Go Behind-The-Scenes with Rihanna as the Barbadian pop star works with Gucci Creative Director Frida Giannini on the luxury brand’s 2008 Holiday ad campaign. Gucci’s “Tattoo Heart Collection,” for which Rihanna is a spokesmodel, will benefit the UNICEF.

A full-length e-film documentary chronicling Rihanna’s work with the campaign will be debut on Rihanna’s and Gucci’s websites on December 9.

Daniel Levitin

What I have loved, is that it is such a marvelous way to get to know new music that you might never have heard of. It’s such a hoot that people like Bob Dylan have regular shows that he narrates and picks songs for. His banter is almost poetry sometimes. You hear the blur between his singing and his speaking.

I can flip the channel and hear spa music for days. Float on soft synth music, meditation music, druggy music, trance music, and so on. And then FLIP and you are hearing close harmony from the 40s, FLIP metal music FLIP news FLIP Christian enthusiasm FLIP twelve channels of classical music FLIP I’m in the mood for folk these days. I get to hear so much early to modern “folk” music. It’s a music that resonates with me and it’s a joy to find it.

My point in all this, is to celebrate XM radio in opening even college professors to all kinds of new music. I used to think it was a luxury. Now, I’ve discovered a lot of music, AND it’s deductible.

Banda Larga Cordel (WEA, 2008)

Jill Turner reflects on the dizzy heights that Gilberto Gil has scaled as a musician and a politician, whilst she listens to his bright and breezy new album, Banda Larga Cordel, his first for eleven years. One of the greatest names in Brazilian music, Gil recently stepped down as Brazil's Minister of Culture, to spend more time, not with his family but with his music:

Gil has travelled a long and interesting road since creating the Tropicalia sound in the late sixties. Music that once got him booed off stage as he fused regional Brazilian styles with outside rock instruments and influences. Music that also led to Gil's detention and temporary exile, as his lyrics made oblique references to and criticized the military occupation.

Forty years on, with over fifty albums to his name, a cabinet of awards including seven Grammy's you could be excused for expecting a " best of luxury cd box set", issued in time for the Christmas stockings. Instead Gil gives us an album, in the main full of new compositions with the subtle use of electronica to reaffirm and bolster the sound he is best known for. His vocals only ever so slightly husky, could belong to a man 40 years his junior, reassuring in the knowledge that Gil had to take time out after a polyp, now removed, wreaked havoc with his vocal chords.

Banda Larga Cordel is classic Gil, as demonstrated by, 'Amor De Carnaval' and the bossa nova based 'Outras Viram'. There are of course the other expected elements of pop, reggae and samba throughout with a couple of tracks that could stand alone, which in the old days would be released as singles. 'Nao Grude Nao' an uplifting flirtatious track borrowing styles from forro with great flute work interspersed with dancefloor electronic beats. The other is 'La Renaissance Africaine' a francophonic track written for the African Festival of Black Arts, which will leave its catchy melody running around your head hours later.

My only criticism is the absence of translated lyrics that we come to expect with many international releases. I know music should speak for itself but with Gil's political activism and passion for communication, the lack of translated lyrics leaves quite a hole in the listening experience.

Buy the CD:

• In North America: Banda Larga Cordel
• In Europe: Banda Larga Cordel

Here’s a track off the new album:
The Bill Mike Band : “Make Peace” (mp3)

This week we had the opportunity to chat with group leader Bill Mike about the album, working on your inner Wolf Blitzer and Friday’s CD Release show…

Who is the Bill Mike Band?
William Michel (guitars,vocals,guitar pedals)
Chris Morrissey (bass)
Steve Goold (drums)

What do you guys get out of this group compared to your session gigs?
We get a chance to play in a high energy exploratory hard rock band that dabbles in improvisation. We also get a chance to play for a lot of cool teenagers. Our fans are younger and we’ve cultivated an audience through music education and music curation. I host a periodic teen music series called “Rock For A Cause.”
There are no musical rules in BMB other than to push ourselves to our musical limit every show and every recording. I know that sounds dramatic but it’s true. We’re fucking exhausted after one of our shows but we get off on that. Personally it’s my church and workout room at the same time.Chris and Steve have a musical history together since high school so it’s fun for them to reconnect and create a bad ass rhythm section.

I read your band is made up of both liberal and conservative viewpoints. Is that the reason your new sophomore album is called “Truce”?
Partially. I’m originally from Ohio and grew up in a highly Christian/Republican part of the world.Through my living experiences in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, I’ve refined my political and spiritual belief/value systems and they swing to the blue states. I wrote the lyrics to Truce as a way to help folks navigate through the pain,anger, and frustration of living in a divided nation no matter what belief system you may have. It’s an idealistic manifesto in a way to help people cross the divide and actually learn about the people they think they disagree with. I spent the last 3 years talking,writing,and listening to Americans who have more conservative views of the world. This process/ life class is still really challenging, but that’s the point.It’s going to be. We Americans have the freedom to side and hide with people we agree with politically and spiritually. It’s very easy for me to watch ” The Daily Show” and feel good about my politics, but in order for real progress and a less venomous America, we have to have civil conversation with our adversaries. I’m not saying it’s always going to work, but the effort has to be put in. The harder route will yield a deeper understanding and deeper growth. So in my immediate life I have a band and a family composed of conservative evangelical christians and die hard liberals. That’s where I started this new journey and that’s where I’m still working. I was just tired of being enraged all the time when it came to politics.I was exhausted and I knew music was the great vehicle to channel my thoughts and emotions in a constructive way.

Now that Obama was elected President, will you have to quit the group?
HAHA. No it’s cool. After rehearsals we usually hit The Muddy Pig in Saint Paul and talk politics and music. Everyone in this band is working on their inner Wolf Blitzer. We disagree with each other at times about life issues, but our music ideals are very similar and that’s the glue. Each person in BMB is a good guy so there’s tons of respect. We try to be open communicators even when it’s rough. Obama will proove he’s a reasonable approachable man who’s very methodical. He’s stable and a seasoned soul.

Truce! Tell me about the new album.
Well I know you don’t know me Greg but I’m a humble dude, but I think Truce is one of the most progressive rock records ever made in Minnesota. It’s tough,grooving,raw,fragile,experimental,thoughtful, multicultural, and memorable. It took three long years, went through 5-8 remixes per song, 2 additional songs were recorded mixed then axed. We had the pleasure of receiving a recording grant through Fur Seal Records and The Jonathan Grove Foundation. Joe Johnson our engineer helped us get the recording grant and we lucked out and got it. That was a blessing. We went over our grant budget in the end but all three of us wanted this record to be an A-squad recording so we kept on recording and mixing until the mission was complete. It was worth all of the extra work, sacrifice,and money.

Tell me about the track “Make Peace,” which you can download right here.
I’m really into banjo style finger picking and always wanted to write a hard rock riff based on bluegrass music.I dabble in a lot of old guitar pedals and sounds but I write all my tunes on an old classical guitar that my sister played in 1976. Outside of the experimental rock scene and improv scene I love playing American Roots music. The original melody inspired a rock song compiled of many layers, twists and turns.It grooves n growls and has many musical movements. Chris and Steve added amazing parts to complete it and make sound very orchestral. The lyrics are multi- tiered. Thanks again Greg for letting me talk about this stuff. I really appreciate these questions. There have been many peace songs in our rock n roll history and i was hesitant to write a literal tune about this subject. But man all of us have felt heavy in the last few years so I wanted to give it a shot in an honest way. I got to this point of acceptance in 2007 that war and man go together. We’ve always had war and may always will. These thoughts were making me sick and sad for a prolonged period of time. I had to write a song to deal with the strange realization that just a handful of male sociopaths have ruined millions of innocent lives through their individual fueds with other sociopaths.That fact just floors me and confuses my brain to know end.But, here I am in America, relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. I’m a working class musician but I still have the luxury and freedom to escape the world’s ills at any given moment. Not only do I have the luxury not to participate in politics or religion if I don’t want to, but through modern technology I can actually escape global reality at any given moment.Very few people in America have witnessed true life threatening violence and if they did they would probably want to reconsider their pro war pro retaliation statements. We’re a huge land mass with many modern amenities and in turn,Americans can create little bubble or microcosms of synthetic reality.Isolation is totally possible. I feel that i was doing that in my life and wanted to shed that part of me. I wanted to be connected to my progressive Minneapolis community that was directly around me and contribute to it. I wanted to get rid of my intrusive thoughts about man and war and step out of my comfort zone.

MAKE PEACE
make peace make peace
two words we’re advised
make peace make peace
but massive wills collide
make peace make peace
conditions are to follow
make peace make peace
reverse this passive power

make peace make peace
when godly laws lose power
make peace make peace
when human error transpires
make peace make peace
history shows our trauma
make peace make peace
the risk is always higher

Make peace and watch the blood dissolve

Tell me about your upcoming CD Release gig.
It’s going to be like an old school Lollapolluza show. I’m going to have a juggling troop perform (Family Unit Juggling Troop), and a Indian tabla player (Gary Waryan) will be performing for people in the lobby of the Cedar,Hummingbird will be performing. They are a great acoustic instrumental trio.These guys play in other bands like Tapes n Tapes, Last of The Dinosaurs, and Lucy Michelle. Desdamona and MC Carnage will be doing a medley with BMB. I will also have my senior guitar students on stage with us on a tune called ” Secure.” That will be a wall of guitars, basses, and umph. Our little youth rock orchestra.The Draw Fire records crew will be there in full force as well!

Anything else?
Thanks for letting me talk. It’s an honor and privilege to be able to talk about ones art in this way. Very cool. I’d give BMB a shot live. I’m proud of this band. We’ve been nestled in the rock underground but have cultivated a great diverse group of fans who are amazing talented people as well. I think we’re one of the few bands in Minnesota that can play for any music audience imaginable and come out alive, unscathed. and appreciated. We’re not a hyped band and by choice we try to continually take risks to evolve and grow as musicians and as a band.We’re about the listener,community, and the power of music to transform lives. We value entertainment and aren’t total stiffs but the songs and where they can take us matters most to us right now.

The work is in fact arguably one of the most lyrically solid of the whole Jethro Tull catalogue exploring cloak & dagger cold war themes of intrigue and suspense dripping with imagery from such novels as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Gorky Park and Funeral In Berlin. In order to convey the double-crossing world of world of femme fatales, double agents, traitors and assasins Anderson looked towards cutting edge technology which was becoming available to artists at the time, particularily in the field of computer and digital recording technology which allowed for an appropriate cold clinical feel to the muisc here rather than pastoral folky auras of the Jethro Tull of the past although many of those elements are assimulated here, albeit in updated form. Consequently, some of the music here fulfills Anderson`s designs for this new era and some of it fails miserably.

However one looks at it, two conspicuous factors contributed to the overall outcome of this experimental album, namely the absence of a live drummer in favour of a Linn drum machine (programmed by Anderson) and donated state-of-the-art keyboard products coutesy of the Fender Rhodes company. This gave Peter Vettesse, who provided the lush keyboard backdrops on Broadsword & The Beast, virtual artistic carte blanche which resulted in a case of the-kid-in-the-candy-shop syndrome at times. Glaring examples of this over-indulgence occur on tracks like Paparazzi, Automotive Science and Apogee, the latter of which is introduced by a garbled voice of a technician running down some sort of checklist which briefly captures the mood of a space mission. Jethro Tull meets Hawkwind? Something which could have worked here but falls apart on the launch pad before it can gain any altitude. But it`s not as directionless as Astronomy which again offers, by the very virtue of its futuristic lyrics and hints of a Tangerine Dream-like synth-pulse, some possilbilities but grinds to a halt morphing into a bad Euro-pop song and it`s a pity that Anderson didn`t capitalize on some of these fragmented moments of salvation which he stumbles into not only here but throughout the work. Other tracks which suffer from Vetesse and Anderson overdoing it with the new toys include Nobody`s Car and Tundra the latter of which didn`t even make it on to the original vinyl release.

What does save Under Wraps is placing the four tracks that at least have some distant relationship with the Jethro Tull lineage at the beginning of the work. The opening upbeat numbers Lap Of Luxury and the title track nod back to the seventies, but once again with updated propensity. Lap Of Luxury was made into a video which recieved extensive airplay on MTV and Muchmusic in North America and is actually a passable eighties pop song with the Nouvel Tull touch as Anderson put it at the time. The ubiquitous flute lurks throughout the work and is flaunted to reasonable effect on the third track, European Legacy which with it`s Spanish flavour is arguably the best piece on the album which evokes the plight of a defector. Other tracks which save the day are Heat which features some razor sharp guitar from Martin Barre ( who lists Under Wraps as his favourite Tull album! ) as well as Under Wraps #2 which captures the romance and intrigue of a dangerous liason returning to some acoustic guitar work.

In the reflective liner notes from the 2005 remaster ( which also includes the Lap Of Luxury video ) where Anderson gives the album a mini review himself he expresses a 20/20 hindsight yearning to re-record the work with a live drummer but at the same time maintaining that his desire at the time was to be more in tune with the times. Hence, Under Wraps is most definitely not a Jethro Tull album that will have any immediate dramatic impact especially on fans of the early seventies material, but given time there are some outstanding qualities to be found particularily the lyrics if one can remain impartial to some of the overblown Linn drumming and tawdry 80s Keyboard flash. Anderson does demonstrate that he could bring Jethro Tull up with the times here with some experiments that worked and some that didn`t. Bear in mind the harsher critiques of this album have come from those who were expecting more of a continuance of the previous Broadsword & The Beast album which was even beginning to sail into Spinal Tap waters when it was released in 1982 the very thing that Anderson wanted to avoid.

Jethro Tull should be commended here for their adventurous abandon, not relying entirely on past glories even if it meant courting the acrimony of their public.

by Vibrationbaby


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The clothing line name is inspired by Ross’ song of the same name off his “Trilla” album and features a figure similar to the old guy from Monopoly as the icon. Check out early looks of Luxury Tax from Ross’ latest launch party.

Max Raabe and Palast Orchester

Heute Nacht Oder Nie (Tonight Or Never) (SPV Recordings, 2008)

In 1920s and early 30s, before Germany turned an ugly eye to the rest of the world and turned an even uglier to its own people, culture and arts, there existed a vibrant world of cabaret clubs, dance halls and revue shows. That world, lost in war and over time, has found a champion in Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester and the 2-CD set of their extraordinary performance at Carnegie Hall concert entitled Heute Nacht Oder Nie (Tonight Or Never). The recording, out now on SPV Recordings, is an anachronistic collection of delights.

Sophisticated and wryly humorous, Heute Nacht Oder Nie plunks eager listeners square in the middle of a Weimar cabaret club with all the stunning flash of an opened cigarette case and all the sumptuous luxury of bejeweled women, tuxedo-clad gentlemen and chilled champagne. More than just a copycat act, Heute Nacht Oder Nie exudes all the fantastical avant-garde, plucky optimism and stinging irony of an age desirous of intellectual pursuits, personal freedoms and a good time. In short, Mr. Raabe and the Palast Orchester have recreated a sizzling good time.

From the opening fanfare of title track “ Heute Nacht Oder Nie” to the sweetly sincere “Gib Mir Den Letzten Abschiedskuss,” Mr. Raabe and orchestra transport the listener to another world. Brilliantly orchestrated, Heute Nacht Oder Nie moves through such familiar song classics as “Singing in the Rain,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “These Foolish Things” and an utterly charming version of “Dream a Little Dream” that are better than time travel.

Taking turns with jazz, rumbas, tangos, foxtrots and German waltzes (you’ll have to listen to the CD for explanation), Heute Nacht Oder Nie casts a spell of pure delight. Mr. Raabe’s sharply clever interludes of explanations or translations capture that cabaret feel and leave the listener completely unable to resist. Sassy fun mingles among the more popular standard in the forms of “Ich Steh’ Mit Ruth Gut,” “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” and “Mein Kliener Gruner Kaktüs” that bubble up with the theatrical, slapstick explosiveness of a first-class variety show.

With a stage presence and a vocal mastery capable of wooing an audience, Mr. Raabe must surely be the reincarnation of a radio crooner with such versions of “Ich Küsse Ihre Hand, Madame,” “Du Bist Nicht Die Erste” and “Tango-Ballade.” His vocals sail across the musical landscape like a silk scarf swept up by a breeze. But I think it is the inexpressively lovely, yet solemn, choral and piano version of “In Einem Kühlen Grunde” that really brought home the idea of what was lost out of the era.

It would be criminal to not mention the tight, neat work of the Palast Orchester musicians. With bright flourishes, dizzyingly ragtime rhythms and dreamy melodies, the Palast Orchester sound is wonderfully opulent and vibrantly stunning. Heute Nacht Oder Nie overflows with the suave sophistication of a well-made martini, the seductive lure of a chorus girl’s legs and the witty humor of a culture past but not out of reach.

Buy the CD:

• In North America: Heute Nacht Oder Nie
• In Europe: Heute Nacht Oder Nie - Live in New York