In the Mix

The Thermals. Excellent three piece punk band from Portland, Oregon, playing at the First Unitarian Church on Friday, with Reporter and War On Drugs. Here's the video to "Pillar of Salt." Love the Flying Nun outfit.

Rocky Mount, N.C. native Thelonious Monk looks out from the cover of the Oxford American's 9th annual Southern Music Issue. It's rich, as always. You might think that by now the OxAm folks would be running out of worthy Southern, or at least Southern connected, musicians to profile, but that's happily not the case. (Though in a bunch of instances, they sort of cheat, such as with Betty Davis, Dan Hicks and Van Dyke Parks, profile subjects who spent a hot minute living below the Mason Dixon line, then headed north.)

Along with Monk, there are some big names featured: Sean Wilentz writes about the making of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde in Nashville in 1966 and Holly Gleason explores what's going on underneath Hollywood country boy Dwight Yoakam's hat. But the real pleasures are in the obscurities and discoveries, and the 26 song CD that comes with the magazine. You hear Fred Neil's spooky, soulful "Little Bit Of Rain" and then you turn to Mike Powell's pieced together story of the guy who wrote "Everybody's Talkin'" and of whom Dylan once said "You couldn't touch him, everything revolved around him," and who was, Powell writes, "at best an antihero, and at worst the kind of story people don't bother to tell."

Those stories are included here, though, about the great '50s doo-wop group The Clovers and Teddy Grace, a Louisiana white girl all but lost to history - until now - who you would be forgiven for mistaking for Billie Holiday on first listen. (She's pictured with the Mal Hallett Orchestra in 1934 in Atlantic City before a huge crowd inside what looks like Boardwalk Hall.)

And among the very best is a piece by Inquirer reviewer Steve Klinge, who wrestles with the legacy of Southern soul-pop singer Sandy Posey, who was known best for the 1966 almost-masochistic hit "Born A Woman" (later somewhat perversely covered by Nick Lowe), and who Klinge calls "one of the least emancipated female voices of the mid-60s."

Check it out online here, and do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Jay-Z's American Gangster hits stores today, as does the actual soundtrack to the Ridley Scott-Denzel Washington-Russell Crowe American Gangster movie. which mixes up Bobby Womack funk, Staple Singers and Sam & Dave soul, and Public Enemy rap, along with a score by Bomb Squad producer Hank Shocklee.

My review of the music will be in the Inky come Sunday. Meanwhile, here's a clip of Jigga on Letterman from last Friday. Stick with it through the interview segment and check the horn heavy band he'll be bringing to the Fillmore next Monday.

Rosanne Cash posted a message on her web site yesterday stating that she's cancelling her tour schedule for the rest of the year to undergo brain surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital for "a rare but benign condition." The language makes it seem not all that serious - she's "expected to make a full recovery and will return to the studio to complete the recording of her debut for Manhattan Records" and plans to be back on the road in March -- though the words "brain surgery" sound pretty serious to me. Here's hoping all goes smoothly for Cash, an exquisite singer who's gone through plenty of heartache of late with the deaths of her father Johnny and step-mother June in 2003 and her mother Vivian in 2005. This song, from a Craig Ferguson show last year, is from Black Cadillac, her 2006 album that processed that pain.

Flosstradamus, the excellently named Chicago DJ duo of Curt Cameruci and Josh Young who did the remix of "Yea Yeah," the party tune by Brooklynites Matt & Kim, whose video is right here, play at Silk City on 435 Spring Garden St. tonight. That's Flosstradamus, not Matt & Kim. Rappers Amanda Blank, whose version of Britney Spears' "Gimme More" can be heard here, and Spankrock are supposed to show up. It's $5.

"Cold water in the face, brings you back to this awful place." The Clash always excelled at looking bad news in the eye, and making something magnificent out of it. Julian Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten opens at the Ritz at the Bourse today. It's pretty great. The review is here. This 1981 clip of "The Magnificent Seven," which asks the musical question: "Plato the Greek, or Rin Tin Tin: Who's more famous to the billion millions?," isn't in the movie. It's from the late Tom Snyder's The Tomorrow Show, though for some reason it's not included on this DVD.

Excellent show at the North Star Bar tonight headlined by The Pipettes, the sassy lasses from Brighton, England who tweak girl group conventions for neo-feminist fun. We come today not to praise the Pipettes though, but to shine a little light on Nicole Atkins, the nascent New Jerseyite who, like Beyonce, Robert DeNiro and Tina Fey, has her own (kinda hokey) American Express commercial. Atkins hails from Neptune, just south of Asbury Park on the Jersey shore, thus the title of her Columbia debut Neptune City, which blends '60s Brill Building songcraft with a touch of Twin Peaks spookiness. She writes dreamy pop songs that are soaring, sophisticated and full of longing. Atkins is at the North Star with her band The Sea in the middle slot of an early 7 p.m. all ages show. Monster Bobby, who also plays guitar with the Pipettes, goes on first.

Busy weekend in town: Tonight - that's Friday - there's a excellent funk-jazz-hip-hop bill with Portland, Oregon's Lifesavas, plus New Orleans jam band Galactic and Boots Riley, the great MC with Oakland hip-hop agit-rop band The Coup, at the Fillmore at the TLA. Here's a lifesavas video, with Vernon Reid on guitar:

Meantime, out at Haverford College, the much ballyhooed Vampire Weekend, the Columbia grads schooled in African pop, get their Oxford shirts down and dirty in the school's Lunt Basement venue. And speaking of blog band phenoms, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the 2005 model, wind up their world tour back in town at Starlight Ballroom, in singer Alec Ounsworth's hometown.

There are a couple good club shows to choose from on Saturday, too. At the North Star, the Los Angeles duo The Bird and the Bee - Inara George and Greg Kurstin - make their enticing neo-Brazilan pop moves.

And Canadian hip-hop/roots music storyteller Rich Terfry, better known as Buck 65, headlines Johnny Brenda's. His new one, Situation, is a concept album of sorts, with all the songs set in 1957, the year that French revolutionary Guy DeBord gave birth to the Situationist movement. This gangster-dirtbag tale here, "Wicked & Weird" is from his 2005 This Right Here Is Buck 65.

There's more than one new Dylan movie out there this fall. Besides the seven ways of looking at Bob in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, there's Murray Lerner's The Other Side of the Mirror: Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965. The black and white doc, which came out on DVD in October, is a no-talking-heads compendium of performance footage from the three Newport Folk Festival appearances that are so crucial to the Dylan myth.

(Between Christian Bale, who plays an ardent folk singer named Jack Hardy, and Heath Ledger, who plays an actor named Robbie who plays Hardy in a biopic within the biopic, and Cate Blanchett, who plays bushy haired androgy-dylan in the movie's Fellini-esque section, Haynes has all three of the Newport Dylans covered. Read an interview with Haynes here. Steven Rea's review is here.)

The Dylans in Lerner's Mirror are pretty hard to compete with, though, whether it's the babyfaced boy singing "North Country Blues" in his work shirt in 1963, or the bohemian Bard whose poofy hair is blowin' in the wind as he does "If You Gotta Go (Go Now)," in 1965, or the flannel shirted guy who asks "if anyone has an e harmonica" than nearly gets pelted with them on stage.

Most of the performance footage is pretty fabulous, and Lerner's no-narration technique makes the few non-musical moments that much more telling, as when a giggly Dylan finds himself trapped in a fishbowl-like car wondering "Where are all my friends? They deserted me." Or when a group a fans come to the conclusion that once a performer gets to the point where he's idolized like a "God-man" like Dylan is, well then "who needs him anymore?"

Watching the electric performances of "Maggie's Farm' and "Like A Rolling Stone" from '65 that have been so written about and over analyzed feels almost illicit, like you're watching something that you're not supposed to see, an episode from oral and written history that's somehow become miraculously available as a primary source. And yes, you can hear the legendary boos, which seem particularly absurd, considering how great both Dylan and Mike Bloomfield sound.

Dean and Gene Ween - aka Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman - are in town Saturday night, playing a home town show of sorts at the Tower Theater behind their excellent new La Cucaracha. Here's a clip of the great hopes from New Hope on The Jane Pratt Show in 1993 doing their Princely ode to Philadelphia, "Freedom of '76." Despite what the song says, by the way, Mannequin was not filmed at Woolworth's. It was Wanamaker's.

Journalism is such an imperfect proposition. This Jill Scott quote didn't make the final cut in my interview with her that ran in the Sunday Inquirer. She was talking about her experience shooting The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana with director Anthony Minghella this past summer, and how the communitarian vibe she got from the people there reminded her of growing up in North Philadelphia - near 23rd and Lehigh, between Oakdale and Harold, to be precise.

Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist from Alexander McCall Smith's series of best selling novels that Scott plays, solves crimes “without an arsenal of guns - she just has the might of her spirit,” Scott said when she was back, briefly, this month to do post-production work on the feature length film, which is targeted to be a series on British and American TV.

Being in Botswana reminded her “of what Philadelphia used to feel like to me when I was a kid. It takes a village to raise a child. And everybody watches everybody’s children. And that’s how I grew up. I couldn’t get around the block too far, without some neighbor saying, ‘Jill, go back around the corner now. You know your mother don’t want you around here.’”

Meantime, here's the video for "Hate On Me," in which Scott puts the envious in their place on her new album, The Real Thing, Words & Sounds, Vol. 3.

Chris Larkin, keyboard player with Kenn Kweder & the Secret Kids in the '70s and the New Wave synth-pop band The Vels in the 1980s, died last Wednesday. Gayle Sims' obituary is in the Wednesday Inquirer. Here's a blog set up by his brother Eric. And here's a video for The Vels' delightfully chipper "Look My Way."

Roll over, Beethoven, and tell the reclusive author the news: There's going to be a huge rock festival in Vineland next August.

Caught an excellent show last night at the North Star Bar with Soulsavers, the British DJ-production duo of Rich Machin and Ian Glover, who team up with grunge-survivor Mark Lanegan on the ruggedly mysterious new It's Not How Far You Fall, It's The Way You Land, which is one of the strongest CDs of the year.

I was expecting Machin and Glover to be a pair of knob twiddling geeks. But instead Soulsavers, on the second date of a five city U.S. tour with Lanegan - the serious looking dude pictured above - combined a live rhythm section with looped samples, plus two back up gospel singers, who tored down Leadbelly's "Midnight Special" as an encore.

Much to my chagrin, Lanegan didn't sing Bob Dylan's "Man In the Long Black Coat," one of the high points of the I'm Not There soundtrack. And for a guy who has collaborated with everyone from Greg Dulli to Isobel Campbell, he wasn't much for human interaction, never locking eyes with anyone in the room.

But his basso profundo is as deep as Sleepy LaBeef's, and his spiritual seeking songs like "Revival" packed plenty of powerful conviction. And he and his Soulsaving cohorts really kicked it up a notch with a take on Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Effigy" that did John Fogerty proud.

Here's a video for "Revival," which also happens to be the name of the new album by Fogerty, who, these days, is writing for Newsweek.

Not sure how I feel about the Brylcreem, but I like Richard Hawley. He's at the World Cafe Live on Sunday.