Music

They don’t make cars or blues heroes like this anymore.Taj Mahal has been playing his brand of blues music for 40 years now
and you might be inclined to think he's slowed down a stride or two
during that time. But after a 20 minute chat, the 66-year-old legendary
musician seems as quick as ever and endlessly excited about his
upcoming tour.

Taj is stopping off in Bend as part of a tour (along
with his trio) supporting his new album, Maestro, which is slated to
hit the shelves on September 30, just two days after his show at the
Tower Theatre. The album is a 12-track, wide-reaching collaborative
project meant to celebrate Taj's 40 years laying down music. A
collection of collaborations from an aging blues man might, on the
surface, sound trite - the late-career collaboration-heavy disc is
almost a right of passage - but thankfully, Taj has come through with a
record not only impressive because of who plays on the cuts (Los Lobos,
Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Ziggy Marley, Phantom Blues Band) but because
they are genuinely good songs. And Taj seems to know they're good.

It’s big, it’s three-days, it’s local and hey, it’s free…Bend Roots ’08.I like to think of fall as "locals time" here in Bend. The tourist flow
lessens and remains slow until the snow starts falling and that means
it's time for the people who actually live here to get out on the town.
And our music scene follows the same model - the big-bill amphitheater
shows are done for the year and the other out-of-town tours will soon
slow as well. So, thus, it's time for the local artists to get their
time in the spotlight.

In only its third year, the Bend Roots Revival
has solidified itself as the quintessential who's-who gathering of
Bend's musical community - well, at least the acts that fall somewhere
near the definition of "roots music"…sorry punk and metal bands. This
weekend brings three days of music to the Westside for what Bend Roots
director (and captain of local jamsters The Mostest) calls a "block
party." And it pretty much is a block party - and it's also one of the
best parties, block, birthday or otherwise, of the entire year if
you're a local music fan.

An American Band in Jamaica, part I.Taking your all-white, six-piece reggae band to Jamaica is a bold move.
It certainly takes some balls. In some respects, this is akin to
growing up in Norway crafting since the age of seven what you believe
is an authentic and high-quality country western act, then taking your
show across the Atlantic to Nashville. So, it was with a bold stride
that drummer Chris O'Brian and the five other members of Rochester, New
York's Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad arrived in the birthplace of
reggae a little over a year ago.

"As a large reggae ensemble of
Caucasians from upstate New York, we tried not to let ourselves get
singled out for playing this music that has spread all over the world
in a short amount of time. We don't take it heavy, we don't take it
lightly, we just don't even take it when people come with their funny
look on their face," O'Brian says rather assertively while driving on
the Massachusetts Turn Pike on the way to what will be GPGDS' second
festival appearance of the day.

You need goggles like that when you send these kind of e-mails.Aesop Rock is coming to Bend along with the esteemed gentlemen of the
Hieroglyphics crew and a gaggle of other hip-hop all stars for what
very well might be the most prolific hip-hop event this town has seen
since we got that shipment of water-damaged Sir Mix A Lot cassettes in
'91. I wanted to get some phone time with Aesop Rock, but was told that
Mr. Rock prefers questions be directed his way in the form of e-mail. I
obliged and here's what Aesop Rock had to type about Tom Waits, curtain
installation and reading National Geographic:

tSW: A slightly
pedantic question: Indie hip-hop, or alternative hip-hop or however you
want to "genre-ify" it, seems to be increasingly drawing on influences
outside of the hip-hop arena. What’s your most significant non-hip-hop
influences past and present?
Aesop Rock: Probably either the
Mountain Goats or Tom Waits. They both happen to strike that chord in
me that usually only a savage MC can get to. They both are masters at
their craft, they put a massive amount of effort into the lyric-writing
aspect of all of this, and each have distinct deliveries that work
hand-in-hand with the way they write. I'm a longtime fan of both. Tom
Waits' albums have such unique production, and overall drunkenness to
them. I dunno, I could go on about them each forever.

Those Camels like it loud.The above photo is actually the cover art for Global Noize's
self-titled debut CD, if you can believe that. It's hardly the stuff of
multi-thousand-dollar photo shoots or commissioned artistic renderings
that are often found on CD covers. It's just two dudes standing next to
a couple of camels with some stacks of records and a few speakers
photoshopped in for extra pizzazz.

But those two dudes are Jason
Miles, the illustrious jazz keyboardist also known for his producing
career, and the dude on the right is none other than DJ Logic, the
expert turntablist known for his collaborations with a myriad of
musicians of varying genres. As for the camels, they remain
unidentified.
The photo was taken when Miles and Logic were in
Morocco prior to the birth of the world music project known as Global
Noize and the all-star band that then sprouted. If you ask Logic, he
says the image has some weight to it.

Forget the Madonna headset, David Allan Coe is a badass.Wayne Newcome now leads the local rock band Problem Stick but 25 years
ago he was driving a delivery truck in San Francisco and hating nearly
every song he heard on the radio. It was around this time that he
bought the 45 single of David Allan Coe's "Willie, Waylon and Me." Now,
a quarter of a century later, Newcome and Problem Stick take the stage
in an opening slot for Coe's Midtown Ballroom performance.
"When all
those stupid hair bands came out, I couldn't stand all that shit. So I
started listening to country music and that's when I bought my first
David Allan Coe 45," Newcome says.

Get a good look at those dreads, ’cause you ain’t gonna see ’em again.The Source caught up with Aussie sensation John Butler over the phone last week before he and his band played in Flagstaff, Ariz. Their latest release, Grand National, has gone multi-platinum and enjoyed worldwide success. And it all started in 1998 with Butler busking on the streets of Fremantle, a small port city just south of Perth, on the West Coast of Australia. Which is where we began our line of questioning…

The Source Weekly: What's it like being so huge in Australia and then coming to the US as a lesser known act? Is it strange or do you like being somewhat anonymous?

John Butler: There's a big difference between mainstream popularity and underground popularity, which is what I guess we kind of have over here now after seven or eight years of [touring] America. We kind of just build it up from the ground up [so] by the time you're kind of getting to where your status is in the well-known region, it's solid and it just stays for a long time. That's kind of what's happened in Australia, every step of the way it's grown slowly, it's never been like a huge splash and so by the time we were big, the roots were very deep, it wouldn't really matter what storm came by, what we built wouldn't be knocked over.

Is it nice to go around and not worry about people coming up to you all the time though?