• This Tuesday the power-pop purveyors at Not Lame Records are releasing a new tribute to The Cars entitled Substitution Mass Confussion. As a salute to Cars bassist Benjamin Orr, who died of cancer in 2000, the CD benefits the American Cancer Society.
Celebrating its golden-jubilee season, the Friends of Chamber Music of Davenport gave its annual Holiday Concert at the Butterworth Center in Moline on December 17. The Friends gave this wonderful free concert as a gift to the community.
From "lip-stinking" to iPod envy, this past year was another whirlwind of technology gone wild and taste often misplaced. Bob Dylan went from hawking Victoria's Secret to his new signature wine, Planet Waves, and while perhaps better suited to sponsor a line of rolling papers, the Doobie Brothers followed suit with their own private label, Doobie Red.
Loud drums and a driving guitar kick off the album, and from most bands, this would hardly be remarkable. But coming at the beginning of a record from The Winter Blanket, it’s downright shocking. After all, this is a group whose sound rarely eclipses the musical equivalent of a whisper, following in the delicate, subdued, austere slowcore tradition of Low.
'Tis the season to shake off the cold and retreat under the comfort of hot chocolate, lots of blankets, and a good book. An armload of cool new selections are worth snuggling up with, aiming to feed your head and pop-culture addictions.
With a flick of the wrist and a sweeping downbeat, guest conductor Catherine Comet led the Quad City Symphony Orchestra into the first strains of its concert on Saturday, December 4. The musicians, under the graceful yet commanding baton of Comet, performed Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C and Aaron Copland’s Symphony No.
He toured minor-league baseball parks with Bob Dylan earlier this year. His latest album puts Tom Waits material next to Toby Keith’s, and includes duets with the popular jazz crooner Norah Jones and the ever-respected alt-country goddess Lucinda Williams.
The culture war is rising like my heating bill. Macy's and other Federated department stores have banned "Merry Christmas" from their customer greetings this season, so as not to offend. All references to Christmas are being stripped from public spaces, replaced with candy canes (sugar!), snowmen, and foil-wrapped presents (buy now!).
Bob Dorr has fronted the Blue Band for 23 years, and he promises that he'll keep it going through a major milestone: a quarter century. "Our immediate goal is to make it to 25 years, and that's less than 18 months away," Dorr said.
• For a number of years now the CMH Records imprint has churned out a bizarre array of tribute CDs under the "A Bluegrass Tribute to" banner, serving up a down-home finger-pickin' twist on artists including Metallica, the Dave Matthews Band, and Cat Stevens.

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