Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie's 26 Northwest Songs Album Out Now!

Smithsonian Folkways is proud to present their new release, the two-disc Roll Columbia: Woody

Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs, which marks the latest chapter in Smithsonian Folkways’ rich history with the iconic songwriter.  Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs is a trove of new discoveries, and a celebration of Guthrie’s genius and lasting contributions to both the history and musical traditions of the Pacific Northwest. 75 years after Woody’s stint with the Bonneville Power Administration, present-day Pacific Northwest artists influenced by this fruitful time in Guthrie’s career have gathered together to record their own interpretations. Roll Columbia is the first and only complete collection of these 26 songs, including nine that had never before been recorded.  R.E.M. members and the Decemberists included!

Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs is available now from Baker & Taylor.

 

The Seattle Times recently spotlighted the “rootsy, sometimes gritty” performances on Roll Columbia.

Bash & Pop Rock Colbert!

The first project from Bash & Pop in two decades, Anything Could Happen, was released last Friday (1/20). The night before the album's release, the band appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. They performed "On The Rocks", and after the song's performance, Tommy Stinson got into a little (playful?) wrestling match with Stephen Colbert. Check out the powerful Colbert performance below.

 

Click  www.cbs.com/shows/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert

Allison Crutchfield's "Tourist in This Town", on NPR First Listen!

Allison Crutchfield’s debut solo album Tourist in This Town is out this Friday, and you can listen to the album in its entirety right now at NPR Music. Pre-order your copy on CD, now

Of her album, NPR Music wrote: 

Punk living arrangements may mean that Crutchfield has no physical space to call her own, but she carves out her own bold lane on Tourist, far from the scrappy pop-punk of her formative bands. Opener “Broad Daylight” is so startling, you might check to see if you hit play on the right record. Singing a cappella, Crutchfield unleashes a regal trill that evokes Neko Case singing gospel, her voice as pure and strong as sunlight beaming through a stained-glass window. Her songwriting talents have long been assured; here, she establishes herself as a gifted singer.

Listen to and share Tourist in This Town now at NPR Music

 

Two New "Now That's What I Call.." Album Releases Announced

NOW That's What I Call Music!, the world's best-selling multi-artist album series, is pleased to announce the simultaneous release of this year's first two NOW collections; NOW That's What I Call Music! 61 and NOW That's What I Call 90s Pop, on Friday, January
27 on CD.



With the release of NOW 60 in November 2016, US sales of NOW series albums breaks the 100 million copies mark.

NOW That's What I Call Music! 61 features 16 major current hits from today's hottest artists including Bruno Mars, Maroon 5 featuring Kendrick Lamar, Alessia Cara, Ariana Grande featuring Nicki Minaj, DJ Snake featuring Justin Bieber, The Weeknd featuring Daft Punk, Rae Sremmurd featuring Gucci Mane, D.R.A.M featuring Lil Yachty, Zay Hilfigerrr & Zaylon McCall, Fifth Harmony, Jon Bellion, Martin Garrix & Bebe Rexha, Hey Violet, Shawn Mendes, Niall Horan, and gnash featuring Olivia O'Brien.

Tift Merritt Back with "Stitch of the World"

Grammy Award-nominated artist Tift Merritt’s new album Stitch of the World will be released

January 27 on Yep Roc Records. Listen to “Love Soldiers On,” the second song from the album, below.

Stitch of the World, Merritt’s sixth studio album, was written on a friend’s farm in Marfa, Texas, at Merritt’s California cabin and in New York City in the wake of several major changes in her life. Merritt workshopped the songs on Stitch of the World with longtime friend Sam Beam of Iron & Wine after bumping in to him in an airport. The album was recorded in Los Angeles while Merritt was six months pregnant, after which she relocated to her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina.“Dusty Old Man,” the album’s first single, recently premiered via Rolling Stone Country, who said, “Powered by guitars from Marc Ribot and pedal-steel wiz Eric Heywood over a bouncy shuffle rhythm from drummer Jay Bellerose and bassist Jennifer Condos, ‘Dusty Old Man’ has more of a bluesy, loose-limbed feel than anything Merritt has ever done.”

The time since the release of Traveling Alone has also found Merritt recording and touring with Andrew Bird in his Hands of Glory, MC Taylor’s Hiss Golden Messenger and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein.

Hans Zimmer-The Classics Out January 13

Sony Classical is delighted to announce a key new recording event: a brand-new album performed by stellar musicians of the day that showcases some of Hollywood's greatest ever movie themes, written by one of the world's most innovative musical talents and leading film composer of our time – Hans Zimmer. His new album, Hans Zimmer – The Classics is releasing January 13, 2017 on Sony Classical.

This vivid collection of back-to-back blockbuster hits brings together for the first time Zimmer's unmistakable movie themes, re-imagined and in arrangements especially written for some of our top musicians including superstar pianist, Lang Lang; cello wizards, 2CELLOS and Tina Guo; outstanding violinists, Maxim Vengerov and Lindsey Stirling; Classic BRIT Award-winning saxophonist, Amy Dickson; global video superstars, The Piano Guys and with stupendous vocals by Leona Lewis.

'Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie's 26 Northwest Songs' Gets Jan. 27 Release

Woody Guthrie traveled to Portland, OR, in the spring of 1941 to write songs for the Bonneville

Power Administration (BPA). Although this phase of his career is not as familiar as others, it was a prolific one, and the 26 songs he penned over 30 days included some of his best-known work: "Pastures of Plenty," "Hard Travelin'," and "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On," which later became the state folk song of Washington.

Now, 75 years later, a group of musicians celebrate this period in the iconic songwriter's life on 'Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie's 26 Northwest Songs.' The two-disc album, out January 27, 2017 (out via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) features members of R.E.M., Black Prairie, and The Decemberists; folk veterans like Michael Hurley and David Grisman; and younger players from the Pacific Northwest folk scene. 'Roll Columbia' is the first album to include all of Guthrie's BPA songs, including nine that have never previously been recorded.

The Bonneville Power Administration, a New Deal-era public works agency created in 1937, commissioned Guthrie to write the series of songs to help promote the benefits of dams being constructed along the Columbia River. Renowned ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax had recommended Guthrie for the project, and Guthrie moved from California to Portland, being paid little more than $10 a song for his month's work.

Brantley Gilbert Back with The Devil Don't Sleep Album

For Brantley Gilbert, his back-to-back platinum success comes from writing about his life – and watching the people who live like he does respond. If Halfway To Heaven was the story of a young man in the clutches of all it means to be wild, and Just As I Am considered the consequences of the life and the good times getting there, The Devil Don’t Sleep marks the next phase of the working class country icon in the making’s life.

Sixteen songs on the regular disc. Ten more on the Deluxe Edition. It’s a whole lot of music from country music’s hardest hitting songwriter/artist. It’s also a lot of life lived.

“A lot has happened,” marvels the man nominated for CMA Song of the Year for Jason Aldean’s signature “Dirt Road Anthem.” “And anyone who knows me knows that every album is another chapter of my life. Even though it’s my life, even though some of what I write about is very specific to what happens to me, I think the challenges, the places where we figure things out are all the same – no matter what we’re facing, realizations all mean the same things.”

Though “The Weekend” explodes as one of Gilbert’s industrial strength five o’clock Friday party anthems, The Devil Don’t Sleep works a celebratory tip for other reasons. As Gilbert is quick to point out, the songs offer a cautionary undertow because, as the title suggests, temptation is a non-stop reality – and people need vigilance to avoid backsliding into the very things that defeat them.

Smithsonian Folkways Releases "Spirituals & Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast"

Acclaimed stewards of the ring shout, the McIntosh County Shouters keep alive the faith, form,fervor of "the oldest surviving African-American performance tradition of any kind" (New York Times).  Smithsonian Folkways will release its second recording of the McIntosh County Shouters, 'Spirituals & Shout Songs from the Georgia Coast,' on January 20. This 17-track, 61-minute album is accompanied by a 40-page book chronicling the history of the group and the heritage of this transcendent ritual. The collection will be released as part of the African American Legacy series, co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways and the newly opened Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The McIntosh County Shouters originally formed in the 1980s in Coastal Georgia and consisted of family members -- related by blood and marriage -- all belonging to the third generation out of slavery. They released 'Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia' through Folkways in 1983, and now, almost 35 years later, the next generation carries the ring shout tradition into a new day.

The group is led by "energized charismatic songsters" (Atlanta Journal Constitution) Freddie Palmer, Brenton Jordan, Venus McIver and Carletha Sullivan, with other members including Carla Johnson, Carolyn Palmer, Alberta Allin, and L.C. Scott (basers, clappers, and shouters) plus Brenton Jordan (stick-man and tambourine). In traditional ring shout, the "songsters" will "set" or begin a song, slowly accelerating to an appropriate tempo. Their lines are answered in a call-and-response pattern by the "basers," who deliberately step and shuffle, adding to the rhythm with hand-clapping and foot-patting. Seated next to the songster would be the "stick-man," who beats a simple rhythm with a broom or wooden stick. This marriage of singing, percussion and movement endures in the current generation of Shouters.

Brian Eno Returns with Reflection

Brian Eno has announced a new ambient album called Reflection that'll be out January 1, 2017 via Warp/Redeye. Reflection, which is one 54-minute track, follows his release of The Ship, which Eno put out earlier this year. Below, read Eno’s statement on his new album, below, and see the cover artwork.



"Reflection is the latest work in a long series. It started (as far as record releases are concerned) with Discreet Music in 1975 ( - or did it start with the first Fripp and Eno album in 1973? Or did it start with the first original piece of music I ever made, at Ipswich Art School in 1965 - recordings of a metal lampshade slowed down to half and quarter speed, all overlaid?)

Anyway, it’s the music that I later called ‘Ambient’. I don’t think I understand what that term stands for anymore - it seems to have swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows - but I still use it to distinguish it from pieces of music that have fixed duration and rhythmically connected, locked together elements.

The pedigree of this piece includes Thursday Afternoon, Neroli (whose subtitle is Thinking Music IV) and LUX. I’ve made a lot of thinking music, but most of it I’ve kept for myself. Now I notice that people are using some of those earlier records in the way that I use them - as provocative spaces for thinking - so I feel more inclined to make them public.

Pieces like this have another name: they’re GENERATIVE. By that I mean they make themselves. My job as a composer is to set in place a group of sounds and phrases, and then some rules which decide what happens to them. I then set the whole system playing and see what it does, adjusting the sounds and the phrases and the rules until I get something I’m happy with. Because those rules are probabilistic ( - often taking the form ‘perform operation x, y percent of the time’) the piece unfolds differently every time it is activated. What you have here is a recording of one of those unfoldings.

Reflection is so called because I find it makes me think back. It makes me think things over. It seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation. And external ones actually - people seem to enjoy it as the background to their conversations. When I make a piece like this most of my time is spent listening to it for long periods - sometimes several whole days - observing what it does to different situations, seeing how it makes me feel. I make my observations and then tweak the rules. Because everything in the pieces is probabilistic and because the probabilities pile up it can take a very long time to get an idea of all the variations that might occur in the piece. One rule might say ‘raise 1 out of every 100 notes by 5 semitones’ and another might say ‘raise one out of every 50 notes by 7 semitones’. If those two instructions are operating on the same data stream, sometimes - very rarely - they will both operate on the same note…so something like 1 in every 5000 notes will be raised by 12 semitones. You won’t know which of those 5000 notes it’s going to be. Since there are a lot of these types of operations going on together, on different but parallel data streams, the end result is a complex and unpredictable web.

Perhaps you can divide artists into two categories: farmers and cowboys. The farmers settle a piece of land and cultivate it carefully, finding more and more value in it. The cowboys look for new places and are excited by the sheer fact of discovery, and the freedom of being somewhere that not many people have been before. I used to think I was temperamentally more cowboy than farmer… but the fact that the series to which this piece belongs has been running now for over 4 decades makes me think that there’s quite a big bit of farmer in me."