Hey Joe, where you going all tangled up in blue? Gonna change my attitude, walk on down the avenue Fly away on a magic carpet ride down to Graceland. Goodbye, Joe Hey Joe, what kind of mood you in with that cat-like grin? I’m moving off the dark side of the moon Going over to […]
She shakes me out, she jiggles me down starts me dancing like a rodeo clown. Twist to the left, twist to the right never do we get too way up tight. She stays so near, she goes so far she ain’t no Facebook or Internet star. She’s seen over here, she’s been over there all […]
In the morning, when the sun comes up In the morning, when the sun comes up In the morning, when the sun comes up Give thanks for this cup of coffee. In the evening, when the sun goes down In the evening, when the sun goes down In the evening, when the sun goes down […]
(for Langston Hughes) We start work at 6, break at 8, go again till 10, then spread thin, straining hoom across the street, pay to park the horn in the barn. 4 plus 8 hours of bars: menus, bibs, gases, and books. We buy these blues, coughing up blue stained bills, so our blues may […]
Three new short pieces up over at SoundCloud with The Variable Trio. “Little Richard” and “Easy on the Blues” were attempts to recreate the shellac 78 sound, using aged vocals recorded open microphone into a portable recorder on tape cassettes then playing them back through a boombox into GarageBand, using the laptop open microphone and […]
Berfrois waves down the Toads’ Blues Bus.
“I am here, and there is nothing to say,” John Cage said, in his “Lecture on Nothing” (Silence, 1961). “If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment.” So we boarded Line 15, ancient music now turned summer, for the 2011 Portland Blues Festival. The bus in summer […]
Over at JazzWax, jazz journalist Marc Meyers pulls out an old discussion, with Stan Kenton trying to explain a depressed jazz market. Marc focuses on Kenton’s suggestion that the emergence of folk helps explain the jazz recession, but finds Kenton’s explanation historically inaccurate: “I find this entire folk-as-jazz-killer thing a hoot,” Marc says. Hoot of […]
