Music Review: Incognito-Bees+Things+Flowers-Narada Jazz

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The grooves of summer are evident on the band’s cover of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves The Sunshine” that also serves as the album’s attempted creed and title source. Despite an auspicious start, Bees misses the thing called pollen in the flower and ends up with only a buzz. For example, the Ayers’s tribute boasts snug rhythm interspersed with carefully handled guitar that loses its pleasant dominance in Joy Rose’s mannered singing. Soul music’s ethos of gospelly, gritty, and generous emotion fails to appear thereby leaving the best intentions of a cover song flat. This thud in the road of their creativity accurately forecasts a playlist of limp pickings beneath a history of golden jazzfunk that grooved heartily through Positivity, No Time Like The Future and Adventures in Black Sunshine etc. Bad vocal ideas painfully continue and the sturdiness of Jocelyn Brown’s voice flees to be replaced with waggish ululation on a sleepy version of “Always There.” Ghosts of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho soundtrack eerily precede Carleen Anderson’s melodramatic rendering of “Summer In The City.” Anderson’s previous work with the defunct Young Soul Disciples, her first solo album and earlier work with Incognito portrayed her mature instrument in better arrangements. Is it possible for a hot band to miss its own mark sometime? Yes. When they come to your town see the show but buy this release at your own risk.




Julie Mehretu At The DIA

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Julie Mehretu’s maps look like electric grids of different worlds exploding. In the fall of this year the Detroit Institute Of Arts will get some of this energy to permanently marks its walls.




Kelley Carter On Disco D

Disco D dead at age 26

DJ was an innovator in ghetto-tech music

David (Disco D) Shayman was the kind of young musician who would lend a shoulder to his friends when they were going through life’s low moments. It was nothing for Shayman to repeatedly check in and offer encouraging words.

The Ann Arbor-bred DJ and music producer who made his name as an innovator and DJ in the ghetto-tech scene — and went on to work with big-name hip-hop stars such as 50 Cent and Chamillionaire — was found dead on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. He was 26. The cause of death was an apparent suicide. read more




Drink And Play Like Jimi?

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As if Jimi Hendrix lava lamps were not enough. Now you can drink the essence of Jimi and get the energy to play like him!