I’ve attended a few concerts recently that pushed me further into the No-Laptop Zone and they couldn’t have been more different in their sound, influences, and effect. The best of them, Radio Massacre International and the Trevor Dunn’s Schemes of Omission employed no laptops, prefab drum loops, sequencer patterns or CD replicated soundscapes. Trevor Dunn…
Best Of
The 2007 Best of Echoes Poll Opens
I bet many of you don’t care much about polls. Good music is good music. Music you like is the music you like. You probably don’t need to know what thousands of other people think to form your own opinion and tastes. But polls do serve a real function in a community. They’re effective for…
Program Highlights
Scott Huckabay-A child of Hendrix, a brother of Hedges
Scott Huckabay came into the Echoes Living Room today. He was last on the show in 1998, although we’ve played his music regularly ever since. Scott Huckabay is a combination of an acoustic, finger style player who dips his already formidable technique into an array of stomp boxes, delays, loops, harmonizers and octave shifters. Think…
Reviews & Commentary
The Sound & Vision of üNN
Someone sent me a link to a new video of theirs on YouTube. The music was good, but the cinematography was bad, the sound was awful and the audience was inattentive. But like all things on the web, there were links to some other videos including this one by an artist who records as üNN.…
Reviews & Commentary
Echoes at Eighteen
Echoes 18 We don’t celebrate our anniversaries well on Echoes. We did a decent job of our tenth, but didn’t really milk it for all it’s worth. And the 18th doesn’t quite have the import of the 10th or 20th. Going back into our past never seems quite as important as moving forward into the…
Reviews & Commentary
Prince-Space Guitar God in Waiting
I’ve never been a big fan of Prince, although I’ve always respected his obvious genius, distinctive vision and even enjoyed a lot of his songs, especially in the 1999-Purple Rain zone. I realize that I probably miss the point of Prince entirely. For me, he was always a bit too much about image over music.…
Reviews & Commentary
Joe Zawinul Leaves the Planet: Weather Report founder dies.
Joe Zawinul has passed. The Viennese keyboard player wrote “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” for Cannonball Adderley, (later a hit for The Buckinghams) and was part of Miles Davis’s early fusion efforts including writing the title track to In a Silent Way and “Pharaoh’s Dance” on Bitches Brew. He’s best known, however, for founding Weather Report,…
Reviews & Commentary
Sheila Chandra Returns
It’s been a long time since Sheila Chandra graced us with new music. Her last proper album was This Sentence Is True (The Previous Sentence Is False) in 2001. Since then Chandra has been retiring in southwest England, singing only in an amateur choir, still nursing her voice after years of nagging throat problems. But…
Reviews & Commentary
Lone Rider: Shadowfax & G.E. Stinson’s Glitched Trajectory
Ever wonder what happened to Shadowfax? This instrumental band, named for Gandalf’s horse in the Lord of the Rings, started as a progressive rock group with leanings toward the acoustic chamber sound of Oregon in the 1970s. After Will Ackerman resurrected their careers on Windham Hill they became leading exponents for an evocative, melodic and…
Reviews & Commentary
A Beat Drops: Max Roach Passes
Max Roach: January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007 A true Titan of 20th century music, one of the principal architects of Be-Bop and a voice of liberation in the black community, Max Roach has passed. Roach wasn’t just a drummer, but a musical conceptualist. Whether orchestrating polyrhythmic equations behind Charlie Parker or tuning the…