Dave Longstreth brings his ever-evolving indie-rock act, the Dirty Projectors, to the Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow night. You’ll probably hear his new arrangements of old Black Flag songs; the Projectors latest CD, “Rise Above,” is Longstreth’s strange and orchestral re-creation of Black Flag’s 1981 album “Damaged.” 7:30. $15. Museum of Fine Arts, 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. 617-369-3306. mfa.org
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CAMBRIDGE - Joan Baez was doing what she always does at a concert, something as inane as tuning her guitar as the audience piped down. Except last night it felt particularly poignant, even nostalgic.
“Here I am doing what I did in Harvard Square every night between songs,” she said as she tweaked her guitar one last time before starting the show. “The bane of my existence.”
And here they were, a sold-out Sanders Theatre full of peo ple who
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For more than a year now, we’ve wondered what it would be like to run our fingers through the thick and delicious hair of reality television’s most apathetic villain, Justin Bobby of MTV’s “The Hills.” Today there’s a chance to mingle with the woman who knows best. Costar and ex-girlfriend Audrina Patridge, the subject of revealing photos that recently surfaced on the Internet, will be at the Estate tonight. Like Paris Hilton, who recently visited
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The Hard Lessons play indie rock that manages to be cutesy and soulful at the same time. Not easy to pull off. The band’s song “See and Be Scene,” catchy enough to be a Weezer single (hand-claps included), is all about young hipsters trying too hard to be cool. Ironically, the Hard Lessons recently played that number to a crowd of scenesters at the SXSW music festival in Austin. Joining the group tonight at O’Brien’s are the Sterns and Age Rings.
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LOS ANGELES—Phil Spector made a brief court appearance Friday in which his new lawyer said he could not be ready for the music producer’s murder retrial until September at the earliest.
The lawyer also filed a writ asking that a neutral judge be appointed to decide if Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler should be disqualified from Spector’s second trial because of alleged bias.
Fidler earlier rejected the bid to remove him, saying he was impartial in the case and that it was too late to file such a motion.
PHILADELPHIA, Miss.—Poison drummer Rikki Rockett was arrested on a rape warrant and his case was turned over to the district attorney’s office for possible grand jury consideration, officials said Friday.
Rockett, 46, was arrested Monday at or near Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles police said. He was booked and released, and was awaiting an extradition decision by Mississippi prosecutors.
A woman in Mississippi filed a complaint
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NEW YORK—Madonna wants the media to leave Britney Spears alone. “They need to step off,” she told the “Yo on E!” satellite radio show. “For real … Let’s go save her.” Madonna, 49, said her daughter, Lourdes, 11, feels the same way.
“She knows Britney, (but) she doesn’t really watch TV or read gossip stuff,” the pop star said in the interview. “I think she sort of gets the drift of what’s going on, and I think she feels very protective of Britney.”
MIAMI—In a Nov. 14 story about a federal court motion filed against music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, The Associated Press quoted from documents erroneously described as FBI interrogation records related to an investigation of the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur. FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak told the AP Friday that the documents can’t be found in the agency’s records and don’t appear to be legitimate.
The documents were filed as part
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LOS ANGELES—Frenchie Davis, the big-voiced “American Idol” contestant who found success on Broadway in “Rent,” will undergo surgery to remove a vocal cord polyp.
Davis said she’s eager to take care of the condition that’s begun to cause tiredness and hoarseness after performances. But she’s apprehensive.
“I’ve talked to other singers who had surgery. One girl said her voice went up. Others’ voices got clearer. I’m just excited to see and a little nervous, of course. It’s still surgery,” Davis told The Associated Press.
ATLANTA—An Allman Brothers Band member says Gregg Allman is unable to play several upcoming concerts because of his treatments for hepatitis C.
Drummer Butch Trucks says the band has canceled appearances in Florida next month and bowed out of its annual run of shows at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in May.
Trucks says Allman began undergoing treatment last year.
The Allman Brothers Band was founded in Florida in the late 1960s, but gained
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The Beatles Biography And Top 10 Songs
Being from Manchester which is quite close to Liverpool there is some local rivalry (especially between Manchester United F.C. and Liverpool F.C.) between the two towns and as such I generally support the Manchester bands first, but I think the whole world likes The Beatles even if they won’t admit it. The Beatles are the most successful of any bands, ever.
I first started listening
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For most pianists, a program whose chief components are staples by Beethoven and Ravel would hardly raise eyebrows. But things are different when the pianist is Stephen Drury, whose name is practically synonymous with contemporary music. He has seemingly mastered every mongrel dialect of the avant-garde, from the naive to the outré, making one wonder what interpretive mien he would bring to Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata and Ravel’s suite “Miroirs” on Wednesday night.
A.E. Housman is a poet whose influence stands in inverse proportion to his output. His renown resides chiefly on one slim volume of poetry called “A Shropshire Lad,” published in 1896. Little noticed when it first appeared, the poems gradually caught the popular imagination. Their unadorned language united an evocation of pastoral England with a bleak vision of the world and intimations of death. The book has never been out of print.
War is a
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What’s in a name?
For bassist Harvie S, formerly known as Swartz, a whole lot of headaches, lost work, missed phone messages, and airline-counter confrontations.
Back when S carried a full complement of letters, his last name (which he has since legally changed to S) didn’t interfere with him becoming one of jazz’s standout accompanists, a virtuoso sought out by the music’s elite, such as Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Jim Hall, Tommy Flanagan,
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People listen to Brother Ali, the Minneapolis rapper born Jason Newman, for all kinds of reasons. Some admire his wordplay: Lines like “For real I be diligently killing the soliloquies/ Of these millipedes that try to pass themselves off as ill MCs” don’t happen by accident. Others come for the production, a series of lush, soul-tinted beats that never get in the way of Brother Ali’s torrent of ideas.
Some enjoy his voice, at once pinched and
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It was almost three years to the day between the releases of Kathleen Edwards’s last album, “Back to Me,” and the new “Asking for Flowers.” Considering the two-year gap separating “Back to Me” from her highly regarded debut, “Failer,” the delay may not seem like much.
But by her own reckoning, Edwards was on the road nonstop from 2001 to 2006, during which time she made her first two albums and learned to be a touring musician in one extended fit of creative energy. For number three, she took a break.
A couple of years ago, while digging through crates in the attic of his parents’ Connecticut home, Dave Longstreth unearthed a worn cassette of “Damaged,” the propulsive hard-core record by Black Flag. Longstreth had never been much of a punk kid. His tastes ran, instead, toward the melodic: the Beatles and glossy ’80s rock. But something about the cassette’s cover art - a portrait of singer Henry Rollins glaring into a cracked mirror - looked “really exotic and very foreign. Very appealing.”
Mystical visitations are much on the mind these days of Victor Wooten. In addition to a new album, “Palmystery,” out next week, the Nashville-based contemporary bass guitar hero is also releasing a book, a work of fiction titled “The Music Lesson,” in which a young player learns wisdom well beyond musical technique alone from a chance encounter with a spiritually advanced stranger.
“I Saw God,” a song on the new disc, advances a similar theme.
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A Bartok scholar once confessed to me that she could not bring herself to read the composer’s correspondence from his late period in America. It was simply too heartbreaking, she said, to witness at close distance the slow expiring of one of the century’s great composers, displaced by exile, dismissed by his adoptive public, his health deteriorating, his finances in ruin. Against this backdrop, the creative spring of the composer’s very last years
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There are now two bands called LA Guns. One is led by original guitarist and former Guns N’ Roses member Tracii Guns. The other is fronted by his former bandmates, vocalist Phil Lewis and Revere-bred drummer Steve Riley. Tonight, you can see the latter version of the 1980s band play a gig as part of what its calling its 20th anniversary tour. You won’t see Tracii, of course, but there should be plenty of hair and sleaze. The band plays with Jaded
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NEW YORK—Grammy-nominated rapper Remy Ma was led out of a Manhattan courtroom Thursday, weeping and in handcuffs, after being convicted of shooting a woman outside a nightclub last summer.
The defense had conceded that Remy Ma, whose real name is Remy Smith, fired a shot toward a friend she suspected of stealing $3,000, but said it was an accident.
Smith, 26, faces up to 25 years in prison following her conviction in state Supreme Court for assault, weapon possession and attempted coercion.
Beach Boys Biography And Top 10 Songs
I don’t think I know anybody who doesn’t like at least one Beach Boys song, but I like most and have liked them since I was younger. When I was about 10 I used to save my pocket money and buy LP’s and one day while I was at the market I came across Pet Sounds and bought it for 50p because I actually thought it was going to be the sounds of various animals, and thought it would be funny to
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ATLANTA—Rapper T.I. pleaded guilty Thursday to federal weapons possession charges, and will receive a sentence that includes prison time after he completes a period of community service.
In the year that he is awaiting sentencing, T.I., whose real name is Clifford Harris, must complete at least 1,000 hours of a total 1,500 hours of community service, talking to youth groups about the pitfalls of guns, gangs and drugs.
He will be sentenced
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Buying Out Of This World Used Synthesizers
Back in the 1980s, a new type of musical tool was implemented in music and it helped to define the New Wave sound. This was the synthesizer and it was used in nearly every type of pop and rock music for the entire decade. It proved so popular that 20 years later, we can still pin point ’80s music’ based on the synthesizer sound.
However, by the time Grunge came along in 1992
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HOUSTON—Raul Navaira remembers seeing his brother, the Tejano music star known to his fans simply as Emilio, signing autographs after an Easter weekend club date in Houston.
Raul Navaira climbed aboard the tour bus that Emilio routinely drove and went to sleep for the 200-mile trip home to San Antonio.
“It was like any other night,” Raul Navaira, 40, said Wednesday.
Except it wasn’t.
“The next thing I knew, I felt stuff falling over me,” he said.
March 29 When it’s done right, Cape Breton fiddling is like sudden spring on a rocky seacoast, both wild and sweet, pounding and prancing, violence and violets. And hot young fiddlers Fraser (above) and MacGillivray do it right. 8 p.m. $15. First Parish of Watertown, 35 Church St. 617-623-1806. fssgb.org
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CAMBRIDGE - For about five years, indie outfit Why? has been churning out albums that defy genre and expectations. Over shape-shifting structures of samples, beats, and synthesizers, frontman Yoni Wolf raps in his weedy voice with no apologies, spitting rhymes equally bizarre and beautiful.
Still, the golden boys of this fusion of hip-hop and indie rock have stayed under the radar, even as their project has grown from a one-man band to an eclectic trio with new collaborators on every record.
March 29 What to expect from Japan’s magnificent bombshell rockers? Perhaps a seven-neck guitar. Or something like the 40-minute, 20-voice choir, three-drummer hyper-space romp on “Super Roots #9.” With Northampton Woods (Thurston Moore, Bill Nace). 18+ 9 p.m. $17. The Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. 617-562-8800. thedise.com
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March 30 Devoted to the art of the song recital, this talented troupe celebrates the yearning, lyrical poetry of A.E. Housman in settings by 20th-century British composers and world premieres by Ned Rorem, Libby Larsen, and Robert Pound. 2 p.m. $5-$10. The Boston Conservatory’s Seully Hall, 8 the Fenway, Boston. 617-912-9240. bostonconservatory.edu
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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March 27 Grammy-nominated Hambridge has produced Buddy Guy and Susan Tedeschi, sung in “Ratatouille,” and written for Lynyrd Skynyrd and Billy Ray Cyrus. But his heart resides with his hard-boogie, bar-tested Rattlesnakes. 9 p.m. $10. Johnny D’s, 17 Holland St., Davis Sq., Somerville. 617-776-2004. johnnyds.com
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