Sound Check's Blog Posts Tagged 'Month' (6)

50 years since the Beatles' famous performance on the Ed Sullivan show and their legacy is more complicated than ever. Were they the greatest song writers of all time, or massively overrated? Were they the band responsible for watering down rock and roll and making it safe for white suburban audiences or were they band responsible for pushing it radical new directions? Can they be all those things? (yes.) Every punk goes through a phase of rejecting the Beatles followed by a…

Singer and civil rights activist Nina Simone would have been 80 this week. The rightly titled High-Priestess of Soul cut an unimpeachable string of 40 records in her career. While musically, her songs fall pretty squarely in line with the vocal jazz sounds of the late 50's, her songs have not aged into elegance and irrelevance the way many of her contemporaries have. Listening to the landmark 1964 live album Nina Simone in Concert, her performance isn't merely electric.…

Though orthodoxy holds that skatepunk originated on the West Coast, pro skater and multi-instrumentalist Chuck Treece was making the world safe for melodic hardcore in Philly during the mid-80's. As the leader of the band McRad, Treece was a part of the movement to inject punk rock with reggae, funk, and metal influences. McRad's 1987 full length Absence of Sanity is these days best remembered for the tracks it contributed to the legendary skate video “Public Domain.” But the…

Husband and wife team Dessy Di Lauro and Ric'key Pageot have concocted a style of music they call “neo-ragtime.” Their latest album “This is Neo-Ragtime” (out Feb 5th) blends hip-hop, soul, RnB, and ragtime into a sound and style that looks back on the last 100 years of Black Culture while simultaneously looking forward. We spoke with them about their upcoming release, Black History Month, and the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.…

We talk a lot about the artists behind the microphone. But for every word written about the artists working on one side of the recording studio, tragically few words are written about the artists on the other side of the sound-proof glass. In his 40 year career, Nile Rodgers has worked with everyone from Bowie to Madonna, from Sister Sledge to Master Chief. His music unwittingly formed the backbone of hip-hop with the Sugar Hill Gang basing their breakthrough Rapper's…

Nearly 40 years before George Clinton claimed his cosmic heritage and before Crass declared that if no-one else would release their anarchic noise then they'd just do it themselves, a pianist from Birmingham (or Saturn, depending on who you ask) named Herman Poole Blount (again, depending on who you ask) set out to redefine the possibilities of music on his own terms. Although there are many many origin stories out there for the great Sun Ra, here's the version of the story that…