GoodTimeTonight is a blog about Fiddles and Banjos and Guitars and Folk and Roots music and Country and the Blues and Americana and Chicago and the midwest and America.
Mavis’ last album ‘Live Hope at the Hideout’ was recorded here in Chicago and is really great as well. I’m defiantly looking forward to this. Or as Mavis says about Jeff Tweedy, “ It’s so new to me to sing with different phrases. If I could write a song like that, nobody could say nothing to me, I would get the big head”
I picked up both of these albums this week and they are both worth checking out.
Drilling For Oil: Jonas Friddle
Jonas is an excellent banjo picker living in Chicago. He hosts a few jams bi-weekly around Chicago and I’ve seen him with his other band, The Barehand Jug Band, around town. This solo album is every bit as excellent as those other projects and more so. Jonas’s banjo and guitar picking style on this album reminds me of John Hartford’s, both minimal and full at the same time. Excellent dynamically and with a great rhythm that just carries you along through the whole album. My favorite records make me want to learn how to play them and this one is no exception.
Peter K. Siegel & Eli Smith: Twelve Tunes For Two Banjos
Eli is the host of the Down Home Radio Show so I had been following him for a while but I hadn’t picked up his album until now. This is a great album of clawhammer banjo duets. Peter and Eli compliment each other quite nicely, and this album is just great to listen to. As a clawhammer student myself it’s always great to get another reference to work from and here eli covers a lot of standards and some obscure things like “Ever See the Devil Uncle Joe?” which reminds me of Holy Modal Rounders version of the same. Also Peter’s voice sounds like kind of a folky Frank Zappa which I like.
The Chicago Folk Festival at the University of Chicago was held this weekend for it’s 50th year. That’s amazing! The festival itself helped germinate the folk movement in the early 60s. I just got a new book of photos by Raeburn Flerlage of images from the early years of the festival. Check out this NPR article about the book and the scene, it’s really great:
I haven’t looked at Roger McGuinn’s folk den page in a while but he’s been chugging along recording occasional folk songs and putting them up. This is a page I like. I noticed a recent entry is a recording of a song called “Frozen Logger” which apparently has Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music founder Frank Hamilton playing banjo. Check it out:
This event should be good. If you’re in Chicago go out to the Old Town School this Sunday. Mark and the Pickin’ Bubs have been featured on the blog here and all the performers are really excellent.
Please join us Sunday, January 10 @4 pm at the Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago. Jim Craig, Eddie Holstein, Mark Dvorak & the Pickin’ Bubs celebrate the new year in song, story & collaboration. A one-of-a-kind show, tickets are going fast.
order online: http://oldtownschool.org
or phone: 773 728 6000. A grand reception follows the show @The Grafton Pub.
admin | Uncategorized | Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Hey, so I need to get back into this. There were some great albums and music happenings in the later part of 2009 so I’ll probably work through reviewing some things and hopefully get some more podcasts up. For now here’s a video of Dave Ralwings playing a Jessie Fuller song ‘The Monkey and the Engineer’. This is also on his excellent album ‘Friend of a Friend’ that came out in 2009.
admin | Uncategorized | Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
I’m a musician and a programmer so this was kind of interesting. I think there’s many ways of approaching music, and in the one for me at least, there’s a pretty clear overlap between the thought processes of these worlds. This i’s kind of out of scope (ha) for the blog. But oh well.
Though I think Jeff is wrong on one point, they have many things in common.
Instrumentalists in particular (guitar players for example) make great programmers. It’s not just about math and music being similar, or the fundamentals vs the art. Instrumentalists have to zoom in to work with very repetitive technical details, and so become very focused - like a guitar player practicing a piece of music at a slow speed.
So you may have noticed that the iTunes podcast isn’t working. When we moved the server I needed to update the iTunes store address but this didn’t happen correctly. For now the short solution is to update your podcast link to the RSS feed button to the left. Here’s how, if you would like to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes you can follow these steps too:
1. Open iTunes, Click Advanced from the toolbar and select “Subscribe to Podcast”.
2. iTunes should give you a URL box, in here paste this link (this is the same link as the RSS button on the right): http://feeds.feedburner.com/Goodtimetonightpodcast
You should See the listing for Good Time Tonight on the podcast page in iTunes. You can always come here to listen to the podcast directly on the site or subscribe in any rss reader of your choice. Hope this helps. I’ll send out a note when the itunes listing is updated, but this link should work going forward.
Elvis Perkins is a songwriter that I like. I played his first album Ash Wednesday a lot and I saw him when he was in chicago last time. He’s got some new tracks streaming on his site and looks to be releasing a new album in the spring.
