It’s not common that a gifted songwriter is also an excellent interpreter of other’s songs. Sure, many of our great songwriters will occasionally record cover versions and quite well, but few do it on a consistently wide-ranging basis and do it with few peers.
Rosanne Cash does that, perhaps as well or better than anybody. At the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut Tuesday night, Cash mixed songs from Black Cadillac, an album dedicated to her late father Johnny Cash, and a few requests with songs from her upcoming album The List, which will consist of some of the pillars of the great American country songbook.
As Rosanne tells it they come from a list her father gave her. When she graduated from high school in 1973, she went on tour with Johnny Cash, and when he asked her if she was familiar with a particular country song and she said no, he asked about another. When she couldn’t identify three he named, he said that’s it and made a list of 100 country songs for her to learn as her musical education. Continue reading Rosanne Cash and The List
He rarely plays in the States but Taylor was scheduled to be at four venues in or near Connecticut: Toad’s Place in New Haven, Black-Eyed Sally’s in Hartford, the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass., or if you wanted to drive a little further, Misquamicut Beach in Westerly, R.I.
I caught The Beehive Queen and her remarkable band Rebel Montez Saturday night at Cafe Nine, a tiny club that might hold 200, in New Haven, Connecticut. Chris showed why she is one of the state’s legendary R&B/soul singers as I watched her play the first of two 90-minute sets that included original tunes from each of her five albums and a number of meticulously chosen covers that not only put her vast talents on full display but also carried a sense of blues and soul history.
The place was called The Stone Balloon and was fashioned directly after the Cafe Au Go Go in New York. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Tables and chairs took up most of the audience area in front of a small stage on the right-hand side wall toward the front half of the room. Unlike the Au Go Go it was brightly lit between sets. The Au Go Go was always like a cave.
My main interest was not in the Director’s Cut, which I had bought back in the early ’90s, but in the Extras disc, Woodstock: Untold Stories. It includes about three hours of material with nearly 150 minutes of previously unreleased performances, the rest consisting of documentary video segments.
For details about the project, including specific mastering techniques, as well as a wealth of other information on The Beatles, check out 
Sebastian’s charming and engaging style of entertaining creates an immediate connection with his audience as he mixes interesting anecdotes from his career with a type of humor that is so easy to relate to, especially for his contemporaries as he puts it.
For the uninitiated, Rockpalast is a long-running German TV show that started in the early 1970s and broadcasts live concerts. Many performances from those shows by scores of artists have been officially released or generally available over the years.
If you pre-ordered the set, you also received another previously released concert on DVD/CD, Sugar Mountain Live At the Canterbury House 1968, which I wrote about back in December in