When you hang with the Fremonts it becomes obvious almost immediately these guys operate on the same frequency. They’re connected like brothers, both on and off the stage. In conversation, they finish each other’s sentences and, even trippier, during live gigs they’ll occasionally trade off instruments. Over the past 20 years the lineup has changed […]
It’s 6:15 on a Tuesday morning. Past the desert valley the mountains rise up into their own isolation, stretching themselves awake as the first light begins to break. The clouds, roiling in, create a reflected image of the mountains projecting all the more brilliantly as they turn from a soft pink to a hot flowing […]
“A little water on a cold day to wash your hands with is a good thing.” —Zebadiah Creed On a beautiful Halloween Saturday, my good friend Mark C. Jackson came to my home for lunch and a conversation. There would be a lot to talk about. Award-winning novelist, singer-songwriter, musician, composer, podcaster, raconteur, and bandmate, […]
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 […]
In our recent past, we had what some refer to as a folk revival. Musicians were turning off their amplifiers and reaching for their acoustic guitars. Mandolins and fiddles crept their way from the woodworks of bluegrass festivals into rock venues and were muscling out guitar solos and synthesizers on radio airwaves. Instruments like the […]
I first heard the young bass virtuoso John Murray five years ago, when he was just 11 years old after fielding a phone call from his mentor, trumpet-master Gilbert Castellanos, who made the seemingly outlandish claim that he was “the next Scott LaFaro” (the legendary bassist for Bill Evans, who died in a car accident […]
The blues flows through San Diego. It has for a long time. Sometimes it has been obvious, flowing on the surface, and other times it has tunneled underground from far, far away just to bubble up underneath our feet. But, improbable as it may sound, a continuous stream of one of the greatest branches of […]
If you’ve followed the music scene in Southern California anytime during the last 40 years, you already know the name Eric Lieberman. If not, you’d certainly know his bands: The King Biscuit Blues Band with Ken Schoppmeyer and Paul Cowie, Tuesdays at Winston’s in Ocean Beach with the Rhumboogies, or every Thursday at Croce’s with […]
On a moonlit strip of highway in Colorado, the van Astra Kelly was driving hit some black ice. She was finishing up a solo tour that had taken her around the country a few times. In almost two years, she’d logged 85,000 miles on the conversion van that skidded, rolled, and landed upside down on […]
