Starting with an intense Opening Gala Concert at UCLA's Royce Hall, the World Festival of Sacred Music-- Los Angeles will once again be the talk of the town on L.A.'s music scene when it takes over venues all over the City and County, comprising 41 events over 16 days.
With 1,000 artists participating, 2008 marks the fourth such gathering of musicians from sources as diverse as the small republic of Tuva in western Asia to the halaus, or classical performing arts schools, of Hawaii. Since its inaugural run in 1999, the festival has taken place in intervals of three years, with the second and third editions having been held in 2002 and 2005. Read more »
A city that needs a big break from the slow and painful legal drama surrounding its mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit is about to get one when its four-day heavy-hitting jazz festival starts off at 5:15 p.m., with the Duke Ellington School of Performance Arts Jazz Ensemble taking one of its six stages.
The Detroit Jazz Festival, almost into its fourth decade (this year witnesses the 29th annual edition), is filled to the brim with performers forming complete spectrums of both visibility in the local, regional and national jazz scenes as well as the various denominations of jazz. Read more »
The best part of the Dell Dome was actually a ping-pong table. The reason is that it made the interviews conducted at the Dome with some of the best up-and-coming artists of the rock world at Outside Lands significantly more exciting. Significantly more because the interviewees, including Ethan Miller of Howlin' Rain, were forced to answer questions by the Dome's MC, Johnny Santos, while matching up against him in a game of table tennis. So all the fans who came into check out what were already up-and-close interviews in the small Dome were treated to a unique mix of sport and musical salon rather than just sitting through a dull, regimented Inside The Actors' Studio-style interview.
Howlin' Rain, which the band that frontman Miller formed while simultaneously keeping things going with the alternative prog-rockers Comets on Fire, is nothing less than an excellent classic rock band that isn't afraid to veer from the Southern sensibilities of the Creedence Clearwater Revival to stomping Muscle Shoals grooves to, more apparently on their newest album, laid-back folk-rock in the vein of Fairport Convention. However, the collection of these flavors translate less to a corncopia of retro sounds but rather a more demented, hard-edged take on Woodstock rock that comes out sounding like an excellent proliferation of mix tapes of unreleased Blue Cheer and Crosby, Stills and Nash (with the latter being in their angriest of protest modes).
Miller, whose fierce vocals fit perfectly with the "Howlin'" part of his band's name, actually tore Johnny the Dome MC a new one on the table while fielding question after question, and his reward for doing so was a new Dell laptop customized with Mr. Ming's prints. And when Johnny opened up the floor to possible questions from the crowd, I managed to finagle a pretty sizable interview from Miller as he went back from the Dome to the festival's artist lounge area, carrying the hefty unopened laptop box under one arm and a coat to help brave the cold Haight-Ashbury-area weather under the other.
When Mayor Ray Nagin, the mayor of the City of New Orleans, stepped up to the podium for a hastily-fashioned press conference three days after Hurricane Katrina's passage through the city, he said that the city was, "In a state of devastation."
Being one of the five deadliest storms in America's history, the substance of the Mayor's statement goes without saying, and the economic damage (the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the storm would slow the growth of inflation-adjusted U.S. GDP by up to 1.5%, or keep the country from about $161 billion of purchasing power; according to a later report). It was also estimated by an agency with a similar level of authority, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), that more than 20% of New Orleans' citizenry at the time-- up to 105,300 people at one point-- was left officially unemployed by the storm.
While few are fundamentally unaware of the high cost to both the nation and the city as a result of Katrina, few are also aware of exactly why so many residents lost their jobs and why the economy of New Orleans in particular was so susceptible to the storm's damage.
