| Riffs: An online music column | | Posted Saturday, October 07, 2006 7:05:48 PM by Blog57 Team | | Gloria Fajardo defected to America from Cuba in 1957, joining her family in an escape to Florida shortly after her second birthday. Fajardo moved from doing innocuous fare at weddings to stardom in America came as the centerpiece of the Miami Sound Machine in the late ‘70s. She also met and married bandleader Emilo Estefan, changing her name in the process. While she had a sultry, expressive and rich voice, it was the band's facility with Latin-tinged dance tunes as much as her leads that fueled the group's commercial success. Still, the Estefans were savvy enough to realize that there was a huge Latin market mostly being ignored at the time by the domestic labels. They smartly tailored a deal for this market and became one of the hottest Latin pop and dance bands around, before returning to English material and truly hitting it big in the ‘80s.... | |
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| | | Aretha coming to the McCallum | | Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 5:03:50 PM by Blog57 Team | | R&B legend Aretha Franklin has been added to the McCallum Theatre lineup Sept. 14 with a show that will launch its season in precedent-setting style. Its the Queen of Souls first Coachella Valley appearance. Tickets go on sale only on the McCallum and KDES-FM Web sites at 9 a.m. Monday. Tickets will go on sale at the McCallum box office and by telephone to 340-ARTS on Sept. 6. Franklin was discovered by Columbia Records executive John Hammond, whose run of great discoveries included Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Her hits have included Respect, Baby I Love You, A Natural Woman and Chain of Fools. McCallum Director of Presentations and Theater Operations Mitch Gershenfeld said he was approached by her agent Tuesday after trying to book her since February.... | |
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| | | Old-school? Her? Christina Aguilera goes 'Back to Basics' with 'retro' CD | | Posted Saturday, August 19, 2006 11:09:09 PM by Blog57 Team | | Christina Aguilera wants to be a revivalist. She's titled the much-fussed-over album that hit stores Tuesday ''Back to Basics.'' Its complementary discs of hip-hop and high-concept pop have been packaged in a retro sleeve emblazoned with the phrase ''a 'new orthophonic' hi fidelity recording'' ? as if the laser-etched plastic contained within could be played on a phonograph from the 1920s. .... | |
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| | | Laissez Faire In The Studio | | Posted Sunday, July 16, 2006 1:42:12 AM by Blog57 Team | | When John Hammond died in 1987, his "discoveries" of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan were cited in his front-page New York Times obituary. He might as easily have been credited with discovering Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom he signed to recording contracts in a long career as a producer for Columbia Records (now owned by Sony) and its subsidiaries. Dunstan Prial's exhaustively researched The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music ($25, Farrar, Straus & Giroux) covers the career of this once legendary figure. A Vanderbilt heir, Hammond grew up in Manhattan and lived in a mansion off Fifth Avenue, a short bus ride away from Harlem, whose nightspots and jazz clubs he first visited in the 1920s while he was still in his teens. His nocturnal habits made him a familiar figure on the scene.... | |
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| | | The queen of soul -- and a lost soul | | Posted Tuesday, July 11, 2006 3:01:07 PM by Blog57 Team | | By sheer coincidence, two of Detroit's most soulful female vocalists have reissues of '70s material coming out in stores. The big difference between them is this: Aretha Franklin is a household name, and her "Fillmore West" is extremely well known. Bettye LaVette has just started to receive the attention she has long deserved, and "Child of the Seventies" is being released in the United States for the first time. The idea behind Aretha's recording at San Francisco's Fillmore West was a classic record company crossover scheme. Jerry Wexler, who signed Franklin to Atlantic Records, came up with the idea of having the Queen of Soul play to audiences more used to seeing Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead and having her mix in some current rock hits with her own classics in an effort to make some magic.... | |
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