Bloggerhythms

The Saw Doctors live performance at the Black Box in Galway, Ireland on New Year's Day 2005 was released as a limited edition CD with a run of only one thousand autographed copies. All proceeds from the sale of the disc went to the Galway Sri Lanka Relief Fund to aid tsunami victims. When orders for New Year's Day exceeded the number made available by the original pressing Leo Moran, one of the band's founding members and primary lead singer, wondered how The Docs could keep their promise to fans that their purchases would still be part of a limited run while trying to fill all of the excess orders. The answer was to issue another thousand discs with brand new cover art, shown here, and new liner notes written by Moran. This would preserve the exclusivity of the original thousand and keep the remaining customers happy. After copies of the first thousand sold out the band gave the fund a check for 15,000 euros. New Year's Day is an excellent live disc, more enjoy...

After hearing Love Potions and Snake Oil in 2009, an album full of very eccentric and very dark humor interspersed with more traditional country songs and ballads, I couldn't have been more impressed with D. B. Rielly. His combination of upbeat zydeco, blues, soul, and country, had most people who heard him wondering why he is virtually unknown. His anonymity proves once again that there is no justice in the music business. Not much has changed on Rielly's new album, Cross My Heart + Hope To Die , except that his humor is far less vicious. This means the ten song set is a bit more accessible than it's predecessor but not enough to lose the edginess that is always required of any artistically successful Americana record. "Roadrunner" is a less than happy saga about an unreliably restless young woman who takes to the road, leaving the protagonist behind, yet its relentlessly danceable arrangement propels the song out of the doldrums. The humorous "Wrap...

Brazil has been a hotbed of jazz for decades and - in case you haven't noticed - João and Astrid Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim aren't the only stars South America's largest nation has sent to international fame. To prove my point there is Eumir Deodato, who recorded my all time favorite jazz-rock, instrumental album, Prelude , a surprise chartbuster from 1972. Technically jazz but with a heavy rock influence, Deodato put together one of the more accessible fusion records of all time with all-stars John Tropea (electric guitar), Airto Moreira (percussion), and Billy Cobham (drums) by his side. Ron Carter and Stanley Clarke shared bass duties. Deodato played piano and lots of Fender Rhodes. The shortened hit single culled from the album was "Also Sprach Zarathustra." It went to #2 on the pop charts in the USA and won a Grammy in 1974 for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. It also went into the top 10 in the UK and Canada. The much longer, LP version that o...

It's time to start the new year off with some house cleaning. In February 2013 Bloggerhythms followed the lead of many other sources on the web and posted that trombone player Paul Tanner, who had just passed away, was the last surviving member of the Glenn Miller Orchestra, the World War Two era's most popular big band. (Read Mr. Tanner's brief but very interesting biography here ). As it turns out Tanner was not the band's lone survivor. Instead, the honors go to Herman "Trigger" Alpert, a stand up bass player who joined the Miller organization at the height of their popularity in 1940 when he was only twenty-four years old. Alpert died on December 21, 2013 in Florida at age ninety-seven. Jazz fans often criticized the band for sounding too stiff and stodgy so the highly regarded Alpert was a welcome addition to the lineup. He provided them with a freewheeling spirit that was sorely missing from their ranks. Alpert was drafted into the service the ...