Different Strokes and Indifferent Folks

I spent three nights working at the Folk Alliance conference last week.  (My summaries are here, here and here.)  While I admired a lot of what I heard- showcases by Bill Miller, Gaelynn Lea, Barbara Dane, Elle Márjá Eira and Wink Burcham were magnificent- I felt a bit detached.  

A good portion of the attendees had dedicated their lives to folk music.  Not me.  I might have been forcibly ejected from the conference had the true believers around me known that I had listened to the latest release by the rapper Future on the way to the event each night.

During one showcase, I was seated next to a man with no awareness of personal space.  I suspected that his life was transformed by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger in the early ‘60s.  He went into ecstatic paroxysms when a performer broke into the protest song “(Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody) Turn Me Around.” 

I was both annoyed and envious.  That was his moment.  What’s mine?  If I love everything, am I deeply attached to nothing?   I often feel like a profligate philanderer who sleeps with a different partner every night and inevitably winds up alone and friendless.


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I reviewed Run the Jewels’s return to the Midland theater.

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I elected to hit the Green Lady Lounge instead of attending the Kansas City Folk Festival on Sunday afternoon.  My notes on Dominique Sanders’ momentous weekend are posted at Plastic Sax.

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Benjamin Netanyahu bumped me off the airwaves last week.  I was slated to yak about the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

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I write weekly concert previews for The Kansas City Star and Ink magazine.

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Clyde Stubblefield has died.

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Al Jarreau has died.

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Junie Morrison has died.

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I confess to reading the recent spate of rock-is-dead essays with almost as much relish as the inescapable jazz-is-dead dissertations.  And man, when I hear certain songs on “rock” radio stations, I’m overwhelmed with an urge to break stuff.  Uniform’s Wake in Fright makes me feel better.  Excoriating noise in the vein of Big Black and Jesus Lizard, Uniform’s Wake in Fright is a vicious ghost of rock past.  Here’s ”Tabloid”.

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The New Year's Concert 2017 with Gustavo Dudamel is less than three hours long, but it took me more than a month to work my way through the opus.  Maybe Vienna isn’t for me.

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David Bowie probably made scouting expeditions at New York jazz clubs before selecting Donny McClaslin’s band to create Blackstar.  A group led by David Binney might have been his second choice.  Binney’s fine new album The Time Verses is similarly exploratory. 

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I can’t defend my affection for John Garcia’s The Coyote Who Spoke In Tongues.  It’s a bombastic metal-goes-acoustic jam.  And I love it.  RIYL: Alice In Chains, smoke, Kyuss.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)