Bloggerhythms

Danny Seraphine's California Transit Authority (CTA) is back with their second album, Sacred Ground , and this time the band took the field with a real live horn section that sounds like it was cloned straight from his old band, Chicago. Seraphine's current group is loaded with top notch session players who shared the spotlight with him on CTA’s 2007 debut, Full Circle . Ed Roth is on keys, Mick Mahan plays bass, and Peter Fish adds his keyboards to three tracks. The most important member is guitarist Mark Bonilla who also serves as CTA's unofficial music director. He co-produced the set with Seraphine, shared composing credits on eight of the fourteen tracks, and wrote most of the horn arrangements. While Bonilla's horn charts frequently remind you of Jim Pankow's work with Chicago Sacred Ground's overall vibe is a hybrid of that band's two most productive periods: the James William Guercio years and the tougher sounding moments from the David Foste...

Danny Seraphine served as the drummer for Chicago from 1967 to 1990. He may not be one of the more famous drummers in rock 'n roll history but he is definitely on the list of the most respected skin beaters of the classic rock era. Twenty years after the band dismissed him amid great acrimony he and collaborator Adam Mitchell offer us Street Player: My Chicago Story , a 281 page autobiography that also doubles as a history of this outstanding rock septet. As many celebrity memoirs do these days, Seraphine's book does not start at the beginning. Instead it opens with a tragedy that had a profound effect on his life and on the lives of all of his bandmates: the unexpected death of guitarist Terry Kath. Kath's demise is discussed in more detail later in the book but before that sad chapter Seraphine takes you back to his childhood, to his ethnic Italian upbringing in the city his band was named for, and how he became a delinquent. He dropped out of high school and joine...

Another decade is rapidly drawing to a close so its time to ask where the past ten years will find itself in the annals of American history? When someone speaks about "The Roaring 20s," "The Sexy 60s," or "The 70s," (also known as "The Me Decade") people instantly conjure up certain images and news events associated with those time periods. Will this decade eventually do the same and acquire a nickname that will stereotype it forever? Is there a common cultural theme to identify the first decade of the still young century? If you have a good moniker for where we are today please let me know. As always, there was lots of news. The decade marked the election of the first mixed race President of the United States, but for most Americans, the single most important historical event was the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath that we are still living with today. The past ten years were not the best years for war or peace, or for many...

Let me start by getting the only negative out of the way quickly. The name of this band is California Transit Authority. While this really isn't a bad name it may cause some of you to chuckle when you discover the band's leader is former Chicago drummer Danny Seraphine. If he and his new group want to earn some credibility as something more than a tribute band their name isn't going to help. The reason I am making this an issue is because everything else about Full Circle , California Transit Authority's debut album, is a rock-fusion lover's fantasy come true. While nine of the thirteen tracks are covers of Chicago songs they are not retreads of the sappy ballads that oozed from their lifeless torsos in the 80s. Chicago hasn't rocked like CTA does since the Nixon Administration. All of the Chicago songs updated here are from the Terry Kath era. None, with the exception of "Mississippi Delta City Blues," appear on any Chicago album past V an...