKERS Sooner Silly Fishy www.lizframeandthekickers.com Proof that live music lives: I first heard Liz Frame at a street festival. She blew me away then and her new CD still has me … Continue reading →
Louis Armstrong SatchmoIf there’s any one person to thank for bringing this bit of murderous, Marxist musical-theater satire to a large English-language audience, it’s none other than Louis Armstrong. He was not the first performer of an English version of … Continue reading →
MICHAEL LEWIS The Natural World: Lyric Driven Songs of the Borderlands Michael Lewis 001 www.michaellewismusic.net With his wife Denise Wilson, Lewis is one half of the singer-songwriter duo Traveler’s Dream. They’ve been on the road … Continue reading →
Rudolf Forster in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 “Die 3-Groschen-Oper “ One challenge of exploring how music allows people to respond to murder, tragedy, and other forms of violent hardship, is that it makes one attuned to, well, murder, tragedy, and other forms … Continue reading →
