Killer work from the same sessions that gave the world Cannonball Adderley's classic Black Messiah album – live material from an extended stretch as the Troubadour club in LA – featuring a very righteous, freewheeling version of Cannonball's group! The lineup features some wonderful work on Fender Rhodes from George Duke – who brings a more soulful, spiritual current to the proceedings than Joe Zawinul did in earlier years – a really commanding presence that hints at his brewing solo fame, and which is a very welcome addition to the core lineup, which also includes Cannon on soprano and alto, and brother Nat on cornet!
Before he was under the wing of Neil Young and before he made a series of underappreciated solo albums, guitarist Nils Lofgren formed Grin, a trio that was devoted to simple, basic rock & roll, in 1969…
After years of silence, Patti Smith returned to music with a series of concerts in late 1995. It had been years since she had performed live – for most of the '80s and '90s, she concentrated on domestic life. Following the death of her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, in early 1995, Smith began playing music in public again and those concerts eventually led to the triumphant comeback Gone Again. Her husband wasn't the only loved one Smith lost between 1988's Dream of Life and 1996's Gone Again – her brother and her close friend Robert Mapplethorpe both died.
Red House Records is pleased to announce a new release by Ray Bonneville, a poet of the demimonde whose new album, Easy Gone, was released on April 15, 2014. The album finds the French Canadian-born, American-bred guitarist/ songwriter delivering a powerful, gritty batch of songs written from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge, including a stint in Vietnam and a struggle with drug addiction. In his life, he’s been a bush pilot and a cab driver among other jobs, living both in the States and French-speaking Canada. A true raconteur with a lifetime of stories to tell, the self-taught musician was just too busy living to get around to opening his storybook until his early 40s, some 20 years after he started performing.
If Good as I Been to You was a strong traditionalist folk record, World Gone Wrong was an exceptional one, boasting an exceptional set of songs given performances so fully realized that they seemed like modern protest songs…