16
Jul
2008
We're
busy as always this week, bringing in a number of bands that will be
playing this week's Pitchfork Festival in Chicago. The sessions
that we'll be recording here in Rock Island include visits by
Candle, Bear Country, The New Year, The Icy Demons, Jennifer
O'Connor, Secret Machines, The Dutchess & the Duke, the Prairie
Spies, Ani DiFranco, and Supergrass.
Natalia Zukerman might as well have been born on the road. She is the child of two classical musicians who traveled a lot. (Her father is violinist, violist, and conductor Pinchas Zukerman.) She said last week that she got on a plane for the first time when she was six weeks old, and "I've learned to pack and unpack since I was a little kid.
It's
a relatively calm week at Daytrotter headquarters this week, but the
few things that are happening are exciting.
Three
years ago, the Black Banjo Gathering was held in North Carolina to
celebrate "the African American heritage of the banjo, which has
not only a historic past, but also a resurgent present, and a great
future," according to the event's Web site
(
The blues musicians of the Kinsey Report - composed of Kinsey brothers Donald on guitar, Kenneth on bass, and Ralph on percussion - haven't released a new CD since 1998's Smoke & Steel, and during a recent phone interview, Ralph states that "we don't tour as much as we want. One reason is because the venues aren't there anymore, and another reason is because we've been working on a new record for some time now, and we want to come out with something fresh."
Elvin
Bishop, who lived outside the small town of Elliott, Iowa, as a
child, attributes his connection with the blues community to his
rural upbringing. "The reason I fell in so easy with the old blues
guys," he said, "is because I knew the feeling of being out in
the country and not much going on. ... You grew up with kerosene
lamps and wood-burning stoves and shit like that."
"I
got started singing when I was five years old," Marie Knight said
in a recent phone interview. "My mother used to stand me up on the
table in the church. That's been my life, the church."
When
Tinsley Ellis first came to the Mississippi Valley Blues Festival in
1989, he was just beginning his solo career. "I just remember we
were a new band out of Georgia, got the deal with Alligator
[Records], and the blues society booked a concert there," he said.
"We started off that concert by being like, I think, one of the
first bands to play of the day, and now, here I am being the closing
act of the main stage."
