How much do I have to do for you people? I've jumped into standing pools of water, knocked teeth out, broken noses with flying shoes, held high F# for 20 seconds, rapped freestyle, taken off my pants, fiddled, memorized dozens of pages of single-spaced text for a one-time-only performance, picked up and down as fast as possible, and turned my private affairs into jokes at the risk of permanently alienating everyone I love just to get a chuckle from you.
Read MoreNot himself in person but a bunch of people who love his music and anyhow who doesn't? I'll join Robin and Linda Williams, Rickie Simpkins, Cathy Fink, Marcy Marxer, Dave Chappell, and Mark Schatz, all legends, especially Dave, who's just about my favorite black comedian.
Read MoreThe good news, if you can call it that, is that once again this year's show will take place at Fitzgeralds in Berwyn and across two dates. December 31 and January 2 are the dates. As always, buying tix in advance is strongly encouraged, so that you'll be assured of getting in the room.
Read MoreI forgot to post last Monday's show details. I played with a segment of the punk rock group the Mekons, in support of our new release, Jura. It was the best attended Monday Hideout I've done (possibly excepting the Michael Shannon show, I think the numbers were about identical) so I guess not posting anything here is the key to success.
Read MoreHey, that was a killer Kinky Friedman show last night!
Read MoreI'm ending my Monday night residency, but not soon. I'll be reprising my favorite themes and revisiting my favorite guests, or at least those who live around here, as a sort of sentimental last hurrah, and it'll take about a year.
Read MoreWould anyone at the school -- faculty or students -- care to walk me and and my son around campus for an hour one day over the next couple months, in return for lunch and laffs? Contact me here.
If you live in Washington or Oregon, but not within about 50 miles of either Seattle or Portland, and you're interested in having me do a house concert for you on Sunday December 6, please write me here at the site.
Read MoreCongratulations to Danny Barnes on winning the coveted Steve Martin Prize for Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. No one could more deserve the recognition and the money ($50,000). First I heard, over the weekend, I was at a bluegrass gig and a couple people were buzzing about it. I ran home and googled excitedly, then texted Danny my elation.
Read MoreMy friends T.J. Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi, large-canvas improvisers of great renown and unbelievable chops, have asked me to warm up for them on October 3rd at New York's crappy hole-in-the-wall venue, Town Hall.
Read MoreThursday, Barley's Taproom in Knoxville. Friday, Station Inn in Nashville. Saturday, Barking Legs in Chattanooga. Sunday, Red Clay Theater in Duluth GA. Me, Don Stiernberg, Missy Raines, and Shad Cobb.
Here's the last Monday show until mid-October: a night of Merle Haggard music, played by Gerald Dowd, JJ Piet, Brian Wilkie, John Rice, and me, and more or less starring Redd Volkaert, who seems to know something about the subject.
This last week I...
...finished two good books, Richard Wright's Native Son (a long time catching up with that one!) and Etgar Keret's The Seven Good Years.
...attended a memorial service for my grandfather in the godforsaken middle of Pennsylvania.
...left Chicago out of one airport, parking my van in long-term, and returned absentmindedly to another.
Read MoreI play with Don Stiernberg.
I'm playing with Steve Dawson. We're doing songs by women, who, while slightly more than half of humanity, compose but a smallish fraction of the writers and singers of popular music.
This week it's the Scavengers. Robbie Gjersoe, K.C. McDonough, Gerald Dowd and I play a set of music, in all the styles that middle-aged guys seem to like.
Read MoreWith my boy Preston leaving for college next month, we're giving him a sendoff with a Monday night show starring himself. Musically, he and I are sort of co-curating. Preston picked the material and will be drumming and singing most of it, and I picked the players.
Read MoreI play country blues and one or two other things with Eric Noden. Lots of groovy guitar work!
Read MoreI welcome one of America's great (if not justly acclaimed) songwriters, John Sieger. I've been good friends with John, and an avid admirer and very occasional co-writer, since the early 1990s.
Read MoreAbout once a year I do a wordplay-generated mashup at my Monday residency. This Monday it's "Graham and Charlie Parker." I seem to recall, during previous mashup preparation bouts, which, by the way, are always extensive and call on a broad swath of the cerebrum, that subtle and surprising common threads have come to light. This time, not so much. The reason you can find an element here and there in, for instance, a Monk head, that can be made to correspond with something in, for example, oh, a Monkees melody, is that the world of harmony is finite. Narrowed down further yet by the subcategories "American" and "midcentury" (broadly speaking, of course) and "popular" (jazz used to be popular music, believe it or not), the project starts looking much less lunatic, and a Monk-Monkees or two-Parker set of music can come to be something other than an otiose comic exercise.
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