Author: TKA
via JamBase
Bobby Rush shared a new single, “One Monkey Can Stop A Show.” The song is an update of the blues legend’s 1995 song, “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show.”
“One Monkey Can Stop A Show” follows Rush’s 2022 Chicken Heads 50th Anniversary EP featuring Buddy Guy, Gov’t Mule and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram as well as his Grammy-winning 2020 album Rawer Than Raw. Bobby explained how the new single came to fruition:
“Nearly 30 years ago, I wrote and cut the record ‘One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show’ which is about a woman threatening to leave me. Though if she leaves me, I’m going to find someone new. This time, ‘One Monkey Can Stop A Show,’ is in a similar direction, but it means that the woman is not going to let me go. I need to change my actions and treat her better. She’d rather see me dead than see me go.
Why I cut this song is because the song ‘Keep on Rollin’’ is so big with the R&B artist King George today. He’s saying, ‘if you leave me, you ain’t gonna stop nothing, I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. This train is going to keep on rolling.’ I was talking about in my song, she was so devastated she will stop the train and you. Not only does he call out my song ‘One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show’ in his song, but he also inspired me to come back to the table with a new version of my original.”
Via NPR WRTI
A few years ago, in a catalog essay for a major exhibition of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, critic Greg Tate cast a sidelong glance at the voguish recent turn for Afrofuturism, a creative mode that took shape on the margins before accruing its cultural and literal currency. Tate, who died in 2021, had in mind a more organic, less calculating ideal for the Afrofuturist impulse — like the one so alluringly drawn on “Virgo,” a coolly aerated funk jam by Meshell Ndegeocello.
“They’re calling me / Back to the stars,” Ndegeocello sings at the top of the track. Then: “Deep outer space.” She plays a synth-bass and chordal vamp, over a head-nod funk beat; her vocals assume both a curvilinear croon and a confiding murmur, hinting at cosmic secrets. The song’s two featured guests — Brandee Younger on harp and Julius Rodriguez on Farfisa organ — deepen the seraphic shimmer, against an evolving cycle of funk and club rhythms. Ndegeocello, who played bass in one of Tate’s early bands, isn’t conforming to anybody else’s idea of the celestial plane. When she sings of supernovas, she sounds like a witness.
Red Baraat on Good Morning America in celebration of Holi.
Red Baraat is currently on the road for their 11th Annual Festival of Colors Tour!
via NYT
An Unlikely Fiddler’s Dream
Michael Cleveland was born blind and mostly deaf. That was only the beginning of his journey to become one of modern bluegrass’s most compelling musicians.
Michael Cleveland had been 13 for five days the first time he picked with the bluegrass demigod Doc Watson — in a backstage bathroom, no less, at an awards show in Kentucky.
It was September 1993. Peter Wernick, the first president of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA), had assembled a band of young hotshots to provide a pointed rebuttal to a Washington Post feature that argued kids didn’t care about antiquated mountain music. The teenage quintet electrified its audience, sprinting through a Bill Monroe standard with verve that suggested these sounds were vital to fresh generations.
After the triumphant ceremony, John Cleveland ushered his son — born blind, with one eye; almost deaf in his left ear and partly deaf in his right — to the bathroom. They found Watson, Wernick and a cadre of other genre giants laughing and jamming there, as though the lavatory were a back porch, and the teenage Michael joined for an hour.
Ranky Tanky wins Grammy Award for Best Regional Roots Album for ‘Live at the 2022 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival’.
This is the band’s second trophy. In 2020, the group won a Grammy Award for Best American Roots Music Album for their 2019 release, ‘Good Time’.
via WRTI
Catherine Russell has long had a gift for breathing new life into old songs, with no special trick beyond the clarity of her singing and the purity of her intention. Her latest single perfectly illustrates why those two elements are more than enough: it’s a beautifully faithful new version of a song written and first recorded by Billy Eckstine more than 75 years ago.
“‘I Want to Talk About You’ is one of my favorite love songs by one of my favorite artists, a singer and instrumentalist who deserves to be remembered,” Russell says. “I choose songs by the lyrics, melody and harmonic structure and all of these appealed to me.”
Russell — whose 2022 album on Dot Time Records, Send For Me, was rapturously received — is releasing her single in conjunction with Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, with all proceeds supporting the Jazz Foundation of America. WRTI is proud to premiere the track before its official release this Friday.
via NYT
Other winners in the classical field on Sunday included Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which had its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2021, the first opera by a Black composer in the Met’s history. It won for best opera recording, for a performance conducted by the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and starring the singers Angel Blue, Will Liverman, Latonia Moore and Walter Russell III.
via New York Times
Cécile McLorin Salvant, ‘D’un Feu Secret’
Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of her generation’s finest jazz singers, throws a high-concept curveball on her coming album, “Mélusine.” It retells a European folk tale — about love, a curse, broken promises and reptilian transformations — in songs new and old. “D’un Feu Secret” (“Of a Secret Fire”) is indeed old. It was composed in 1660 by Michel Lambert. “I could be cured If I stopped loving/But I prefer the disease,” it vows. McLorin sings it like an early music performer, poised and delicate with feathery ornaments. But the accompaniment, from her longtime keyboardist and collaborator Sullivan Fortner, is on synthesizers, savoring the anachronism. —JON PARELES
The Texas Songwriters Association has named Alligator Records artist Marcia Ball its 2023 “Texas Music Legend.” She will be presented with the coveted Darryl K. Royal (DKR) Texas Music Legends Award in a ceremony to be held on February 25, 2023 in Austin, Texas. Find more information here. Previous DKR Texas Music Legend awardees include songwriter/musician Stephen Bruton and Ray Benson of Asleep At The Wheel.
Ball is simply overjoyed, saying, “I can’t contain myself, and I am so grateful for this amazing honor bestowed by the Texas Heritage Songwriters Association. I know I am in some really good company. Thank you so much!”