2025: A Different (Shortened) Year in Live Music
Annual lists bear a bad reputation for the very good reason that they’re hairy blue hell to write. My (very good) years-ago Gazette editor Maggie Hartley renamed our Year Ender summaries as Rear-Enders. Tear-out-your-hair frustrating, they subject us writers to endless second-guessing: “Is this really better than that?” Multiply those doubts by the number of…
Jazz is Coming to Town
Review: “It’s A Jazzy Christmas” Saturday, Dec. 20 at Proctors GE Theatre More felt familiar than new in “It’s a Jazz Christmas” Saturday in Proctors GE Theater Saturday, and that was a good, warm, familiar thing. The place was packed with families wearing happy smiles, holiday hats and those gaudy sweaters tugged from closets about…
This one really hurt.
Joe Ely has died at 78. He and his band played one of the 10 best rock shows I’ve ever seen, at J.B. Scotts, May 9, 1981, fronting a great band co-starring guitarist Jesse Taylor, pedal steel player Lloyd Maines (whose future Chicks singing daughter Natalie was then seven years old), accordion player Ponty Bone…
More COWBELL! Wait, no…More Jingle Bells
Since before Thanksgiving, seasonal music has filled every mall, store or restaurant. Those songs work best live, however, in our annual parade of Nutcracker ballets, Slambovian rockers, cosmic and comic McKrells, Melodies of Christmas, jazzy improvisation, world music hybrids and church choirs. O Holy Night Poster provided Seasonal music natually happens in churches – including St.…
Tell me I’d hear the Beatles’ “Komm Gib Mir Deine Hand” twice in one day…
and I’d have laughed – but both hit as surprise high points in a recent Nashville visit. First, the Beatles’ German version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” rang out in “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm” at the Frist Museum downtown, a post office turned art-deco gallery palace. That night, brother Jim…
Previews: I’ll miss these but you don’t have to
Cool shows happen here while I’m in Nashville for a show by brother Jim’s Floating Zone band. Proctors presents the Joshua Rodman Quartet at Universal Preservation Hall Thursday, Melisande at Proctors Passport Series in the GE Theatre Friday; and a Very Slambovian Christmas Saturday at the Eighth Step at Proctors GE Theatre. Meanwhile, an extended…
Jimmy Cliff Goes Silent
Reggae pioneer dies at 81 The stars aligned at the Lenox Music Inn that sweet sunny afternoon in August 1976; and Jimmy Cliff’s star shone brightest. It all felt perfect: the beautiful warm weather, the shared sense of happy anticipation, the usual friendly vibe at my favorite-ever venue. So, when Jimmy Cliff and his band…
Ellie Goes to see Paul McCartney
Ellie von Wellsheim is our guest writer here. Married nearly half a century, I’ve found her to be the most capable person I know; founder and executive director of the MoonCatcher Project. http://www.mooncatcher.org. She once fell asleep with her head on my shoulder in the sixth row of a Bruce Springsteen show at Albany’s Palace…
More Greenberger Words and Music
TO The Record Shelf – A review of “Ginger Ale” by David Greenberger & The Hi-Ho Barbers Versatile and creative as Greg Haymes or Bill DeMain, prolific as Bill Frisell or Chandler Travis, David Greenberger does what nobody else does, and lots of it. “Ginger Ale,” his 30th (at least) words and music project presents a…
A Folk Virtuoso of Principle and Hope
Review: John McCutcheon at the Eighth Step at Proctors GE Theatre; Friday, Nov. 14, 2025 “I’m the Bruce Springsteen of folk music,” John McCutcheon quoted a reviewer late in his Friday show at the Eighth Step in Proctors GE Theatre, wryly noting this referred to his duration onstage. In two sets, each 70 minutes, plus intermission,…
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