Coming Soon to a Local Independent Music Store Near You

A new record by Buddy Miller and a bunch of his friends. You can find a little taste here - a cover of a George Jones tune. I posted about Buddy here a while back and things have not changed since then.

Passings ~ Fred Anderson (1929-2010)

Fred Anderson sits on the edge of the stage at the Velvet Lounge
before opening for the evening (February 2006)
~ Photograph © Jeff Robertson/AP.

Fred Anderson has died. You can read obituaries here and here and here and here. Anderson was a musician, entrepreneur, mentor and, by all accounts, a genuinely decent man. His passing is an immense loss to the jazz scene in Chicago especially, but very far beyond as well. I commented on a recent Anderson recording here just about this time last year.
__________
Thanks for the heads up!

Music Rochester

Every so often The Guardian runs a story about the disappearance - or at least precarious existence - of local record shops. There is another in the paper today. I often complain about Rochester as a cultural backwater, but there are at least three terrific independent record stores in town (compare that to supposedly hip places like, say, Ann Arbor, which seems unable to sustain any) - The Bop Shop, Record Archive, and Lakeshore Record Exchange. Each of the stores occupies a distinct niche - for instance, I try not to go the Lakeshore for fear that I will single-handedly dilute the hipness of the staff and clientele simply by virtue of my age. In any case, on this dimension at least our cultural ecology seems relatively robust.