Among my post last week, I received a nice care package from Ace Records that included one quite weird Duke Ellington album ("My People"); Volume 3 of their "Where Country Meets Soul" series (I cannot recommend Ralph ''Soul'' Jackson's version of ''Jambalaya'' highly enough); and, maybe best of all, "Cracking The Cosimo Code", a collection of extraordinary music originating from Cosimo Matassa's New Orleans studio in the 1960s.
Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Robert Plant and Arcade Fire are among the bands playing at this year's New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
The event will take place across two weekends: April 25 - 27 and May 1 - 4.
Other artists performing include Santana, Vampire Weekend, Alabama Shakes, John Fogerty, Aaron Neville and Allen Toussaint.
You can find the full line-up here.
Seeing as how Matthew E White and his band are on tour in the UK this week (I’m seeing him play in London tomorrow), it seemed a good time to post the feature about my visit to Richmond a couple of months ago. I’ve put a few links to stuff in here, too, so you can get a taste of the really interesting music coming out of the scene that revolves around White. Long read, this one…
There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying – turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many – booked Gram parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population when Gram died in September, 1973.
