News
Yellow Dog Records to receive Keeping the Blues Alive award
We’re humbled to learn that we’ve been nominated for a 2016 Keeping the Blues Alive award.- This is The Blues Foundation‘s highest honor for “individuals and organizations that have made significant contributions to blues music”.
Although the award is supposedly for the record label, we know that it’s really a recognition of the the incredible talents of the musicians who we’ve been privileged to work with.- We’re thrilled to accept this award on their behalf and look forward every day to more great music to come.
The Claudettes: NO HOTEL for you
Chicago and New Orleans piano blues get a shot in the arm and Tin Pan Alley gets the hot-rod treatment, while ’60s pop-soul and French Yé-yé make ravishing returns on the The Claudettes‘ second Yellow Dog Records album NO HOTEL.
Chicago piano crusher Johnny Iguana (who has pounded keys for Junior Wells, Buddy Guy and rock cult heroes oh my god) and absolute wacko Michael Caskey (who has drummed with giddy glee for everyone from Chuck Mangione to Balkan fusion band Eastern Blok) make even bigger waves with the bravura instrumentals on NO HOTEL than they did with their 2013 debut Infernal Piano Plot…HATCHED! (“Like Keith Moon chasing a crazed, punked-up Little Richard” —Blues Music Magazine).
Piano licks inspired by Otis Spann, Mose Allison, Ray Charles and Bobby Timmons meet Minutemen’s “jam econo” ethos and Meat Puppets’ trippy echo as the band packs 16 tracks into the sonic whirlwind that is NO HOTEL. And at the eye of the hurricane: a mid-album set of sultry vocal songs sung in English and French by the band’s mesmerizing new member, Yana.
Though just 24, Nigerian-American vocalist Yana recalls Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt. An alluring singer/dancer on stage, decked out in stunning dresses, jewelry and head wraps, Yana brings her seductive powers to the studio here. She casts a spell with the throwback ’60s pop-soul (punctuated by a grinding blues-rock bridge) of She’s So Imaginary, then puts her own authoritative stamp on hand-picked ’60s French Yé-yé classics.
With NO HOTEL (named after the cruel phrase that appeared on the band’s most deflating venue contract offer yet), The Claudettes use drum sticks, piano hammers, style and swagger to strut from vintage landmarks to someplace new.
Introducing The Ragpicker String Band
Mandolinist Rich DelGrosso, Guitarist Mary Flower and multi-instrumentalist Martin Grosswendt have earned steady streams of praise for their outstanding string skills. Combined, these three have earned nine Blues Music Award nominations and enjoyed rave press reviews and top festival slots all over the world. And they do strum, pick and bow up a storm on their debut album together as the Ragpicker String Band — but it’s their tight trio harmonies that especially dazzle. The acoustic dream team summons the spirits of everyone from the Mississippi Sheiks and Blind Boy Fuller to Jim Kweskin and R. Crumb as their voices and fingers fly through the mists back to the golden prewar age of folk-blues.
Classics by the likes of the Mississippi Sheiks, Sleepy John Estes and Blind Willie Johnson — combined with new originals by Flower and DelGrosso — allow this virtuosically fearsome threesome to leaven their serious instrumental and vocal chops with social satire and mischievous humor. Just as Kweskin and Crumb filtered the songs and sounds of their prewar folk-blues heroes through their own modern sensibilities and considerable personalities, so do the Ragpicker String Band. Jump from a fabulously fretted, sublimely sung trip to the past like Trimmed and Burning to a laughing lament of modern times like Google Blues and you’ll find out what an uncommonly fine stew of traditional and contemporary ingredients they’ve cooked up. They even season it with a delectable dose of jazz via a conspicuously piano-less romp through Thelonious Monk’s standard Blue Monk. read more…