The Avett Brothers have only played Santa Barbara one time, an affable, uplifting affair at the Arlington Theater a few years back. To get a feel for the band, check out below their performance over the weekend at the Newport Folk Festival of one of the all-time great sing-a-long songs I and Love and You courtesy of NPR.  The Avetts are coming to the Santa Barbara Bowl on October 10th. Make sure you’re in attendance.

There’s no Chelsea for us today. But it’s a morning, and it’s Sunday. And the perfect soundtrack for a foggy Sunday morning is this solo performance below by Joni Mitchell for the BBC in 1970. While she had written and recorded many song gems by this juncture, Mitchell was just at the cusp of the realization of her songwriting powers. In this performance she plays some of her hits, but also performs two unrecorded songs that she would release the following year on her seminal album Blue.  For us the highlights are when Mitchell sits at the piano or with the dulcimer and plays For Free and California (Mitchell explains the germination of the latter in the video).  When Joni sits at the piano, the song structures evince more complexity than her guitar songs, and foreshadow her shift to open chord structures and jazz influences.  Superb stuff from a young (and needless to say, stunning) Joni Mitchell.

The curtain has been brought down on JJ Cale, one of the most tasteful guitar players and songwriters of his generation.  Cale contributed many songs to the rock n’ roll canon, including After Midnight, Cocaine and Crazy Mama, and will be sorely missed.  Listen to a couple of particularly appropriate songs by Cale below. RIP JJ.

Read the rest of this entry »

We were teased earlier with a trailer from the impending new album Repave from Volcano Choir (Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and musical pals), and then the audio of Volcano Choir’s song Byegone.  Now comes the band’s official video for the song.  Check it out below.  We love this song, and hope Repave is paved throughout with songs of this caliber.

We’re still aglow recalling Belle & Sebastian’s bellissimo show last week at the Santa Barbara Bowl. To help revive that memory (or, horrors, if you missed the show) check out the big Belle band below performing I’m a Cuckoo and Stars Of Track and Field (swoon) at the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Turns out that one of our favorite bands, Broken Social Scene, is (thankfully) suffering from a bit of hiatus interruptus.  The band mothballed itself indefinitely in 2011, much to the dismay of their ardent fans (including yours truly).  But last month BSS both headlined the Field Trip Arts & Crafts Music Festival and appeared on the Jimmy Fallon Show, all in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their label Arts & Crafts.  And now (via Consequence of Sound) BSS has released the video below of its live-performance of unreleased song Where’s Your Heart, Where’s Your Mind?.  Amongst other things, we like the renewed aggression and guitar play on the song, and hope for more interruptions by Broken Social Scene.

Back on August 31 and September 1 of 2011, national treasure Ry Cooder and his band Corridas Famosos played two shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. By all accounts, they were two of the best shows of the year (please, no more rubbing in the fact that we missed it!).  The upshot is that the shows were recorded, and on September 10th Nonesuch will release the resulting album Live in San Francisco.  The Corridos Famosos band includes son Joachim Cooder on drums; Robert Francis on bass; vocalists Terry Evans, Arnold McCuller, and Juliette Commagere; Flaco Jimenez on accordion; and the ten-piece Mexican brass band La Banda Juvenil. Listen below to Cooder & Corridas Famosas perform Cooder’s own Lord Tell Me Why off the album.  More great sounds and another relevant message from Ry Cooder.

One of our most highly anticipated album releases of the year is a collaboration of two of our favorites, Elvis Costello and The Roots, on their collective new album entitled Wise Up Ghost (to be released on September 17th).  The first sampling has now been released in the form of a lyric video for the astonishingly great album-opener Walk Us Uptown.  It’s not surprising that we love everything about the song, which takes both artists back to their roots, if you will.  There’s a dash of funk-soul-brother, a dash of Brit-ska organ and some scratch reggae-guitar from Questlove and The Roots.  And there are Costello’s angrily political and well-penned lyrics sung with his trademark sneer that cauterized his early albums.  Cross-fires and cross-currents-ies.  Indeed.  If the song below is any indication, Wise Up Ghost will be one of the Best Albums of 2013.  In other Roots news, the band is scheduled to work next with the Reverend Al Green on his next album.  Can we hear an “Amen”?!

We grew up on the phenomenal music of Little Feat, the southern funk-rock-boogie extraordinaires led by Lowell George, guitar-genius Paul Barrere and Santa Barbara County’s own Billy Payne.  Many a summertime was filled with the music of Little Feat and any or all of their first seven, all-time albums, not least of which was Feats Don’t Fail Me (which you can listen to in its entirety below).  Check out below a great live vignette of the band performing one of their greats, Dixie Chicken, on Burt Sugarman’s The Midnight Special in1977, with a young Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Jesse Winchester.  Too dang good.  They were one of the best live bands we have ever witnessed, having caught them repeatedly in the ’70s in ole, vaunted Robertson Gym (UCSB) and elsewhere in Santa Barbara County.

After Dixie Chicken, listen to Feats Don’t Fail Me Now.  Every song is a masterpiece of rock, funk, soul, fusion, prog and everything in between or combined.  Here’s the album’s tracklist so you can play along at home:

1. Rock And Roll Doctor
2. Oh Atlanta
3. Skin It Back
4. Down The Road
5. Spanish Moon
6. Feats Don’t Fail Me Now
7. The Fan
8. Medley : Cold Cold Cold/Tripe Face Boogie