To understand the importance of Paul Horn you have to cast back to a time, 1969, when there was no New Age music. Few artists in the west were thinking about a contemplative musical sound. There were no important albums outside of classical music that were pure solo flute and certainly none that plied the…
Hear Anoushka Shankar & Nitin Sawhney Talk about Traces of You in Echoes Podcast. Ravi Shankar passed away in December of 2012. He left an incredible legacy, scores of disciples and two daughters who have achieved their own kind of fame, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. The two sisters got together while Shankar was in…
Tonight on Echoes, Anoushka Shankar & Nitin Sawhney Ravi Shankar passed away in December of 2012. He left an incredible legacy, scores of disciples and two daughters who have achieved their own kind of fame, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones. The two sisters got together while Shankar was in the process of dying and recorded…
Alvin Lee Founder & Guitarist of Ten Years After Passes I remember watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson around 1969. I think it was Steve Lawrence, or another of those loungey Vegas entertainers Carson loved back then, was on the show talking about hanging out with this group Ten Years After. He was shocked…
Reg Presley, lead singer and composer for The Troggs, dies at 71. I just played both sides of Wild Thing, the American debut album by The Troggs, named for their #1 hit song. I bought it in 1966 at Woolworth’s in Tewksbury, Massachussetts. Not even thirty-minutes in total length, it has only one bad song…
Gabrielle Roth passes at age 71. Gabrielle Roth wouldn’t have won any musician polls. She didn’t really play anything beyond some percussion. Yet she was responsible for nearly two dozen albums over the last 20 years or so. She referred to herself as an urban shaman and with the floating personnel of her ensemble, Gabrielle…
I always thought of “Moon River” as the first space music song. Even in 1961, when Andy Williams recorded it, I knew this was music from another era, but something about Johnny Mercer’s lyrics and Henry Mancini’s sweeping orchestration always suggested something beyond this earth to me. Just now I had a new spacey ambient…
Tonight on Echoes we’ll be airing an interview with Icebreaker and BJ Cole talking about their beautiful cover of Brian’s Eno’s 1983 collaboration with Roger Eno and Daniel Lanois, Apollo-Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Our show was recorded last Friday, making it to early too comment on the passing of Neil Armstrong, the first man to set…
Jazz Giant Sam River’s Passes Away. I was so sad to hear of the passing of Sam Rivers at 88 years of age on December 26, 2011. He was an iconoclastic musician who came up in the free jazz days and cut through that scene with music blazing in serrated slices. I got to see…
Composer, keyboardist and Mike Oldfield Collaborator David Bedford Passes I was sad to hear of the passing of David Bedford, the English composer who had a deep engagement with progressive rock in the early 1970s. It actually started a little earlier in Kevin Ayers and The Whole World, a rollicking post-psychedelic, pre-progressive rock, musically insane…