Music documentaries rarely make it to the multiplex.  Last year brought in a couple of rare music doc hits, but their success may have had less to do with music than with the irresistible allure of beautiful women with appetites for destruction, i.e., Amy Winehouse and Nina Simone.  So what are the odds of a documentary about grandmas in Lithuania …

Is it possible to be a music lover yet annually ignore the Grammys, second only to the Oscars in televised awards show viewership?  Very possible: I love music and never watch, even when I’m told there are performances I would enjoy (this year’s was a tribute to B.B. King).  The Grammys are a spectacle of marketing more than music.  I’m …

Filling the niche, `model-virtuoso,’ is a task violinist Caroline Campbell tackles with panache.  Stunningly blonde in black, Caroline sways as she weaves together lines from Paganini and Michael Jackson in a flamboyant showpiece introducing a new electric violin at the world’s biggest music trade show. Every January, the National Association of Music Merchants draws some 100,000 attendees to the Winter …

While visiting my Oklahoma hometown this past May I watched artists painting a mural on the side of an old building that had once been a hotel.  The evolving mural would eventually show, among other things, a depiction of songwriter Mae Boren Axton and Elvis Presley tenderly cradling a black disc as if it were a newborn.  Their baby grew …

No city on earth is so deeply bonded to its music as `the cradle of jazz,’ New Orleans.  Louis Armstrong’s likeness looms large at his namesake airport, greeting arrivals alongside panels celebrating lesser-known jazz pioneers while a Dixieland soundtrack throbs from speakers overhead.  The St. Pierre Hotel’s walls are a mute brass band of antique instruments mounted like trophy fish, …

Real time-warp stuff” is how John Renbourn described the twenty performances heard on John Renbourn: The Attic Tapes (Riverboat Records).  Among the treasures exhumed from the attic of guitarist Mac MacLeod: a recording of Davy Graham’s fingerstyle showpiece “Anji” in a tape box dated 1962.  Renbourn would’ve then been only 18, yet his signature style was already stunningly developed. Renbourn’s …

She was the self-proclaimed `last of the red-hot mamas,’ and in that song bragged: “They’ve all cooled down but me!  I can warm the cold ones and give the old ones back their flaming youth.”  Ragtime ruled in Sophie Tucker’s youth.  She became a star in vaudeville before World War I, yet remained a presence in American entertainment into the …

“Music finish!” That was Lady Rembetika’s emphatic answer to my question: “Do you have live music here at night?”  You’ll find her along a waterfront row of cafes and shops on the island of Corfu.  Instead of smiling hopefully at passing tourists, as most Corfu proprietors do, she sits at the back of her empty café glaring, daring you to …

“Intuition.” That’s Kari Nieminen’s one-word answer to a question about what’s behind his uniquely designed, superb sounding Versoul guitars.  Recently Kari was front and center at a love-in at Westwood Music in Los Angeles for Versoul, a one-man company based in Helsinki, Finland.  Kari’s exceptional craftsmanship and sometimes flamboyant designs, rife with gold leaf and laser lights, has made him …

Some guys just can’t stay out of trouble.  In 1998, Texas Governor George W. Bush revoked the 1925 pardon granted Huddie Ledbetter by Governor Pat Neff.  The reason? “It [the pardon] sent the wrong message to school children, criminals, and victims of crime in Texas.” (At the time of his pardon’s revocation, Ledbetter had been dead nearly half a century.) …