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JazzFest ’13, Day 2: The Masters & Their Minions
As the story goes, Lionel Ferbes played the Battle of New Orleans After Party. That his riffs inspired Johnny Horton’s big hit. I don’t believe that to be true. However, on good authority, it can be...
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JazzFest ’13, Day 3: Lift Off @ Gospel Tent & More
Of the many excursions to the Gospel Tent through the decades, two moments stand out. There was an Easter Sunday years ago, back, when the Rhodes folks still sponsored it and before the admission...
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Tuesday’s Tribute to Allen Toussaint = Boffo
The realization hit, as best I recall, sometime in the 70s. A great majority of the music that really stirred my soul, going back to the Doo Wop days, had a connection to New Orleans. Either it was...
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JazzFest ’13: Daze Between Dwindling Down
The festival kicks up again in the morning. (That would be tomorrow a.m., Thursday.) If you happen to be on your way down, here’s a tip. Think inclemency. It’s rained every day this week. Without...
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JazzFest ’13 2d Thursday: Mostly Mucky
The reality is this. Some days at JazzFest simply aren’t as magical as most. Maybe it’s the music. Maybe it’s the weather or something like that. Or both. Like today. The Film Babe made it to town last...
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JazzFest ’13, 2d Friday: Mud, Malo, Marcia & Mo’ Mud
The gates opened about forty minutes late. One figures the powers that be were trying to make moving around easier in the above the ankle muck. Whatever efforts they made were to little avail. The word...
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JazzFest ’13: Saturday, Sunday, Sayonara
I am a traditionalist. A Beast of Habit, a man who plans a rhythm to his life. And sticks to it. Friends and family have called it OCD. Even at an obsession as harum scarum as JazzFest can be. Whether...
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Gregg Allman: Almost Hittin’ the Note
The last time I heard Gregg Allman with his band — at the House of Blues in New Orleans, sometime in the last five or so years, maybe — he was sober, I believe, and it wasn’t long after he’d taken on a...
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Forecastle Friday: The Early Shift
This is not your older sister’s Forecastle. That’s obvious from the get go. Cops roaming the grounds. Security checks. Wrist bands. No stools allowed. You know the festival you heard about a decade...
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Wanda Jackson Remains the Queen of Rockabilly, the First Lady of Rock & Roll
She told this story about her first tour. She was seventeen. “Neither my daddy or me knew anything about touring. We were Okies. So he looked through the pages of the “Billboard” and saw the name of...
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Cosmo: Let Him Go, Let Him, God Bless Him
If there’s one image that lingers, one that underscores why I miss Tommy Cosdon oh so much, it’s the one in my mind’s eye from the summer of ’61. Taylorsville Road Frisch’s, the one known as the...
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Culture Maven on Culture: Last Thoughts on Cosmo (Including Two Songs)
If you haven’t read my first piece on Tommy Cosdon, the great Louisville rock & roll singer of my generation, you can do so here. I wanted to share my thoughts and some cultural perspective with...
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The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a Jive Hummer
I love rock & roll. I’m obsessed with rock & roll, and am grateful I grew up with it from its beginnings. I just gotta thing about putting its accoutrements in glass cases to be gawked at like...
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Lou Reed, Toussaint McCall & The Power
I had the occasion the other day to speak on the phone with an attorney from a big firm in town. One of those enterprises with 500 lawyers, tony offices in several states, where the paralegals bill at...
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Culture Maven Musical Moment: “Blue Christmas”
My delusion when tackling this project was that my rendition of the Elvis classic, recorded as a medley with my take on a snippet of Toussaint McCall’s sublime, “Nothing Takes The Place Of You,” would...
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Songs That Resonate: “Edward the Mad Shirt Grinder”
You ever have a 48 hours like this? You’ve gotten in a argument with your significant other, neither of you gives in, so it smolders on for too long. You’re eating a gooey brownie to ease the maelstrom...
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Pete Seeger, Rest In Peace
He would have sung through the night, I swear it to be true. And, we, his adoring followers, bathing in his goodness that reigned over us, would have stayed and sung until we were voiceless. Sometime...
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Genesis 1:1 Ed Sullivan, Elvis and JohnPaulGeorge&Ringo
In the beginning . . . It was fifty years ago today. Okay, not exactly. But, if you’re reading this, you should get the lyrical reference. It will be a half century exactly this coming Sunday since the...
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Culture Podcast: Ed Beats Elvis & Beatles
There has, deservedly so, been much ado about the Beatles on the 50th anniversary of their arrival in the United States. And their appearance on Ed Sullivan’s Show several days later. It was certainly...
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New Orleans On My Mind: JazzFest Beckons
It happened again last night. I was presented with the need, the opportunity — the pleasure, actually — to explain why the New Orleans JazzFest isn’t just about jazz in the sense most people might...
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