Searchable News & Info From Reliable Online Sources.
- Sam Smith Announces Engagement To Christian Cowan After About 3 Years Of Dating
The British singer-songwriter’s announcement comes just weeks before the release of their fifth studio album, “Hazel Eyes.” [TheTopNews] Read More.4 days ago - Trump Couldn’t Hide His Excitement After Lil Wayne Praised This White Hous...Trump lapped up the support from the rapper, whose federal weapons charge he pardoned in 2021. [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago
- Waiting for a friend
When I first met Lenny Kaye in 1970, his two immense contributions to contemporary culture were still in the future: (1) his compilation of the profoundly influential double album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68, released in 1972, and (2) his founder-membership of the Patti Smith Group, which he helped the young poet to put together in 1973 and in which he’s still active whenever they reconvene, as they did so memorably last year for the 50th anniversary of Horses. We met in New York, introduced by our mutual friends Richard and Lisa Robinson at a time when Lenny was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street and writing rock reviews for various publications. Somewhere I have copies of his two solo 45s: “Crazy Like a Fox”, released on the Hollywood label under the pseudonym Link Cromwell in 1966, and “Child Bride”, which came out on Mer Records in 1980 under his own name. Now — not before time, you might think — comes his first solo album*, titled Goin’ Local and just released on Yep Roc Records, based in North Carolina and the home of Dave Alvin, Tift Merritt and others. It was worth the wait. These dozen songs have a (mostly) straightforward warmth and clarity, ranging from the no-frills roadhouse boogie of the opening title track — for my money, better than anything on the new Stones album — to the touching ballad “Yes I Will”, dedicated to his late friend Andy Paley and adorned by a discreet string arrangement from David Mansfield, which ends the album. Lenny sings sometimes in a confiding semi-whisper, sometimes in the New Jersey drawl of a kinder, gentler Lou Reed (particularly on a sweet song called “Pennsylvania Girls”). He keeps the arrangements simple, generally confined to himself on guitars, Tony Shanahan on bass, and Mark Sacco, Jeff Berg or Jay Dee Daugherty on drums. One or two other guests show up, among them the mandolinist John Jackson on “If I Were You” and, most surprisingly, the avant-jazz pianist Matthew Shipp on “Let’s Make a Memory”, adding texture to a Fourth-of-July dawning-of-romance song of bitter-sweet resonance: “My hand on your waist, your hand on my knee / Trying to understand who we want us to be…” Lenny keeps his own lead playing mostly under wraps, although there are a couple of eight-bar solos on “A… [TheTopNews] Read More.5 days ago - The coolest of cats
Georgie Fame’s career has been an affair of ups and downs, from the huge and unexpected success of “Yeh Yeh”, which knocked the Beatles off the No 1 spot in January 1965, to the medical problems — a fall from a ladder in 2019, breaking his hip and severing tendons in his right hand, followed in 2025 by a diagnosis of hydrocephalus, impairing his mobility — that have restricted his musical activities in recent years. He’s 83 now, and there probably won’t be any more gigs or records, so it seems all the more worthwhile to investigate a new biography, Cool Cat Blues, written by his friend and fellow singer-keyboardist Ben Sidran. It’s a slender book, only 140-odd pages, but the story is well told, particularly that of his early childhood in the 1940s amid the mills and pits of Lancashire, and the warmth of a family in which music played a significant role. Then the Butlin’s and Larry Parnes years, during which Clive Powell became Georgie Fame and evolved from the pianist with Billy Fury and the Blue Flames to the singer and organist with his own Blue Flames, settling in London and taking up residence at the Flamingo Club, where the all-nighters with an audience of American servicemen and Caribbean immigrants provided the environment in which he could hone his distinctive musical character. During that period, 1964-67, I took every opportunity to see the Blue Flames whenever they visited my home town, which was often. I loved their blend of R&B and jazz, influenced by Ray Charles’s small bands, the vocalese of Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure, and Mose Allison’s vocal delivery and wry wit. And I loved Fame’s choice of sidemen with jazz instincts — has any British jazz saxophonist produced a better ballad solo than the effort by baritonist Johnny Marshall on “Moody’s Mood for Love”, from their second album, Fame at Last? The book runs through the partnership with Alan Price, CBS’s attempts to turn him into a hipper Andy Williams, the surprisingly unsuccessful hook-up with Chris Blackwell and Island Records in the mid-’70s, his popularity in Sweden and his work with various big bands around the world, the creation of an Australian Blue Flames, the recordings produced by Sidran in New York for the Go Jazz label, Fame’s years as a star sideman with Van Morrison and Bill Wyman’s all-star… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 week ago - René Urtreger 1932-2026
The photo above was taken at the Institut Français in Berlin in 2017, during a Q&A session with the pianist René Urtreger following a screening to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (released in the UK as Lift to the Scaffold and in the US as Elevator to the Gallows). The last surviving member of the quintet with which Miles Davis recorded the soundtrack for that classic film, René had accepted my invitation to come to JazzFest Berlin for the event, and to play and then talk in front of an audience. What he’s just said has clearly cracked me up. It may have been his observation about Thelonious Monk — a great composer, he said, but an absolutely terrible pianist. He said it with a twinkle, but he meant it. René was a bebop purist. Bud Powell was his idol and his model. He knew Powell, of course, from Paris in the 1960s; one of his early trio albums was called René Urtreger Plays Bud Powell, including his versions of “Dance of the Infidels”, “Parisian Thoroughfare”, “Celia” and so on. He never lost that allegiance. René died last week, aged 92. Back in 2014, after I’d brought him to London to play at a private event, I wrote here about his career. I won’t repeat myself, but I will say that if you don’t know his playing, the discovery will be worthwhile, whether it’s on that great soundtrack album (just given a de luxe vinyl reissue on Blue Note/Fontana), on the live album from his 1957 Salle Pleyel concert with Miles (Fresh Sound, 2023), on his beautiful album of solo ballads titled Tentatives, released in 2006 on the Minium label, or on his 2017 album with the singer Agnès Desarthe. Desarthe, incidentally, was also the author of his biography, published in 2016 (in French only) under the title Le Roi René. It told his fascinating story, including the long and ultimately successful battle against his heroin addiction, the yé-yé years with Claude François and Serge Gainsbourg, the soundtracks he composed for the films of his childhood friend Claude Berri, and his eventual return to the idiom he loved. He was a delightful man, and one of the greatest European jazz pianists. * The photograph was taken by Camille Blake. Le Roi René is published by Odile Jacob. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago - Brian Case 1937-2026
When Brian Case joined the Melody Maker in 1978, at my invitation, he dubbed himself “Junior Beret” in tribute to Max Jones, the paper’s senior jazz writer, who habitually covered his bald pate with just such a piece of jaunty headgear. Brian died oin Monday, aged 88. I hope to write more about him elsewhere, but for now I’ll just say how much I loved his work, which was as full of surprises as the music he described. It was my privilege to supply the foreword to a collection of pieces about his favourite subjects (On the Snap, published in 2015 by Caught by the River), including Dexter Gordon, Sam Fuller, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Smith, Al Pacino, Ian Dury, and Gerry Mulligan. And, of course, Art Pepper. Here’s Brian opening a feature on the great saxophonist with a description of his long-awaited UK debut at a London church in 1979: Few among the congregation who rose to their feet and applauded before a note was played at St. Paul’s Church, Hammersmith, could have had much idea of what that ovation meant to the performer. They wouldn’t have learned much from his face, but they were to hear it in his music. It was one of those spontaneous exchanges of gifts that achieve a rare, fulfilling parity, a love for a love, and not the love-all of those exchange & mart comebacks with the bombardiering boxed orchids. The tribute to Art Pepper was compounded of respect for his endurance, his artistry, and — for those who understood the shifting symmetry of anguish and elegance in his playing — an acknowledgement of the toll of that equation. Real music costs. Afterwards Brian told Ronnie Scott he should get Pepper in for a season. Knowing Pepper’s reputation as a major junkie who had spent years in and out of Chino, Folsom, Lexington and San Quentin, Scott was dubious. But a year later it happened. The photograph above was given to me by Jak Kilby, who took it backstage at Ronnie’s one night in 1980. Pepper is in the middle, Brian is on the right, I’m on the left. Happy times. Be seeing you, Junior Beret. [TheTopNews] Read More.2 weeks ago
The Searchable USWebDaily.com and TheTopNews NewsBank Helps You Be Better Informed, Faster! Spread The Word.
