Entertainment Weekly, April 30, 2001: Difference between revisions
(formatting) |
|||
Line 9: | Line 9: | ||
BY CHRIS WILLMAN </center> | BY CHRIS WILLMAN </center> | ||
---- | ---- | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | |||
Forget about that whole '80s revival thing you keep hearing about. It's the late '20s and early '30s that comprise the real decade du jour, at least in some musical circles. The Depression themed, country / bluegrass "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" album continues, against all odds, to be the nation's bestselling soundtrack. And this week at UCLA, an all star cast (well, an ensemble of all cult stars, at least) banded together to pay homage to the folk music of that same era. In a pair of epic concerts at the campus' Royce Hall, a cast of dozens -- including [[Beck]], Elvis Costello, [[Steve Earle]], [[Marianne Faithfull]], [[Todd Rundgren]], Philip Glass, [[Richard Thompson]], Daniel Lanois, and even [[Spinal Tap]] -- paid homage to the late Harry Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music, a definitive canon of regional recordings from 1926 to '34. You can almost hear the rallying cry of a new generation: "Let's go Dust Bowling!" | Forget about that whole '80s revival thing you keep hearing about. It's the late '20s and early '30s that comprise the real decade du jour, at least in some musical circles. The Depression themed, country / bluegrass "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" album continues, against all odds, to be the nation's bestselling soundtrack. And this week at UCLA, an all star cast (well, an ensemble of all cult stars, at least) banded together to pay homage to the folk music of that same era. In a pair of epic concerts at the campus' Royce Hall, a cast of dozens -- including [[Beck]], Elvis Costello, [[Steve Earle]], [[Marianne Faithfull]], [[Todd Rundgren]], Philip Glass, [[Richard Thompson]], Daniel Lanois, and even [[Spinal Tap]] -- paid homage to the late Harry Smith, who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music, a definitive canon of regional recordings from 1926 to '34. You can almost hear the rallying cry of a new generation: "Let's go Dust Bowling!" | ||
Line 20: | Line 21: | ||
These highly anticipated UCLA shows were the brainchild of producer [[Hal Willner]], who's previously put together star studded recorded tributes to Nino Rota, [[Thelonious Monk]], [[Kurt Weill]], and Walt Disney. We can only presume, or at least hope, that he'll somehow make an album out of this homage as well. An album would certainly be more economical, by necessity: Both shows ran past 1 A.M., even after 15 numbers were cut from Wednesday's set list, resulting in more jokes about the epic nature of the proceedings than you'd hear on an Oscar telecast. "There was a lot of angsty talk last night about the length of the show, mostly out of my mouth," Costello said at the second concert. "I thought it wasn't long enough. As someone wise said, there are no clocks in church or in Las Vegas. And this is somewhere in-between." | These highly anticipated UCLA shows were the brainchild of producer [[Hal Willner]], who's previously put together star studded recorded tributes to Nino Rota, [[Thelonious Monk]], [[Kurt Weill]], and Walt Disney. We can only presume, or at least hope, that he'll somehow make an album out of this homage as well. An album would certainly be more economical, by necessity: Both shows ran past 1 A.M., even after 15 numbers were cut from Wednesday's set list, resulting in more jokes about the epic nature of the proceedings than you'd hear on an Oscar telecast. "There was a lot of angsty talk last night about the length of the show, mostly out of my mouth," Costello said at the second concert. "I thought it wasn't long enough. As someone wise said, there are no clocks in church or in Las Vegas. And this is somewhere in-between." | ||
{{cx}} | |||
{{Bibliography notes header}} | {{Bibliography notes header}} |
Revision as of 17:10, 16 January 2013
|