John Diliberto

Five Rules for Christmas CDs

I hope many of you enjoyed our seasonal programming this year with Sonic Seasonings, An Echoes Christmas and An Echoes Winter Solstice. WEXT in Schenectady ran 30 straight hours of Echoes Christmas programming. WXPN in Philadelphia scattered at least 8 hours of programming throughout Christmas day. These programs tap into a more contemplative and often…

John Diliberto’s Ten Essential CDs for 2007

John Diliberto’s Top Ten for 2007 You’ve already seen and heard the Echoes 2007 Listener Poll, voted on by listeners and perhaps too many fan club members. And you’ll be seeing the 25 Essential Echoes CDs for 2007, a list of the favorite Echoes CDs voted on by Kimberly Haas, Jeff Towne, and me. Like…

The Perfect Echoes Gift-The Brian Eno iPod

iPods have revolutionized music listening. Music fans can travel around with 160 gigabytes of storage. That’s 40,000 songs and more than 4000 CDs worth of music. For ambient musicians like Steve Roach and Robert Rich, whose compositions last the full 72 plus minutes of a CD or the 7 hours of a DVD, the iPod…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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.…

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,…