Rage Against The Machine attracted a crowd of almost 9000 people as they headlined an anti-war concert in Denver yesterday (August 27th).Read the rest here.
The concert at the Coliseum, held to recognise Iraq Veterans Against the War, also featured a performance from State Radio.
At the conclusion of the concert, protesters marched on the Pepsi Centre, which is currently the site of the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
Pandora is one of the nation's most popular Web radio services, with about 1 million listeners daily. Its Music Genome Project allows customers to create stations tailored to their own tastes. It is one of the 10 most popular applications for Apple Inc.'s iPhone and attracts 40,000 new customers a day.Read the rest here.
Yet the burgeoning company may be on the verge of collapse, according to its founder, and so may others like it.
"We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision," said Tim Westergren, who founded Oakland-based Pandora. "This is like a last stand for webcasting."
The transformation of words, songs and movies to digital media has provoked a number of high-stakes fights between the owners of copyrighted works and the companies that can now easily distribute those works via the Internet.
The doomsday rhetoric these days around the fledgling medium of Web radio springs from just such tensions.
Greg Osby released 9 Levels (Inner Circle Music) on August 2, his first album in three years. Osby's ensemble features vocalist Sara Serpa, guitarist Nir Felder, pianist Adam Birnbaum, bassist Joseph Lepore and drummer Hamir Atwal. The album title refers to "The 9 Levels of Humanity," a principle of Zen Buddhism.Read the rest here.
Jerry Wexler, the legendary record man, music producer and ageless hipster, died at 3:45 a.m. today at the age of 91. Wexler was one of the great music business pioneers of the 20th century: as co-head of Atlantic Records from 1953 to '75, he and his partner Ahmet Ertegun grew the small independent R&B label into the major record company that it is today.Read the rest here.
Wexler was much more than a top executive — he was a national tastemaker and a prophet of roots and rhythm. The impact of his deeds matched his larger-than-life personality. Because of him, we use the term "rhythm and blues" and we hail Ray Charles as "Genius" and Aretha Franklin as "Queen." We came to know of a record label called Stax and a small town called Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We witnessed the rise of Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, and we care about a thing called soul.
Isaac Hayes packed a lot of excitement and achievement into his 65-year life, which ended Sunday an hour after his wife Adjowa found him unconscious and collapsed near a treadmill in his Memphis, Tenn., home. He had written hit songs, made platinum records, starred in movies, been elected to two music Halls of Fame and provided the voice of Chef on South Park, which gave him a memorable if premature send-off in 2006. But the biggest triumph for this self-described Black Moses had to be on April 10, 1972, when his Theme from Shaft won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.Read the rest here.
LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of the Dave Matthews Band, died Tuesday from complications stemming from injuries he sustained in an ATV accident, the band's publicist said.Read the rest here.
Moore, 46, died "unexpectedly" at a hospital, publicist Ambrosia Healy said in a statement.
Moore was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, and had been rehabilitating at his L.A. home after the June 30 accident at his farm outside Charlottesville, Virginia.
The creation of great art does not rely solely on the creativity of great artists. Behind countless masterpieces are promoters, critics and consumers who make artistic expression possible. Although he can't sing a note and never played an instrument, Norman Granz is one of those non-artists who made jazz possible in the 20th century. As a concert promoter and record producer, Granz has no equal in the history of popular music.Read the rest here.
The son of Russian immigrants, Granz grew up in California during the Great Depression. He discovered jazz music early in life, befriending Nat "King" Cole, Lester Young and Billie Holiday. On the eve of America's entry into WWII, Granz began producing nightclub shows around Los Angeles. As disc jockey Les Davis notes, Granz not only brought musicians together for relaxed jam sessions, but also got black and white patrons together by insisting that club owners suspend their segregation policies.
