Latest news with #AmericanMusic
ABC News
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Christian Li performs Korngold
17-year-old Australian violin sensation Christian Li, teams up with charismatic Brazilian conductor Eduardo Strausser and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for this exciting concert of American music. Christian Li was the youngest-ever winner of the Menuhin Competition and brings lyrical brilliance and cinematic flair to Korngold's Violin Concerto, which draws its themes from the composer's Hollywood film scores. The evening opens with the world premiere of Australian composer Bree van Reyk's Fanfare for Solidarity, a joyful tribute to the orchestra's stand for marriage equality. Recorded live in concert at Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on 28 June 2025. Producer André Shrimski. Engineers Jack Prest, Virginia Read and Andrew Edgson. Program Bree van Reyk: Fanfare for Solidarity Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Violin Concerto in D, Op.35 Jules Massenet: Thaïs - Méditation George Gershwin: Cuban Overture - Rhumba Leonard Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story Artists Timothy Constable (tambourine) Rebecca Lagos (tambourine) Joshua Hill (tambourine) Christian Li (violin) Sydney Symphony Orchestra Eduardo Strausser (conductor) Find out more Read the concert program
Yahoo
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Iconic ‘Mr. Brightside' Band Delivers Epic ‘80s Cover Live and Breaks Internet
Iconic 'Mr. Brightside' Band Delivers Epic '80s Cover Live and Breaks Internet originally appeared on Parade. Sometimes the most beautiful moments in rock happen when bands honor their influences in the most meaningful way possible, and The Killers just delivered one of those spine-tingling tributes that reminds us why live music matters so much. During their SummerFest performance in Milwaukee, the Las Vegas quartet surprised fans with a cover of "American Music" by Violent Femmes – and the choice couldn't have been more perfect. Playing the work of Milwaukee's most iconic alt-rock heroes in their actual hometown felt like the ultimate act of musical respect. For those who know their alternative music history, this moment was pure poetry. Violent Femmes burst onto the scene in 1981 with their folk-punk sound that defined Milwaukee's underground music culture. Gordon Gano's distinctive vocals and Brian Ritchie's acoustic bass created a template that influenced countless bands. Brandon Flowers and company delivered "American Music" with the reverence it deserved while maintaining their signature energy that's kept them at the top of their game since 2001. The performance showcased how The Killers have maintained their creative vitality more than two decades into their career, sounding as crisp and passionate as they did during their early 2000s breakthrough. What made this cover particularly special was the hometown context. SummerFest has long been Milwaukee's crown jewel music festival, and seeing an international superstar band like The Killers pay homage to local legends Violent Femmes created one of those full-circle moments that festival magic is made crowd's reaction was immediate and intense, with fans capturing the moment on TikTok where it quickly went viral. Comments poured in from viewers expressing disbelief that "the band at the top of my i-need-to-see-them list" was performing their "favorite Violent Femmes song." This kind of cross-generational tribute represents everything beautiful about rock music's interconnected nature. The Killers didn't just perform a cover – they created a bridge between eras, honoring the Milwaukee legends who helped shape the alternative landscape they now dominate. 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 Iconic 'Mr. Brightside' Band Delivers Epic '80s Cover Live and Breaks Internet first appeared on Parade on Jun 29, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 29, 2025, where it first appeared.
Forbes
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
The Doors Surge On iTunes As The Band Celebrates Six Decades
The Doors surge on iTunes charts as The Very Best of The Doors hits No. 13 and both "Lift My Fire" ... More and "Riders on the Storm" return after a major CBS interview. UNSPECIFIED - CIRCA 1970: Photo of Doors Photo by MichaelThe two remaining members of The Doors, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, recently took part in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning to celebrate 60 years since the founding of the iconic rock group. The musicians – who have largely been supporting the band's highly-prized catalog, rather than working on new music – were also promoting an upcoming new book titled Night Divides the Day: The Doors Anthology, which arrived this spring. The musical legends are benefiting from renewed interest in their music, generated by the publicity, as Americans are returning to some of the band's classics once again. The Doors Return to the iTunes Albums Chart The Doors are currently climbing multiple iTunes charts in the United States. The band sits highest on the iTunes Top Albums ranking, where The Very Best of The Doors looks like it might soon break into the top 10. The compilation, which gathers together many of the group's most familiar tracks, rockets more than 150 spaces and lands at No. 13. At the same time, the band's self-titled full-length reenters the 200-spot roster at No. 97 — and it could climb further in the coming hours and days. "Riders on the Storm" and "Light My Fire" Reappear The Doors also occupy just as many spaces on the iTunes Top Songs tally, scoring a pair of bestselling cuts with "Riders on the Storm" and "Light My Fire." The two compositions have long reigned as some of the most easily recognizable entries in the group's discography, and both now reappear on the list of the bestselling songs on iTunes in the U.S. "Riders on the Storm" narrowly cracks the upper half of the list, settling at No. 97, while "Light My Fire" comes in at No. 114.
RNZ News
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Nashville Babylon: Saturday 21 June 2025
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. American musician Rickie Lee Jones Photo: Astor Morgan On this week's show there's soul from Sam and Dave, blues courtesy of Earl Hooker, a classic cut from Rickie Lee Jones, reggae from Junior Murvin plus a birthday tune for Kris Kristofferson. Music played: Artist: Rickie Lee Jones Track: Woody And Dutch On The Slow Train To Peking Composer: Kalish Album: Pirates Label: Warner Bros Artist: Booker T. & The MGs Track: Chicken Pox Composer: Jones / Cropper / Dunn / Jackson Album: Melting Pot Label: Stax Artist: Earl Hooker Track: Two Headed Woman Composer: Weaver / Dixon Album: The Blues Collection Label: Orbis Artist: Sam and Dave Track: Soul Sister Brown Sugar Composer: Hayes / Porter Album: Single Label: Atlantic Artist: Aretha Franklin Track: Spanish Harlem Composer: Leiber / Spector Album: Single Label: Atlantic Artist: The Delines Track: Maureen's Gone Missing Composer: Vlautin Album: Mr Luck and Ms Doom Label: Love Police Artist: Calexico Track: The Ballad Of Cable Hogue Composer: Burns Album: Hot Rail Label: Quarterstick Artist: OP8 Track: Sand Composer: Hazlewood Album: Slush Label: V2 Artist: Little Feat Track: On Your Way Down Composer: Allen Toussaint Album: Dixie Chicken Label: Warner Bros Artist: The Valentines Track: Gun Fever Composer: Grant Album: Trojan - Rude Boy Box Set Label: Trojan Artist: Junior Murvin Track: Police and Thieves Composer: Perry /Murvin Album: Police and Thieves Label: Island Artist: Kris Kristofferson Track: Sunday Morning Coming Down Composer: Kris Kristofferson Album: Kristofferson Label: Monument Artist: The Noveltones Track: Left Bank Two Composer: Wayne Hill Album: Single Label: DeWolf Music
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Sly Stone Believed Everybody Is a Star: The Massive Legacy of an Avant-Funk Revolutionary
Thank you for the party, but Sly could never stay. Sly Stone was always the ultimate mystery man of American music, a visionary genius who transformed the world with some of the most innovative sounds of the Sixties and Seventies. With Sly and the Family Stone, he fused funk, soul, and acid rock into his own utopian sound, in hits like 'Family Affair' and 'Everyday People.' Yet he remained an elusive figure, all but disappearing in the 1970s. When he died on Monday, it seemed strange he was 'only' 82, because he seemed even older — as if he'd outlived himself by decades. Yet his music sounds as boldly futuristic and influential as ever, which is why the world is still reeling from this loss. Nobody ever sounded like this man. Sly could write inspirational songs of unity, anthems like 'I Want to Take You Higher' that would turn a live crowd into a euphoric tribe, or uplifting hits like 'Stand!' or 'Everybody Is a Star' that can catch you in a lonely moment and make you feel like the rest of your life is a chance to live up to the song's challenge. More from Rolling Stone 'He Would Be in the Top 10': Ben Fong-Torres on Writing Sly Stone's Rolling Stone Cover Story Vernon Reid on Why Sly and the Family Stone Were the Greatest American Band Chuck D Explains How Sly Stone Influenced Public Enemy But that went side by side with his streetwise sense of betrayal and rage. 'Everybody Is a Star' comes on like a love song to human hope, so radiant in every tiny sonic detail, with Sly chanting, 'Shine, shine, shine!' But it's also got the weird question, 'Ever catch a falling star? Ain't no stopping till it's in the ground.' Sly Stone wanted to remind you that you were the star of hope in the sky — but you could also be the star that comes crashing down into a crater. All his contradictions come together in his greatest song, the 1970 funk blast 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' with the hardest bass-versus-guitar staccato slash attack on Earth. The chorus sounds cheerful on the surface: 'Thank you for letting me be myself again!' But the closer you listen, the more dread and anger you hear. For Sly, with all of his fame and fortune, this is what it all comes down to: Lookin' at the devil. Grinnin' at his gun. Fingers start a-shakin'. I begin to run. It's a death haiku that's all the scarier for being delivered as a party chant. Bullets start a-chasin'. I begin to stop. We began to wrestle. I was on the top. The groove keeps churning, but with no resolution. There's no victory in Sly's battle with the devil — just the temporary triumph of not being defeated, at least not yet. The Family Stone was his ideal of a band as a self-contained community, uniting musicians of different races, different genders, some friends, some relatives — but with everyone lending a voice. His Family Stone built the template for countless music collectives, whether it was the Native Tongues, Prince's Revolution, Afrika Bambaata's Zulu Nation, the Wu-Tang Clan, OutKast and the Dungeon Family, or beyond. 'The concept behind Sly and the Stone,' he told Rolling Stone in 1970, 'I wanted to be able for everyone to get a chance to sweat. By that I mean … if there was anything to be happy about, then everybody'd be happy about it. If there was a lot of money to be made, for anyone to make a lot of money. If there were a lot of songs to sing, then everybody got to sing. That's the way it is now. Then, if we have something to suffer or a cross to bear — we bear it together.' Some of the Family were virtuoso singers, others just filling in for a line or two at a time, but there was always that utopian tribal spirit. His band was a visionary blend of James Brown/Stax/Muscle Shoals funk teamwork, but with the anarchic jamming of the hippie bands from the San Francisco acid-rock scene where he made his first converts. As Sly put it in the title of their debut album, it was A Whole New Thing — a radically democratic sound where everybody was a star. Sly's tough charisma made him a unique presence in Seventies pop culture — remote, cool, unknowable, hiding behind a smile that gleamed like bulletproof glass. You could always see him show up in places like the sitcom Good Times, set in a Chicago housing project, where the cool teenager Thelma had posters of Sly and Stevie Wonder on her bedroom wall, almost like good-angel/bad-angel twins. There was a comedian on BET who used to do a hilarious routine about growing up in the Seventies and watching Soul Train. 'When I was a kid, I didn't know what drugs were. I just knew there was something wrong with Sly.' Those contradictions were always built into his music. 'If It Were Left Up to Me' is one of his funniest, nastiest gems ever, a Fresh funk quickie from 1973, where the singers chant sardonic promises full of sleight-of-hand wordplay, until it ends with a sarcastic, 'Cha-cha-cha!' There's 'Que Sera Sera,' also from 1973, refurbishing an old Doris Day chestnut about how everything always works out for the best, except that Sly turns it into a slow-motion dirge full of dread, a warning that fate is out to get you. 'Que Sera Sera' took on a new life in 1989 as the perfect closing theme for Heathers, as Winona Ryder struts through her high school, covered in soot and ashes. When Shannen Doherty gasps, 'You look like hell,' Winona smirks, 'I just got back.' A very Sly line — so it's fitting that Heathers made 'Que Sera Sera' the closest he got to a comeback hit in the Eighties or Nineties. Sly Stone was born in Texas, but raised in the blue-collar Bay Area town of Vallejo. He was just five years old when he cut his first record with his family gospel group, the Stewart Four. But he was already a musical prodigy, mastering piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Barely out of his teens, he became a radio DJ on KSOL ('Super Soul'), where he honed his eclectic musical tastes. 'I played Dylan, Lord Buckley, the Beatles. Every night I tried something else,' he said in 1970. 'I really didn't know what was going on. Everything was just on instinct. You know, if there was an Ex-Lax commercial, I'd play the sound of a toilet flushing. It would've been boring otherwise.' But he got bored with the strictures of genre formatting. 'In radio,' he said, 'I found out about a lot of things I don't like. Like, I think there shouldn't be 'Black radio.' Just radio. Everybody be a part of everything.' He became a house producer at the local label Autumn Records, producing Bobby Freeman's huge 1964 dance hit 'C'Mon and Swim.' But he also worked with the wildly innovative folk rock of the Beau Brummels — he helmed their 1965 classics like 'Don't Talk to Strangers,' 'You Tell Me Why,' and 'Not Too Long Ago' with the melancholy tinge he would bring to his own band. He also produced one of the Bay Area's first hippie bands, Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane group, the Great Society. For their classic debut single — 'Free Advice' on one side, the original 'Somebody to Love' on the other — he famously drove the band through 286 takes. But one of his most crucial learning experiences at Autumn was watching everybody get ripped off. It was his first time getting burned in the music business, and he made sure it would be the last. He never again got involved with projects he didn't control. So he began putting together his own band, inspired by the local free-form rock scene happening at places like the Family Dog and the Fillmore. 'The concept was to be able to conceive all kinds of music,' he said in 1970. 'Whatever was contemporary, and not necessarily in terms of being commercial — whatever meant whatever now. Like today, things like censorship, and the Black-people/white-people thing. That's on my mind. So we just like to perform the things that are on our mind.' Once the world heard 'Dance to the Music,' nobody could resist, as the hits kept coming: 'Everyday People,' 'M'Lady,' 'Stand!,' 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' The Family stole the show at Woodstock, turning 'I Want to Take You Higher' into a massive hippie chant. People always wanted more-more-more from Sly, based on the utopian promises of his songs. But he became the first major star who made an artistic flourish out of pulling back, whether it was going onstage late — he made that one of his trademarks — or simply blowing off shows. He made a point of being combative in interviews. That also meant long delays between records — after Stand!, he kept everyone waiting an unimaginable 18 months for new music, forcing his record company to drop the utterly perfect Greatest Hits. (The delay also gave Motown time to whip up the perfect Sly and the Family Stone substitute: the Jackson 5, who filled the gap with their doppelganger hits like 'I Want You Back' and 'The Love You Save.') After the wait, he stunned everyone with There's a Riot Goin' On, his radically negative refusal to play the commercial game, with its low-fi beatbox avant-funk. It was the prototype for independent swerves like Radiohead's Kid A or Nirvana's In Utero — yet like those albums, it was a sales blockbuster, hitting home with an audience that idolized him for going his own way. 'Family Affair' is the best-known classic, with Bobby Womack's virtuoso blues guitar, in a heartbreaking tale of newlyweds falling apart. But it also has stunners like 'Spaced Cowboy,' sounding uncannily like Young Marble Giants with its basement drum-machine clank, before it builds into a cocky drug boast with ironic Wild West yodels. 'I can't say it more than once, because I'm thinkin' twice as fast,' Sly growls. 'Yodel-ay-hee, yay-hee-hoo!' But the toughest, bleakest moment is 'Africa Talks to You (The Asphalt Jungle),' where the chorus chants, 'Timberrrrr! All fall down!' 'I wrote a song about Africa because in Africa the animals are animals,' he told Rolling Stone at the time. 'The tiger is a tiger, the snake is a snake, you know what the hell he's gonna do. Here in New York, the asphalt jungle, a tiger or a snake may come up looking like, uhhh, you.' He switched gears with Fresh in 1973 — his most exuberantly upbeat funk, jumping right out with 'In Time.' It's as flamboyantly cheerful as Riot was hostile, which isn't to say it's any less brash in its confrontational spirit. 'Let Me Have It All' is the most openhearted love song he ever did, rhythmically and vocally. Yet it's also an album about drugged-out euphoria on the verge of crashing. 'If You Want Me to Stay,' with its drowsy pimp strut of a bass line, warns you not to be foolish enough to count on him or expect anything out of him — especially if you bought a ticket for one of those shows where he didn't turn up. After Fresh, his music suddenly fell off a cliff, with depressing comeback efforts like Small Talk, High on You, or Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back, with its faux anthem 'Family Again.' Everyone was still stealing ideas from Sly — most notably Miles Davis — but the man himself ghosted. The tabloids kept reporting the bad news: He was wasted on drugs, broke, living out of a car. His final albums barely got noticed, with smarmy titles like Back on the Right Track or Ain't but the One Way, ending with 'High, Y'All.' His final highlights came with George Clinton, his most outspoken disciple, on Funkadelic's 1981 The Electric Spanking of War Babies. 'FREE SLY!' Clinton declared in the liner notes, having recently gotten busted with Stone. Sly also shone on Clinton's 1983 robot-funk hit 'Hydraulic Pump,' from the P-Funk All-Stars' album Urban Dance-Floor Guerillas. 'Hydraulic Pump' was a prophecy of the Detroit techno to come, but it also turned out to be Sly's final moment of glory on wax. When Stone died on June 9, it was just a few days after the 51st anniversary of his most famous celebrity stunt: getting married onstage at Madison Square Garden, in a sold-out 1974 show. In so many ways, that wedding event was his farewell to his public life, as he became a reclusive figure for his final decades. 'Dying young is hard to take, selling out is harder,' he warned in 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),' still just in his 20s. The ultimate epitaph for Sly is that he managed to avoid doing either. Yet the world never came close to forgetting about Sly Stone. The excellent Questlove documentary Sly Lives! (The Burden of Black Genius) was a reminder of why he still loomed so large, years after he'd seemingly said his goodbyes. You can hear that legacy everywhere, even in young punk rockers like Turnstile, who turned 'Thank You' into their own 'T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection).' 'Everyday People' has to be the only song that's ever gotten covered by both Tom Jones and Joan Jett. 'We gotta live together,' the song goes, even though its author made a point of living apart. But he went out as a musical revolutionary who owed the world nothing. Every goodbye he ever had to say was already there in 'Thank You': 'We began to wrestle, I was on the top.' Sly Stone defined that sense of lifelong struggle in his music. But he managed to turn that struggle into songs that will keep right on changing and challenging the world forever. The message in the music is clear as always — everybody is a star. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked
