Month: October 2004

Just last month, Jamie Hook took over as executive director of Minnesota Film Arts, which is responsible for the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and the repertory movies shown at the Oak Street Cinema. In Seattle, where Hook spent much of his adult life, he was known as an unconventional and talented wild man…

If you had to, you could call Bill Frisell a jazz guitarist, but he is really a master at seamlessly mixing a wide range of musical genres, having collaborated with everyone from Elvis Costello to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. One of Frisell’s best albums, 1997’s Nashville, was recorded with members of Allison Krauss’s Union Station…

The genius of Jonathan Richman is that he knows he does “Jonathan Richman” better than anyone else ever could. Normally describing a singer/songwriter as “wacky” seems to be a writer’s polite way of saying this guy is really a childish boob, not a real songwriter. Richman would be the exception. He is a goof, his…

Jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux’s sophomore release, Careless Love, is earning high critical praise—and that’s no small feat for a musician who became best known on her first album, some eight years ago, as a twenty-two-year old who sounded uncannily like Billie Holiday. On her new album, you could say that Peyroux is going after something…

The family band is a great rock ’n’ roll institution, from Oasis to the Black Crowes to Hanson. There’s something fascinating about the unstudied flow of sibling vocal harmonies and stage presence. Los Lonely Boys, three brothers from west Texas, began as their dad’s backing band. First off, let’s take a moment to imagine touring…

Ghosts of country music past reverberate beautifully in the bluegrass tenor of Handsome Family front man Brett Sparks. But somewhere deep beneath the eerie echo of Appalachia, shadowing the Carter Family influence, tucked behind the Autoharps, banjos, and lap steels—somewhere there seems to be an inside joke between this husband-and-wife team. All those death-obsessed compositions…