SAGE ADVICE FROM LOU CURTISS The next big event I’m working on is the Adams Ave Street Fair, which I’ve been doing for the last 15 years or so. Right now, me and a bunch of other noble folk are sitting and listening to four or five hundred audition CDs and trying our best to […]
Deadbrokedown has released a new CD of original country blues, The Last Is First, which is different from the rest of the music landscape in that it is recorded with deliberately bare bones—just guitars and vocals, no drums or bass. Deadbrokedown is David Deakman, and this web-streamed project contains ten songs that play to his […]
Over the nearly 17 years that I’ve been reviewing music recording-related products in the pages of this magazine, there have been literally hundreds of different manufacturers’ wares profiled. Each piece of merchandise—be it software or hardware—was thoroughly pushed, prodded, probed, and put through its proverbial paces in an effort to provide the most painstakingly accurate […]
Transpose Hello Troubadourians! I’m writing this column on the day after Thanksgiving 2020. To say that it has been a really tumultuous year is an understatement. Thankfulness has been an off-and-on feeling for a long time, yet I am thankful for many things that I must mention. I’m thankful to be healthy, not just that […]
As if the year 2020 had not delivered enough anguish to the jazz community, on September 4, the profoundly soulful double bass icon Gary Peacock made his transition from this world into the unknown. He was 85 years old. Bass players are the heartbeat of jazz, and Gary Peacock was one of the most versatile […]
Keys and Curiosities is the latest EP by Way José, local keyboardist/producer Daniel DeMento’s band, or more accurately, an amalgam of musicians and styles gathered from sessions in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles area, and Miami. The online download is a five-track jumble of keyboard-driven pop with music written by DeMento, some featuring recited poetry, others […]
Do you ever feel like you’re in a dream from which you cannot awaken, uncertain whether you are the one having the dream or merely the one being dreamed of? You lose your sense of self; time and place have no meaning, and you become shrouded in the exhilaratingly dreadful feeling that you don’t really […]
Trouble in the Wind has been regularly releasing CDs and EPs for over a decade from their Carlsbad home base. The band has had few personnel changes and their new release, Weird Living, is their eighth. Musically, there has been development that has seen the impressive songwriting prowess of frontman/composer Robby Gira, whose early efforts […]
The last time we beheld guitar overlord Wayne Riker was on his 2018 release Blues Breakout, a spectacular exhibition of fretboard heroics. Known for years for his work on a wide array of projects in a great many styles both locally and nationally, the previous album was Riker in a mood to blaze the blues, […]
