August 2021

If one were to arbitrarily cite any popular music act from the sixties or seventies there is a fair chance that the performer or performers in question, at some point in their respective careers, had a working relationship with or at the very least was in some way associated with multi-faceted entertainment duo Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan, otherwise known as Flo & Eddie.

Tré Burt’s sophomore album, You, Yeah, You, is out today on Oh Boy Records and was lauded by Ann Powers on NPR’s New Music Friday today where the venerable music critic says “Tré is a master storyteller...he is able to combine really vivid, beautiful imagery with really sharp social commentary”.

Topics

The Beach Boys new box set, Feel Flows – The Sunflower and Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971, is out now via Capitol/UMe, in honor of 50 years of the band’s timeless and often underappreciated albums, Sunflower and Surf’s Up. The expansive 5CD box set chronicles and explores in depth this metamorphic and highly influential 1969-1971 period of the band’s legendary career.

The song that came to be known as “Radio Radio” began life in 1975 as “Radio Soul,” written in shameless imitation of Bruce Springsteen’s romantic references to American radio by the 20-year old D.P. MacManus.

With his new remix album, Deciphering The Message, the Chicago-based drummer, producer, and beat scientist Makaya McCraven digs through the vaults of the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records to put a modern bounce on classics by Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Hank Mobley, Kenny Burrell, and Eddie Gale, among others.

A year or so back, I’d had a thought about doing some shows with Sierra Hull & Molly Tuttle, and we got together to jam. (Mostly I was thinking they’d be amazing together without me!) But, later in the recording of the album it became clear to me that I was propagating the boys club, while there were female players who were just as good. Even though I already had more than an album’s worth of music recorded, we did an awesome session with Molly, Sierra, and a couple of dudes -  Mark Schatz and Andy Leftwich - cutting three more tunes.