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When I was a boy, my father, a former music teacher, joked: “There’s nothing worth listening to beyond Bach. Bach wrote it all first.” But I was a child of pop music and, in the words of Morrissey, classical music said “nothing to me about my life.” Continue reading
When Matthew Halls steps to the podium to conduct the Oregon Bach Festival’s June 26 opening performance, it will mark the first time since its founding in 1970 that anyone other than founder Helmuth Rilling has directed the annual summer festival. That opening work, Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, commonly regarded as the first Baroque masterpiece, makes an appropriate accession because the 38-year-old British conductor’s assumption of the artistic director post signals a generational change. Continue reading
Around the 35-second mark on “It Ain’t Easy,” track 14 on Sassparilla’s recently released impressive double album Pasajero/Hullabaloo, something begins to sound very similar to a song cemented on classic rock’s Mt. Rushmore. Continue reading
Though the final entry in the beloved Harry Potter series hit bookshelves seven years ago, and the last film arrived three years ago, The Boy Who Lived continues to live on thanks to the cheeky musical genre known as Wizard Rock, a musical phenomenon which I wrote about in 2007 for EW (“Raise Your Wands: Wizard rock arrives at the library”) just before the final Potter book was released. Wizard Rock combines Potter fans’ love of music and books, so listeners are treated to songs that are based on events from the series. Continue reading
What were you doing at age 17? Well, 17-year-old Clementine Creevy of the L.A.-based band Cherry Glazerr is busy fostering an up-and-coming indie “it” girl reputation — but not before getting her homework done. The cherub-faced trio’s 2013 release Trick or Treat Dancefloor, out on Burger Records, recalls the early work of fellow female-fronted Southern California band Best Coast; think three chords soaked in reverb and rudimentary melodies alongside loose and stony percussion. Continue reading
Zimbabwe’s “afrocoustic” Bongo Love returns to Eugene June 27 at Cozmic. Since the last time the band brought the “Zim sound” to town, Bongo Love released a self-titled album and added a trap set drummer and a female vocalist to the sonic smorgasbord of djembe, mbira, marimba and “southern African guitar licks.” Continue reading
Sometimes opposites attract, and sometimes they create havoc. This could be considered the theme for 2014’s Debutantes & Dealers, the debut full-length album from Seattle folk-rockers Vaudeville Etiquette. Continue reading
Emily Saliers was only 12 when Joan Baez’s Diamonds & Rust was released in 1975. And Saliers, half of the Indigo Girls folk-rock duo, listened to it nonstop. “I listened to the record over and over again until I could learn it,” Saliers tells EW over the phone from Canada. But her interest in Baez wasn’t just song-deep. “I was very admiring of her politics and her journeys and the peace that she stood for,” she says. Continue reading
The road to recovery — and prom: Eugene saxophonist and origami artist Tomo Tsurumi is slowly recovering after a bicycle accident in early May that caused severe injuries to his face, mouth and hands. Continue reading