Kirsten Nash Interview
Kirsten
Nash is best known as one of North America’s premiere saxophonists,
singers and songwriters and yet our conversation on this day started
with a place in Ms. Nash’s career that many people may not be aware of,
her gift for creating outstanding musicals. She has two in her hip
pocket, both of which have been produced and both of which should be
picked up by major theatrical companies looking for something fresh and
exciting and which will deeply move their patrons.
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Amy Black and Memphis
Nashville
based singer and songwriter Amy Black is a lot of things, but there are
some things that we should dispel immediately about what she is not,
just in case readers get the wrong idea from some of the titles for her
original songs from her new album
Memphis. Her song “It’s Hard To Love An Angry Man,” is not about any
men she knows, unless we want to count the men she has encountered and
observed at Home Depot (more about that later) and it is definitely not
about her main squeeze, her hubby, whom she describes as her Zen master.
The killer tune “The Blackest Cloud,” in no way suggests that Amy Black
suffers from a Chicken Little syndrome either, far from it, as in the
view of this writer she projects as being a happy, positive individual
and our conversation was often punctuated with her laughter.
Memphis
is the fourth album that Amy Black has released and in some ways is a
continuation of the stylistic thread of her previous record,
The Muscle Shoals Sessions. Talking about the evolution of her music Black
says, “I think the shift started with my second album,
This is Home that I recorded
in Nashville and you can definitely hear on the first three songs on
that album a little bit more of a soulful, Blues thing going on, before
the rest of the album goes onto singer / songwriter kind of Americana. About the same time that I was recording the
Nashville album I had this day booked at Muscle Shoals and I was going
to record this song called “Alabama,” that I wrote for my grandfather
who was from the Muscle Shoals area I thought it would be cool to go |
Billy Thompson Sizzles
Billy
Thompson’s self-titled and current album segues easily between straight
up Blues and Blues Rock. The album was recorded in seven different
studios and features a cast of top rated musicians including, drummer
Tony Braunagel (Coco Montoya, B.B. King, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt),
organist Mike Finnigan (Curtis Salgado, Neal McCoy, Tracy Chapman, Steve
Tyrell), James “Hutch” Hutchinson on bass (Marc Cohn, Randy Newman),
keyboardist Michael Leroy Peed, bassist Daryl Johnson and several other
musicians too numerous to name in this space. As for recording the songs, “Stranger,”
“Hourglass,” and “Phoine” at Ultratone Studio in Studio City, California
where it was recorded by Johnny Lee Schell (Marcella Detroit, John Lee
Hooker Jr., Bonnie Raitt, Joe
Cocker) and calling up old friends Tony Braunagel, “Hutch” Hutchinson
and Mike Finnigan, Billy Thompson says, “I feel the bluesier stuff
always works great with those guys. I recorded four songs, but I only
used three and the fourth one will be on the next album. I think those
guys are the cream of the crop when it comes to Blues based playing.
They are some of the best players in the world. Mike Finnigan played
with Jimi Hendrix when he was twenty-two and Tony Braunagel was with
Back Street Crawler, which became Free with Paul Rodgers and he played
with Eric Burdon.” The album opens
with the somewhat funky “Burn It Down Bernadette,” cuts to the jumping
“Phoine,” a song on which Thompson’s guitar seems energized by
Finnigan’s splendid organ and vice versa.
The third song on the album “Black Rain,” is |
Laura Rain and the Caesars
Riveting
Riffs Magazine had the opportunity to sit in on a Laura Rain and the
Caesars gig, when we visited the Detroit area during the last week of
June and it was on the recommendation of Mary McGuire of the stellar
band The Blood Sisters that we checked out the dynamic
singer-songwriter. Rain is a powerful vocalist who is reminiscent of
some of the best R&B / Soul / Funk singers to grace the airwaves and a
stage. Her soulful vocals remind one of Aretha Franklin, her Bluesy
inflections bring to mind Etta James, she has some of Chaka Khan’s funk
and she owns the stage like Millie Jackson only minus the coarse
language.
Although, Laura Rain’s band is comprised of
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R&B Chanteuse Alisa Ohri“As an independent artist, I think that it is amazing what we can do amongst ourselves, away from big industry and the huge record labels. There are people out there who want to hear good music and who want to make good music. I am loving it, and I think that we are in really special times,” says Alisa Ohri, a R&B singer – songwriter who now lives in New York City and who got her career kick started many years ago, singing backup vocals for a rock band in California, while she attended university and then later performed with a group that morphed into Third Eye Blind. With her most recent album, ‘Cuz I Feel Alisa Ohri has demonstrated that an independent artist can produce a quality recording, with grooves and vibes better than most of what you will hear on FM radio stations these days. It also does not hurt that she is married to one of the funkiest bass players around Hubert Eaves IV, who for several years toured with R&B queen Erykah Badu. His father Hubert Eaves III lends his production and playing skills to Ohri’s album as well and the senior Eaves is no slouch either, as he was the mastermind behind D-Train’s music and Miles Davis once covered one of Eaves’ own songs. As for the third musician who appears on Alisa Ohri’s ‘Cuz I Feel, Alex Moseley, he was one of the two musicians who backed Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam. Read More |
Maurice Williams Interview
Music
historians, fans of the Doo Wop era and the period in which R&B and
Beach Music began to emerge, do not need an introduction to the music of
Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, for songs such as “Little Darlin’,” first
recorded by and written by Maurice Williams, the hit song “Stay,” and “May
I,” are songs to which generations of music fans have sung along. After
fifty years as a recording and performing singer – songwriter, Maurice
Williams is attracting a lot of attention again, this time with his new
album Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs 50
years… The trade mark falsettos, which put songs such as “Stay,” at
the top of the charts in the 1960s and also made it a hit song years
later, for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, are back once again. In
1960, Shane Gaston was serving up the falsetto vocals and on the new
album it is the late Fred Mangum who provided the falsetto vocals. The
combination of Maurice Williams’s vocals and Fred Mangum are pure magic.
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