News from the darkest corners...

Our friends over at Incubate, the festival for independent culture in Tilburg, the Netherlands have posted a blog entry about our label WM Recordings:

The release of the 100th free album download on the WM Recordings Netlabel label is rapidly approaching. One of the projects surrounding their 100th free album will be the release of an album of cover version of tracks from the WM Recordings catalog.

Do you play in a band? Pick your favorite WM Recordings track from www.wmrecordings.com and… cover it! You can choose from almost a thousand songs, varying in style from pop to afro-beat!

Read the full article here

Larry Knechtel, an award-winning keyboard artist who accompanied generations of leading musicians and combos, is dead at 69.

Knechtel died Thursday of an apparent heart attack. His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Valley Hills Funeral Home in Yakima.

Knechtel was born in Bell, Calif., and performed live and in studio recordings with a wide range of artists, including Neil Diamond, Randy Newman, Ray Charles, The Beach Boys, The Doors, Elvis Presley, Hank Williams Jr. and Elvis Costello.

He earned a Grammy award for his arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” played keyboard on the Dixie Chicks’ Grammy award-winning album “Taking the Long Way” and performed on the Hammond organ for the group’s tour of the same name.

In a very recent interview, Dweezil Zappa said a live Frank Zappa concert circa 1976 will be released “soon” featuring Terry Bozzio and “a female singer”. Word is, Vaulternative will issue a CD of the Spectrum Theater in Philadelphia show from 29 October that year.

The band at that time consisted of Zappa, Terry Bozzio, Ray White, Patrick O’Hearn, Eddie Jobson and Bianca Thornton. The set list included tracks like Stink-Foot, The Poodle Lecture, Dirty Love, Tryin’ To Grow A Chin and The Torture Never Stops.

There is still no news on the 40th anniversary edition of Cruisin’ With Ruben & The Jets that was announced earlier this year.

Lawrence Lucie, a guitarist whose career began in the early years of jazz and continued into the early years of the 21st century, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 101.

Lucie spent most of his career as a rhythm guitarist, rarely stepping forward to solo. But he was a master of the underrated art of keeping the beat, and over the years he kept it for some of the biggest names in jazz.

The list of Lawrence Lucie’s employers included Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for a few nights in the early 1930s, and Louis Armstrong, with whom he worked for four years in the 1940s. He also performed or recorded with Billie Holiday, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson and many others. He was the last living musician known to have recorded with the New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton.

Lucie taught for three decades at Borough of Manhattan Community College. He performed with the New York Jazz Repertory Company and the Harlem Jazz and Blues Band in the 1970s and with Panama Francis and the Savoy Sultans in the ’80s and ’90s. His last show was at Arturo’s in Greenwich Village, where he played solo guitar on Sunday nights until 2005.

Hermann Nitsch is one of the most important artists of the last century. He is a multidisciplinary artist avant la lettre that has heavily influenced contemporary dance, visual arts and music.

Nitsch is the central guest at Incubate. His work is highly controversial, but also often misunderstood. Therefore Incubate has a whole week filled with interesting things you can see, hear and experience about this artist and those inspired by him.

For a very detailed schedule, check http://incubate.org/2009/event/10.

Rashied Ali, the great free jazz drummer who was a member of John Coltrane’s last band, has died yesterday in New York, according to his website.

Born Robert Patterson in Philadelphia he moved to New York in 1963 and quickly moved to the heart and the heat of the free scene, replacing Elvin Jones when Coltrane’s music moved from the classic quartet to the uncompromising spiritual music that Ali helped usher in along with Trane’s wife Alice and others.

In addition to Coltrane, Ali had worked with Paul Bley, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and John Zorn. Just this weekend, Ali had performed with his By Any Means trio at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Details of Ali’s death are still unclear.

Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor who changed the course of music with the electric guitar and multitrack recording and had a string of hits, many with wife Mary Ford, died on Thursday. He was 94.

According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.

As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the “tracks” in the finished recording.

Mike Seeger, an American folk musician and archivist of traditional music, died of cancer Friday night at his home in Lexington,Virginia at the age of 75.

The younger half-brother to Pete Seeger, Mike was an accomplished performer on several instruments including the guitar, banjo, autoharp, fiddle, dulcimer and mandolin. Seeger was both a solo artist and a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen and Tom Paley in 1958.

Seeger’s love of “old-timey” music inspired his audience and other artists to rediscover the roots of American music. Among the musicians he influenced was Bob Dylan who wrote about Seeger in his book, Chronicles.

During his career, Seeger earned six Grammy nominations. In 2007, he played autoharp on the Grammy Award winning album Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

Pocohontas native and Sun Records great Billy Lee Riley, who’d been battling cancer since May, died early Sunday at St. Bernards Medical Center in Jonesboro. He was 75.

Riley is considered by many to be Sun Records’ lost giant. A true multi-threat, he possessed the myriad musical gifts of Carl Perkins, the unhinged spirit of Jerry Lee Lewis, and the punkish insouciance of Elvis Presley – yet fate never rewarded Riley beyond cult acclaim.

Fate or, some might argue, Sam Phillips. The Sun Records owner enjoyed a hit with Riley’s atomic age classic “Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll” in 1957 (thereafter Riley’s band went by the Green Men, and at least for a time, according the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, wore green suits made of billiard tablecloth until the dye from the cloth started staining their skin). But just as Riley’s follow-up, “Red Hot,” began to gain steam, Sun and Phillips put all their promotional might behind Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.”

Despite that setback, Riley continued to record for years, with Sun for a time, then with Mercury, Atlantic, Hip and his own Rita and Mojo labels. In the ’60s, Riley moved to the West Coast and became and in-demand session man, playing on recordings by the likes of the Beach Boys, Dean Martin, John Prine and Wilson Pickett.

More recently, Riley made his home in Newport, recording occasionally and touring often in the festival circuit. In March, he and Sonny Burgess played Juanita’s.