by Bruce McEwen
The Golden Old-time Music Camp-Out came to Boonville last weekend for the second time. It used to be in Yreka, way up north. This is the second music festival to relocate to Boonville in the last few years, the first being the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival, not that Sierra Nevada and the Golden Oldies [...]
Before I Am Love, directed by Luca Gaudagnino and released into American movie theaters this summer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer John Adams had never written a soundtrack. In a way he still hasn’t, since more than 30 minutes of music he supplied for this Italian soap opera without the suds were cannibalized in one [...]
by Bruce McEwen
Lauren’s Restaurant should be packed to the rafters this Saturday night when Nahara, Boonville’s fledgling songbird and healing arts masseuse, takes the stage for her first live performance as a professional singer. Nahara has performed before, both at the Varity Show and she had a solo role in the recent production of Dearly Departed by [...]
When it comes to the commemoration of dead musicians, few women enjoy even a moment in the posthumous spotlight. They were rarely given the chance to compose, and until the 19th century — and even then — did so for the most part furtively, if at all. The influential Viennese music critic, Eduard Hanslick, writing [...]
The musical terrain stretching between the entrenched aesthetic positions of parents and those of their teenage children is dotted with mines and ordnance laced with mustard gas. After enduring countless bombardments of Lady Gaga singing “Alejandro, Alejandro” over the car radio, with one of my kids having fed the coordinates into this long-range howitzer, I [...]
by Bruce McEwen
This past weekend of the quarter moon, a chilly breeze tempered the usually hot June sunshine, as the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival got off to cool start. Locals noted the traffic was light Friday in comparison to previous years, but by Saturday afternoon the parked cars were lined up from Boonville all the way [...]
Tucked away in a bar-room corner, crouched on a chair, the part-owner of Noyo Bowl in Fort Bragg does his best to emulate Aaron Neville.
by Steve Heilig
One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I kept thinking that a voice was wafting thru the air. And it was a voice I thought I recognized. After [...]
by Daniel Mintz
It’s uncertain whether the debt-ridden Reggae Rising — stepson of the long-running but now defunct Reggae On The River — music festival will be held this year but those who are wondering will find out on June 17. That’s the deadline that Humboldt County has given to Tom Dimmick, the festival’s owner, to pay the [...]
Jazz is often held to be the most direct form of personal expression: the taciturn cool of Miles (or do I mean cruelty?); the flighty genius of Bird; the stratospheric humor of Dizzy; the volatile arrogance of a Mingus. A long-favored cliché has jazz as a symbol of democracy. House Concurrent Resolution 57 — loftily [...]
