This week, Inside Appalachia, a West Virginia man is reviving a Black coal camp through farming. Also, the legacy of Affrilachian poet Norman Jordan includes a summer camp for teens to study their heritage. And, the Reverend George Mills Dickerson of Tazewell, Virginia, was born in the years after slavery ended. He’s remembered during Juneteenth through his poetry.
I know I’m a bit obsessed about this band. I get that.
To be perfectly honest, my tireless enthusiasm is founded on one basic idea: by comparison, every other band seems lame. When friends or family talk wildly about some country singer (yawn) or some muso drones on endlessly about a new hot band, I sigh internally. About 40% of the time, the music is engaging and I might even download it and roll it through the Eclectopian wheels. It’s clever and catchy, but it pales by any comparison. It’s not fair to do that, but music people are like that.
Most bands play what you expect- KC dispenses with expectations and operates by its own rules. Fripp calls it, “A way of doing things.” Isn’t that like saying, “I painted this little thing in the Sistene Chapel. Hope you like it.”?
To be fair, KC are their own language, their own country and it is frightfully difficult to compare them to anyone else.
That’s because every player in the group is a monster in their own right.
But, I digress.
The Elements Tour, currently North American leg, is selling out everywhere they play. Not bad for a band with a famous (or infamous) on again – off again history, one that hasn’t ever had a hit single and music that most public radio stations with serious “risk aversion” programming would avoid playing.
Credit Tony Levin. Used by permission of the artist.
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Tony Levin’s pic of the edits that Rachmaninoff made to a score. Mind blowing stuff.
Bassist Tony Levin has an interesting post. Levin is classically trained and the Philadelphia Orchestra librarian opened up their library to him. Utterly fascinating.
So, peace, love and understanding to you all. I leave you with this:
“In strange and uncertain times, such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But Hope is unreasonable and Love is greater even than this.
May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the Creative Impulse.”
On this week's premiere broadcast of Mountain Stage, host Kathy Mattea welcomes Jeff Tweedy, The War and Treaty, Johnnyswim, and Olivia Ellen Lloyd. Recorded live at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, WV.
WVPB recently hosted a pair of musicians from West Virginia University (WVU) to come perform live in-studio during Classical Music with Matt Jackfert. Albert Houde, associate horn professor at WVU and principal horn with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra (WVSO), and Sun Jung Lee, collaborative pianist at WVU, serenaded our Wednesday afternoon with a live performance of Reimaginings by Frank Gulino.
Maestro André Raphel who served as music director of the WSO from 2003-2018, will be taking the podium once again at the Capitol Theater in Wheeling on Thursday May 15 to conduct La Valse by Maurice Ravel, to celebrate the 95th anniversary of the WSO as well as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ravel.