It may have been a cool April and a deceptively temperate beginning of May in Delhi (which otherwise scorches at this time of the year) but I am sitting and writing this and listening to what I think is one of my ideal summer listening albums. It’s a  2004 album called Fly Between Falls and it’s by Animal Liberation Orchestra (ALO) and it has all the ingredients you need to make it best suited for summer: the band hails from sunny California; their music is upbeat and so are their lyrics; there’s a relaxed yet nicely funky groove to their sound; and they don’t tend to pound the stuffing out of your head no matter how loud you want to listen to them. Read more

A couple of days after Levon Helm, drummer, singer and key member of The Band, the legendary rock group of the 1960s and 70s (and then again the 80s and the 90s), died in the middle of last month, I got to hear a podcast that excerpted two radio interviews with Helm—one from 1993 and the other 2007. There was a distinct difference in Helm’s voice between the two interviews. In the 1993 interview he sounded exactly like he did on The Weight. Remember The Weight? I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin’ about half past dead;/ I just need some place where I can lay my head. “Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?”/ He just grinned and shook my hand, and “No!”, was all he said. What a gorgeous song that is. The vocals were shared by three of The Band’s singers. Besides Helm, there was Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. The song itself was written by guitarist Robbie Robertson who, I read somewhere, was inspired by the films of Luis Bunuel to write The Weight. Read more

Mud Morganfield and his half-brother “Big Bill” Morganfield play the blues. Sometimes they play together. I have a live recording of the two playing at the Chicago Blues Festival, doing songs such as Mannish Boy, Nineteen Years Old and Forty Days and Forty Nights, all songs that you can instantly recall as being standards sung by blues legend, the late Muddy Waters. No coincidence there because both the Morganfields are his sons. Remember Muddy Waters’ real name was McKinley Morganfield. Muddy died in 1983 but his two sons in their 50s–Mud’s the older one—keep his trademark Chicago blues sound and legacy alive. They play gigs. They cut records and have a considerably big fan following among blues aficionados. Read more

I have no idea what the lyrics in the music of Iceland’s Sigur Ros mean. They sing in Icelandic and I don’t think this column will be read by too many people who are familiar with that language, which, incidentally, is one of the few Nordic languages that have undergone the least degree of change from its root, Old Norse, the ancient language spoken by the Vikings. But the meaning of the lyrics is not what you should be looking for when you spin something by Sigur Ros. I was pointed to the band some years back by a friend with more adventurous taste in music than mine who’d slipped me a burnt disc with their second album, Ágætis Byrjun (which apparently means ‘good beginning’) with these simple instructions: “Go home. Switch off the lights. Play this. Sit back and shut your eyes.” Read more

It was intended to be a nice road trip. It was an extended weekend. Two men. Two women. A child (a very well-behaved one). A great car – one of those luxury SUVs that cost more than what my flat did when we bought the latter. A destination tucked away in the upper reaches of Kumaon where email reaches you only in fits and bursts. It helped that both the men – one young and the other middle-aged – enjoyed driving with the former being an expert driver and an information whale on SUVs. We had everything we would need up there in the hilly nook we were headed for – a case of wine, light woollens and so on. The only thing left was the music we’d listen to on the way. Read more

In one of the early episodes from the first season of Treme, the American TV drama series themed on post-Katrina New Orleans, Elvis Costello drops in at a club to watch one of the flood-ravaged but still music-drenched city’s leading lights, jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins, play. Ruffins, of course, has no idea about who or how big the English singer-songwriter Costello is. When, during a break, someone tells him he should go and say hello to his famous fan, Ruffins, whose gigs usually end with a free-for-all cook-out that he does himself for his audience, is reluctant. “So, do you want to spend all your life playing small clubs and doing your barbecues in New Orleans?” asks the rather surprised man. “That’d be alright,” says Ruffins with a smile. Read more

My daughter, about to be eight, has an earworm. You know, a piece of music that seems stuck in your ear so seemingly permanently that you just couldn’t get it out. It’s a song that she hums, sings and dances with vigorously even though it’s not being played anywhere. And I’m happy. Delighted, actually, because the song happens to be Lonely Boy by The Black Keys. Actually, the duo that makes up The Black Keys may also seem like an earworm for Download Central, in case you are one of those readers who for some strange reason follows this column fairly regularly—I don’t know how many times I have written about them, obsessively, compulsively and, perhaps also, maniacally.
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I think it is sometimes better to watch a film without having read any of the reviews. Had I read the reviews of 2010’s British film, London Boulevard, I probably wouldn’t have readily watched the film on DVD as I did recently. On Metacritic, the film, a directorial debut of William Monahan, the Oscar winning screenplay writer of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed, got a score of just 52, which is at best considered a middling rating. I was fortunate not to have scoured the net before watching the DVD because I liked the film. London Boulevard is a British crime drama with all Brit cast—Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley, Ray Winstone and David Thewlis (he played Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter films). But it is a British film made by an American director. Read more

By the time you read this, South by South West, arguably the largest music festival held each year at Austin, Texas, will be winding down. Thirteen hundred odd bands would have performed at more than 90 venues. And festival-goers—I envy them all—would have discovered tons of new musicians, many of them obscure but many among them that are likely to make ripples in the coming months. For several years now, I have had a long-standing objective of making it to the festival and drowning in the non-stop gigs for four consecutive days. I haven’t managed to fulfill that objective yet. Sigh! Read more

There are two albums sitting on my desk next to the laptop that I’m typing on and I haven’t yet heard them. One of them is Bruce Springsteen’s new and, as I understand, angry album, Wrecking Ball. Serendipitously, the album landed just as I was thinking of Springsteen. I like Springsteen although I’m not as huge a fan of the sincere, honest, working-class hero musician as are a couple of my colleagues. He is politically outspoken and many of his albums are themed on major issues of their times—Wrecking Ball has been associated by critics with the current financial crisis in the US. Read more