Our Year in Review looks at some of the best and most interesting stories we ran. Feel free to catch up if you missed something of interest, or to read something you liked again.
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Category Archives: News
Ric Ocasek as Solo Artist and Producer
Ric Ocasek, lead singer of The Cars passed away on September 15 at the age of 75. Pretty much no one who was a teenager when their debut album came out in 1978 could resist the band’s ultra-cool style and the way they were able to mix a Euro-electronic sound with pure American pop.
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Cold Diamond and Mink: Here Today Gone Tomorrow
Do you know what’s cool? When your band backs a great performer who brings back the heart of 1960s vinyl soul in a fresh way and then your arrangements and backing are so inspirational that you release the backing tracks as an instrumental album in their own right!
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Art of the Album: Pedro Bell
Pedro Bell, the artistic talent behind Funkadelic’s wild urban psychedelic album cover art, died on August 27, 2019 in Evergreen Park, IL. NDIM presents this retrospective and tribute to Bell.
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Female recording artists are poised to influence the marketing of cannabis culture
by Marshall Bowden
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Laurie Anderson collaborates on Songs from the Bardo
Laurie Anderson, musician and visual/conceptual artist, has made her bones exploring the intersection between the deep philosophical ruminations of fine art and the commercial world of popular culture, with results that are by turns fascinating, hilarious, sad, and chilling. Her latest collaboration, Songs from the Bardo, looks deeply into the Tibetan Buddhism that she has studied and whose ideas she has incorporated into previous work.
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John Coltrane: Blue World
Impulse! label will release lost recordings made for Canadian film recorded between Crescent and A Love Supreme.
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“Rubberband” is NOT the great, lost Miles Davis album
This September will see the release by Rhino Records of a Miles Davis album, an album that is ‘previously unheard,’ “previously unreleased’ or even ‘lost’ depending on what press release or music blog you read. The album, titled Rubberband after its most fully realized track, will hit stores September 9.
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Music festivals: how to get more women on stage (and it’s not just 50/50 quotas)
by Samantha Warren, University of Portsmouth
By all accounts, Kylie Minogue was fabulous at Glastonbury this year. What she wasn’t though – contrary to promotional material – was a headline act. Unlike Stormzy, The Killers and The Cure, who all topped the bill on successive nights on the main Pyramid Stage, Kylie appeared in much less prominent spots on the festival line-up – similar to Janet Jackson, who had also been promoted as a headliner.
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Joao Gilberto, Father of Bossa Nova, dies
“The final flicker of the old flame”
by Marshall Bowden
The music world and cultural doyens of Brazil mourn the death of João Gilberto.
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