Author: mark

jazzfest 2022

for years, decades really, i have been aware of the large music festival held each year in new orleans, known mostly as jazzfest. what i did know about it turned out to be mostly true, in that it was a very large event that featured a wide variety of musical styles, not just jazz, and that you could wander around all day and take in as many artists as you could muster. for a music lover like myself, this sounded like manna from heaven. i also envisioned that in a perfect world, i could go there on my own, not have a specific plan in place, and just go where the muse led me, unencumbered by any other distractions.

but for whatever reason, i never took the initiative to go down there. that is, until i met some like minded friends about 5 years ago who had similar tastes in music, and had been going down there every year for a long time. they graciously offered to allow mrs redeyegin and myself to tag along with them the next spring, and walk us through the experience. that was in 2018, and we had so much fun we went again, taking another couple with us the next year. after two trips down, i sought permission to go down on my own with the group. with the pandemic, that reality did not come into play until last weekend, the first jazzfest since my 2019 trip.

for a voracious music consumer like myself, it is somewhat akin to a football game with four quarters (if you do the whole final weekend – it is four days of music from 11 am to 7 pm). you look at the various stages and artists ahead of time, have a game plan, and then prepare accordingly. and if you are smart, you have a plan b in case you need to make some game time adjustments. an example would have been on friday, when the heat got to me, and i decided to hang out in the gospel tent (out of the sun and water misters overhead) for about an hour. you also have to pace yourself, because each day has a great lineup, and you want to see as much as possible. it is not hard to see 5 different artists each day, and if the logistics work out see at least part of 2 other acts.

have i mentioned the food yet? logistically, the overall event is very well run, but maybe the best feature, other than the music, is the vast variety of food that is offered by local vendors. you will not go hungry here.

one of things i like best about this festival is that all of the final acts finish by 7 pm. you are back at your hotel and ready to go out to dinner by 8 pm. at dinner we would compare notes – who was the best you saw today, which one surprised you, and what were the best covers.

on thursday i saw the iguanas, leo nocentelli, new orleans suspects, playing for change band, billy strings, and ended the evening in the blues tent with betty lavette. the suspects and playing for change were two bands not on my radar, but they are now. the latter did a great cover of stevie wonder’s ‘higher ground’. betty’s cover of john prine’s ‘souvenirs’ was very moving. A good way to end a great day.

on friday, after a rain delay, i saw flow tribe, cimafunk, the zion harmonizers, sonny landreth, and finished with black crowes at the big stage. cimafunk, a funk band from cuba, was one of my highlights. not exactly my cup of tea, but they were killing it. black crowes covered ‘papa was a rolling stone’ , which they said was on their newest album, ‘1972’. apparently all covers from that year. i have that on order and will let you know what i think.

saturday i started the day in the blues tent with bill kirchen, then buckwheat zydeco jr, rory block, a bit of rickie lee jones, puss n boots (a norah jones side project), shovels and rope, then the legendary mavis staples. i was impressed with shovels and rope – they did a very energetic set. kirchen’s ‘times they are a changing’ cover was the highlight of his set.

sunday started with brother tyrone and the mindbenders, then off to the gospel tent for some religion with the dynamic smooth family. yvette landry and the jukes, honey island swamp band, dwayne dopsie and the zydeco hellraisers, beausoleil, ricky skaggs, and then finished in the blues tent once again with buddy guy. a very busy day. yvette, dwayne and ricky were great, and my favorite cover was the latter doing bill monroe’s ‘uncle pen’.

all in all a great weekend, and i look forward to going back again.

did i mention 1972 above? on a side note, today is the 50th anniversary of the release of the stone’s ‘exile on main street’. reader bill vv sent this tribute to me.

ian noe, ‘river fools and mountain saints’

i first learned of ian’s work when i got his debut album, ‘between the country’, in 2019. i felt his writing and delivery were profound and unique, and that album stayed in my rotation for quite a while. he somewhat dropped off the radar after that, i am sure partly due to the pandemic. but now we get his follow up to that album – what he considers to be the flipside – with ‘river fools and mountain saints’. he claims he conceived of the title first, and then came up with the characters and stories to flesh it out. the landscape and people of his hometown of lee county kentucky are imbued throughout, appalachia history seeps up through the tracks.

it is tempting to try to lump him in with other kentucky artists that have recently made it big, like chris stapleton, sturgill simpson, and tyler childers. but ian is deeper and more pure than that. it is always unfair to compare new artists to legends like dylan and prine, but it is not terribly out of line here. i can hear a bit of both, especially their earlier work.

he says that most of his characters are real life people, with ‘river fool’ being about a local legend who is a fixture in the region, who ‘spends his days in a muddy haze, tangled in the cattail poles, working on an ancient bottle’. rather than trying to cast him as a local drunk, he shows the carefree and happy life he leads. it may be the most uplifting song on the album.

it was recorded over a span of two years strictly on reel to reel tapes, at a leisurely pace that gave time for the songs to marinate and evolve. if you liked his last one, you will surely love this one.

molly tuttle and golden highway, ‘crooked tree’

sometimes a post just nearly writes itself. i have been listening to a lot of new material lately, and as occasionally happens in my part time writing mode, nothing was really jumping out and grabbing me to sit down and pontificate about it.

but molly’s newest album changed that recently, and so let me tell you about it. molly tuttle is a renowned master of the clawhammer banjo and a crosspicking guitarist and a recipient of the musician of the year by the international bluegrass award committee. she is a very capable songwriter as well, and has released a number of albums on her own prior to this. but, for whatever reason, she has not actually done a bluegrass album before.

until now.

she not only put together one hell of a bluegrass band to flesh these songs out, she also has a very impressive list of guest artists. some are from the bluegrass world (old crow medicine show, sierra hull, billy strings, dan tyminski), and some are not (margo price, gillian welch). jerry douglas, the best and most recorded dobro player in the world, helps produce and plays on many of the tracks. she has a cowriter on nearly all the tracks, with ketch secor from old crow helping out on most of them.

it is just a solid effort from cover to cover, and it stayed in my rotation for quite a while. the aforementioned billy strings has been at least partially responsible for a rejuvenation in all things bluegrass, and rightly so. i have seen him a number of times and will be catching him in new orleans in may. he is likely on this album for a number of reasons: he and molly have been playing at events for years, they share a love for what they do, and he wants her to get a bigger audience. so do i, as i think she deserves it. they have slightly different styles when it comes to the guitar, but i for one do not think that one is better than the other. so if you are a billy fan, or a bluegrass fan, please give this one a try.

paul simon, ‘the rhythm of the saints’

‘i know the reason

i feel so blessed

my heart still splashes

inside my chest’

(from ‘she moves on’)

due to some recent health issues, i have been spending a lot of time on a treadmill lately. i have to get some daily cardio exercises in, and during these winter months, it is often infeasible to get that done outside. being on a treadmill is pretty boring, and instead of watching a tv like many do, i put on one of my more upbeat itunes playlists and listen to music. i have been building my playlists for a very long time, i have a lot of music in my library, and in order for a song to get selected for any of them, especially this one, it has to be pretty damn good.

in listening to this particular list, i start noticing some patterns. one in particular is realizing that some artists keep popping up more than others. the other is that many of the selections are what i refer to as ‘perfect songs’ – they are timeless and iconic. it was about a week ago that it came to my attention that my paul simon selections intersected both categories.

so i started going down a paul simon rabbithole. not a complete career review, but really just a revisit of what i consider to be his best one two punch – ‘graceland’ and ‘the rhythm of the saints’.

now, ‘graceland’ gets most of the attention, and maybe rightly so. it was innovative in so many ways, it revived his floundering career and personal life, and it introduced the world to the musicians of south africa. the recordings were made in 1985 during a time when there was supposed to be a cultural boycott of apartheid, and so the album was controversial at the time. but its tremendous commercial success and paul’s insistence on bringing many of the artists on a worldwide tour brought a lot of attention to the struggles in south africa. there are a couple of trailers below that provide an excellent background to all of this, if you care to dig further.

but being a contrarian by nature, i want to focus instead on what was his eventual follow up to that album, ‘the rhythm of the saints’, which was released four years later. while the first album utilized african musicians, ‘rhythm’ used many of the guitarists that he had found in johannesburg, but then also used vocalists and percussionists from eastern south america, especially brazil. like its predecessor, this album introduced some of these artists to a new and wider audience. names like milton nascimento and nana vasconcelos were huge stars in brazil, but this and david byrne’s brazilian albums from about the same time showcased just how good these artists were.

but it is simon’s ability to fuse all of these elements together and arrange them to his lyrics that makes the thing timeless and addicting. i mentioned ‘perfect songs’ before, but i could argue that this album nears perfection as a complete piece. there is a lot of river imagery here, both in the lyrics and the flow of the rhythms. there is a continual and bubbling slow moving pulse throughout, and each song seems to move gracefully to the next. it just takes you to another place, and i never tire of it. he hasn’t released anything like this since.

the album sold pretty well, but it never had any hits that got much airplay. but if i have a choice of deciding to listen to one of the two albums, i tend to put on the latter. so if you are not that familiar with it, take some time when you can relax with a cold one and play it from start to finish. i hope by the end that you may agree with me.

here is my favorite track:

‘broken hearts and dirty windows, vol.2’, the songs of john prine

i have heard snippets of this for months now, mostly on sirius ‘outlaw country’, but i was waiting to get the hard copy in my hand, which finally arrived friday. as many of you know, i am still old fashioned and like to hear the whole thing in one setting with the liner notes and song details in front of me, and so i grow increasingly frustrated with the industry trend of releasing singles three to four months in advance of the hard release. from a marketing stance i do not understand that, but my curmudgeon side is coming out here, and i digress.

but this one is definitely worth the wait, and if you have heard any of these teasers like i have, it is time to belly up.

as you likely know, we lost the great john prine to covid in 2020. a singular voice in music was taken from us way too early. one of the great injustices was that his adoring fans – both regular fans like me and musicians – could not get together and grieve and show appreciation for his musical legacy. covid protocols seemed to dash all the concerts planned in his honor. i have heard that some are still in the works, but for now we have this.

volume one came out in 2010 while he was still alive and at that time a still revered figure but with a lower profile than what he came to know just a decade later. it seems that in his final few years he had become much more embraced by the americana community, especially around nashville, and the artists that have contributed to this second volume speak to that.

there are of course a few selections from some of john’s duet partners from his musical past – bonnie raitt, emmylou harris, and iris dement – but the rest are a who’s who of names most of you will recognize and appreciate.

brandi carlisle does ‘i remember everything’, nathaniel rateliff ‘pretty good’, amanda shires ‘saddle in the rain’, tyler childers ‘they oughta name a drink after you’, margo price ‘sweet revenge’, valerie june ‘summer’s end’, jason isbell, ‘souvenirs’, john paul white, ‘sam stone’, and sturgill simpson closes with ‘paradise’.

all tastefully done, with the arrangements giving proper respect to the originals but also adding their own creative licenses. are any of these better than the originals? well no, not really, but that doesn’t matter, does it? one that comes close is ‘one red rose’ by iris dement. she nails it. one of prine’s favorite duet partners over the years, there is a certain poignancy to hearing her sing this one on her own.

so make yourself a ‘handsome johnnie’ – his favorite cocktail – and enjoy.

‘handsome johnnie’:

1 oz red smirnoff vodka

diet ginger ale

wedge of lime

the compilation was put together by prine’s private record label, and the family said they had enough offers from other artists that they can easily follow up with a couple more volumes. amen to that.