Blogs

Talk about a musician’s musician, Adam Block knows his way around a guitar. KDRT is thrilled he will be in the studio this Friday. Adam has played guitar for 20 + years.  After studying history and graduating from UC Davis in 2004, he continued studying guitar with Dave Lynch at Guitar Workshop and then decided to apply to Berklee College of Music in Boston. He earned a Bachelor degree in music and graduated from Berklee College in 2012.  Adam has since studied and performed various styles of music: blues, jazz, rock, R&B, Funk and soul. He has also studied Senegalese music as well as different styles of African guitar playing. He has worked as a sideman in many bands on the East and West coasts, and has also led bands performing his original songs and compositions. Adam has taught guitar students of all ages, young and old and enjoys sharing his knowledge of music and the guitar with his students.

I got into Bad Books after years of listening to Kevin Devine, a Brooklyn indie/punk musician who is one of my favorite songwriters. The group is a side-project featuring Devine and members of the band Manchester Orchestra, whose singer is Andy Hull. This is the second of their two albums, and it's a great listen.

Both Kevin Devine and Manchester Orchestra have albums I like just as much (and some more) than this one, but Devine and Hull are playing a show together in SF next month, so it feels like a good time for Bad Books. Plus, it’s just a tight 11-song indie record.

Also, unlike others, it’s free of profanity, meaning I won't have to do any on-the-fly lyric censorship during the show. I’ll have my three-year-old son in the booth (it’s take-your-kid-to-work day at UC Davis) and I’m sure he’ll be trying to stir up a ruckus in there, so I’ll need to keep my attention on that.

Jazz from soul and folk tonight. Soul jazz from the early 60’s: Hank Crawford * Gene Ammons * Lou Donaldson. Leadbelly songs by Clifford Jordan and Sandra Douglass. Then some early Pat Metheny, followed by 1990’s work: Eva Cassidy * Winston Walls & Brother Jack McDuff * Abbey Lincoln.

Davis Enterprise film critic Derrick Bang reviews Miles Ahead.

Coming up at 3 pm today, Gary Chew has some Miles on Third Streaming.

Jazz After Dark program featuring Miles Davis re-broadcasts Saturday at 9 pm, and Gary's show rebroadcasts immediately after.

Jazz After Dark archive.  Just click and play!

In 1990, experimental avant-garde jazz saxaphonist John Zorn released the album Naked City, a fun, schizophrenic and noisy collaboration with Fred Frith, Joey Baron, Yamatsuka Eye, Bill Frisell, and Wayne Horvitz.  Naked City (as the group became known) was about the most far out you could get, and Zorn’s exploration of what he “could come up with given the limitations of the simple sax, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums format” became the pinnacle of avant coolness. The result was a post-modern hybrid that cut up sequences as he saw fit and treated all genres equally: jazz, grindcore, country & western, and much more were allowed to coexist, even in the same song.  The album has 26 cuts, several that clock in at under 30 seconds. Naked City is melodic and dischordant, familiar and unpredictable, sweet and explosive.  

Miles Ahead, the new biographical movie about Miles Davis starring Don Cheadle in the title role, opens this week in theaters in Sacramento. A fitting time for Jazz After Dark to feature Miles Davis. Nine Grammy awards, 48 studio albums, 36 live albums: Miles Davis was one of the most influential and creative musicians of all time. We’ll hear selections from some of Miles’ work recorded 1951 – 1958: Bags' Groove * Miles: The New Miles Davis * Blue Moods * Dig * Porgy & Bess * Steamin' With The Miles Davis Quintet. Then work by others celebrating some of his signature pieces. Eddie Jefferson vocalizing So What, Al Jarreau on Heaven and Earth, and two by Shirley Horn: You Won’t Forget Me, with Miles in a rare performance as sideman, and then Shirley’s version of Summertime. Finally, Maids of Cadiz from the last Miles Davis album, Miles Davis and Quincy Jones Live at Montreux.