On record, Rodriguez has an assured, slightly too-knowing voice, pleading to a drug dealer - "Won't you bring back all those colors to my dreams" - over a wistful, wheezing musical backdrop that gives way to agitation. The song is "Sugar Man" (available for free download at LightInTheAttic.net/releases/rodriguez/sugar_man.mp3), from the album Cold Fact, and based on them, one gets an image of a street-wise documenter of the dark sides of urban society: "The ladies on my street / Aren't there for their health."
On the phone, though, he's soft-spoken, apologizing that he needs to have questions repeated because of his phone and his hearing.
That disconnect makes sense when one knows that the gulf between Cold Fact and Americans' awareness of it is nearly four decades. Rodriguez released the record in 1970, and its follow-up in 1971, but the apathy that greeted them forced him to give up on music.
"I thought we were going to hit," he said last week. "Didn't happen, though."
You've probably never heard of Local Natives, but 
Born in Mississippi, veteran jazz
trumpeter Art Hoyle was raised in Oklahoma in the early 1930s, and
says that jazz "was just an inevitable part of the black community
when I was growing up. You heard it everywhere - jazz and blues,
and gospel music, of course. It was just part of everyday living."
William Elliott Whitmore, a farm boy who hails from Lee County, Iowa, is set to release his new record, Animals in the Dark, on the Anti- label on February 17. After a trio of acclaimed, intimate, spare, and highly personal albums on the Southern label, Whitmore gets more political on Animals in the Dark, and he also fleshes out his sound. What remains the same is his wizened, worn voice, which gives a startling authenticity to his straightforward, woodsy folk music.
The California-based Donkeys spent three years on their second album, Living on the Other Side, from start to release, and that combined with the quartet's warm, fluffy, unhurried music might create the impression that the band moves slowly. Some songs sound downright lazy.
Michael
J. Miles, the freelance educator, composer, and musician currently in
the area as Quad City Arts' latest visiting artist, isn't blind
to the common associations connected with the banjo. "The general
awareness," he says, "if there is
any, of the banjo sits on
things like The Beverly
Hillbillies or Deliverance
or O
Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Parlophone - the label home to everyone from the Beatles to Colplay in the UK - found the Swedish quintet Love Is All a touch hard to work with.
There is no disputing that Sean Ryan is inexperienced. He's a senior at Augustana College, and he nearly boasts that the songs on his debut album, Lonesome Driver Music, were dashed off and barely touched again.
The Quad Cities quartet Chrash goes by many names, and right now its preference appears to be Chrash Flood. That shape-shifting seems to reflect an almost willful desire for obscurity.
