For the second episode in the Jazz in the Present Tense series here at Stormy Mondays, we’re pointing our ears across the Atlantic to hear what Europe has to offer. First is beat master/keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft, who is featured in the Icons Among Us documentary that was the inspiration for this series, with the late night breathy vocal vibe of You Might Say.

Britain’s Polar Bear released a concept album for its self-titled disc so I’ve included the first two tunes here which cover both the fun, fluid horn-centric side of the band and the deconstructionist madness too–the disc is worth hearing in its entirety. Also from the Isles is Led Bib with the excellently and appropriately titled Squirrel Carnage, and then it’s Norway’s young organ trio Solid with Complicated Shoes. They know how to title their tunes over there. Guitarist extraordinaire Wolfgang Muthspiel gets help from my favorite drummer Brian Blade on the beautiful Gnadenwald from a show in June of 2006, and we finish out with acid jazz mainstay The James Taylor Quartet and their killer rendition of The Theme from Starsky and Hutch. Get your dose of Huggy Bear, and as always, enjoy!

• CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS WEEK’S MIX

With Thanksgiving now behind us and Hanukkah and Christmas quickly approaching, we thought we’d get into the holiday spirit. While there isn’t too much we’ve found this year in the way of hipster holiday music, we will put our stamp of approval on Bob Dylan’s oddly enjoyable first foray into the realm of yuletide tunes – Christmas In the Heart.

The 15-track set, the 34th studio album in Dylan’s long and storied career, mixes the traditional classics with a handful of originals.  All proceeds from Christmas In The Heart will benefit Feeding America, a charity which provides food to over 25 million people in the United States each year. Last week Dylan released the video for the bawdy, polka-infused barroom number Must Be Santa that features Zimmy at a raucous 1950s-era Christmas party in a top hat and long-haired wig. Yup, you read that right…

Jim DeRogatis has a long-held reputation as a firebrand, and he’ll be the first to remind you he’s more than a bit of a contrarian. But we’ve always found those labels a little disingenuous, especially for someone so obviously passionate about not only music, but about being as much reporter and informed critic as opinionated scribe.

In a music critic landscape circa 2009 that’s as much lazy, laurels-resting old hands as unedited, brutally overwrought bloggers, credit the man for valiantly bucking both trends. He’s best known as the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, but DeRo is also a prolific author, blogger and, with Greg Kot, his opposite number at the Tribune, host of Sound Opinions, to us one of the few music radio talkshows that’s as informative as it is passionately music geeky.

This fall came his latest book, a visual history of the Velvet Underground called The Velvet Underground: An Illustrated History of a Walk on the Wild Side (Voyageur). We caught up with DeRo a few weeks back on that and other pressing topics.

HIDDEN TRACK: Being a well documented Velvet Underground fanatic, this must have been a fun one for you. Tell me about the genesis of this book.

JIM DEROGATIS: Voyageur Press has been doing a number of coffee table art books devoted to bands and memorabilia. They did one on Led Zeppelin and I’d contributed an essay on “Houses of the Holy” to that. They had this notion of doing a Velvets art book and they called me up and said could you do the connective tissue historical essay and corral some other writers, and I said, well shit yeah, Merry Christmas. They’ve very generously put my name on the cover.

I have a shelf full of a dozen if not more Velvets and Lou Reed and John Cale books, but being even a huge fan as I am, there is a tremendous amount of artwork in this book that I’d never seen before. It’s nice to be given that context to do some of the writing. The goal wasn’t to do a definitive history for fans, it was to show them a lot of the art they hadn’t seen before, rounded up in one place.

READ ON for more of Chad’s chat with Jim DeRogatis…

On Thursday morning at 9AM, you’ve got a tough choice to make. Hopefully you’ve got DVR and won’t have to pick between Biography’s profile of Jerry Garcia and Palladia’s airing of The Last Waltz. If you don’t have DVR, watch The Last Waltz at 9AM and catch the Garcia Biography re-airing at 3PM.

Monday, November 30 [All times ET]

• Wetlands: Story of an Activist Rock Club [Sundance 10:15AM]
• Classic Albums: Nirvana’s Nevermind [VH1 Classic 2PM]
• The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night [VH1 Classic 4PM]
• Woodstock: Now & Then [VH1 Classic 7PM]
• David Letterman: Weezer [CBS 11:35PM]

Tuesday, December 1

• Film: Woodstock [VH1 Classic 3PM]
• Fleetwood Mac: Soundstage [Palladia 5PM]
• Elton John: Me, Myself and I [Palladia 7PM]
• David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust [VH1 Classic 11PM]
• Carson Daly: Cold War Kids [NBC 1:35AM]

Wednesday, December 2

• The Who: Quick Ones [Palladia 9AM]
• US Music Festival: Part 3 [VH1 Classic 11AM]
• Jeff Beck: Live at Ronnie Scott’s [VH1 Classic 3:30PM]
• KISS: Extreme Close Up [VH1 Classic 5:30PM]
• Spectacle w/Elvis Costello: The Police [Sundance 10PM]

Thursday, December 3

• Jerry Garcia: Biography [Biography 9AM]
• The Band: The Last Waltz [Palladia 9AM]
• Grace Slick: Biography [Biography 10AM]
• Jimi Hendrix: Biography [Biography 8PM]
• Conan O’Brien: Rod Stewart [NBC 11:35PM]

We thought we’d help you ease your way back into the work week with this hilarious video of The Muppets covering Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody…

The Muppets – Bohemian Rhapsody

After two completely different shows in Albany, Phish kept fans on their toes once again tonight at the Cumberland County Civic Center in Portland, ME. While there weren’t the crazy 20-minute-plus jams of Saturday night’s show, there were plenty of bust outs and fan favorites. The quartet played Meat for the first time since the summer of ‘03, Nellie Cane for the first time since the summer of ‘00 and dropped the first Weigh since December 30, 2003.

The show also featured a lengthy encore of Freebird, Carini and Waste. Freebird was performed a capella for the first time since December 29, 1998. For the first time this tour Phish gets two days off in a row before performing the first of three shows at Madison Square Garden starting Wednesday.

Phish
November 29, 2009
Cumberland County Civic Center
Portland, ME

Set 1: Possum > Down With Disease, Nellie Cane, Weigh, When The Circus Comes, Kill Devil Falls, Water In The Sky, Stash, Meat, Undermind, Mike’s Song > I Am Hydrogen > Weekapaug Groove

Set 2: The Moma Dance, Rock and Roll > Light > Crimes of the Mind > Pebbles and Marbles, 2001 > Golgi Apparatus > Cavern > Run Like An Antelope

Encore: Freebird, Carini > Waste

When you have a group of Phish-loving friends, you find all sorts of differing viewpoints on what and how Phish should play. Among the camps, you have those Phish fans who like anything the band does, you have those who are only impressed by the bust outs and those who couldn’t care less about the songs and just want the band to jam. Outside of a few instances of far-reaching improvisation – namely the Susquehanna Sand and the Merriweather 46 Days – Phish hasn’t strayed too far off script since their return in March…until last night’s second of two concerts in Albany.

Following a fun first set that contained a number of rarities and well-played originals, the band started the second set by jumping into the deep end of the pool – two 20-minute-plus songs that contained more peaks than the Alps. The set started innocently enough with Seven Below. After jamming on the main theme of the tune for a few minutes, drummer Jon Fishman changed the beat he was laying down while the other members of the band went off in different directions as well, leading to a bit of spacey dissonance. I thought the Seven Below jam had just fallen apart and that the quartet were about to end the tune, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

After a few quick minutes of each member traveling their own path, guitarist Trey Anastasio linked up with bassist Mike Gordon on a few gorgeous patterns of notes that got Fishman’s attention. What had been a dark, minor key jam had been transformed to a pretty major key jam as only Phish could do. At this point, Fishman, Gordon and keyboardist Page McConnell started to follow Anastasio’s lead, patiently building the gorgeous “butter jam.” That’s not to say the other members of the band rolled over, they each added all sorts of dark accents to add some depth to what Big Red was laying down.

READ ON for more of Scotty’s thoughts on Phish in Albany…

As I mentioned about Wednesday’s show, Phish concerts come in all different shapes and sizes, and that’s what makes them so appealing. What made last night’s show so great were all the curveballs thrown at various points in the show. Whether it was dusting off Jimmy Dale Gilmore’s My Mind’s Got a Mind of Its Own, busting TV on the Radio’s Golden Age to the delight of the indie segment of the fanbase or debuting the reggae-tinged original Tomorrow’s Song; the quartet kept fans guessing all night long.

As soon as guitarist Trey Anastasio barreled through the solo in AC/DC Bag it was clear he was firing on all cylinders and extremely excited to be on stage. Maze gave Anastasio a chance to channel all of his pent up energy for good as he delivered one rapid-fire run of notes after another. The first bust out of the evening came after a long discussion by Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon which ended with the band settling in on the first My Mind’s Got A Mind Of Its Own since 2004. The other bust out of the set was Two Versions of Me off of Undermind, which hadn’t been played since November 28, 2003. The line “no more Phish in the sea” was met smiles instead of groans as the state of the band couldn’t be better…for now.

There’s no doubt the first set was good, but the second set was where the magic happened. The fan-favorite My Friend, My Friend was met with cheers and hugs. The ensemble impressively nailed the tune. Out of the chaotic conclusion of My Friend came a song that had most scratching their heads at first. Then, many in the crowd started putting it together that Phish was covering TV on the Radio’s Golden Age. The band made the tune their own adding a light, happy jam at the end that had everybody pumping their fists.

READ ON for more from Scotty on Albany Night One…

After a spectacular two-night stand in Philadelphia, Phish returns to The Knick tonight for the first time since December 1, 2003. Phish first played the Knickerbocker Arena – currently named the Times Union Center – on December 9, 1995 and has returned to the venue a total of nine times leading up to tonight’s show. I’ll be offering my thoughts on the both Albany shows @YEMblog starting immediately. Other options for experiencing the concerts from home include Phishtwit and Hoodstream.

READ ON for the setlist once the show starts [via Phish.net]

I got down to The Riverside Theatre a little later than I’d hoped to last Saturday night for Widespread Panic’s second of three show in Milwaukee. Unlike the previous night’s show, I didn’t have a chance to talk to anyone near the Wharf Rat table about the soundcheck, so I walked in unaware of what gems Widespread Panic had worked out for the show. As I entered the venue the butterflies started as I wondered what tonight would bring.

Big Wooly Mammoth was a great way to start the Saturday night party in Brewtown. They jammed it into a Henry Parsons Died which gave Jimmy the perfect vehicle to stretch out his fingers early on. Because it’s a marathon, and not a race, things slowed down a moment for C. Brown, giving JB some room for storytelling in his very own special way. Where the first set took it to a new level, for me, was the Wondering>Porch Song combination as the band delivered spot-on versions of two songs that were high on my wish list.

Jimmy, JB, Todd, JoJo, Sunny and Dave then casually walked off stage to gather themselves and prepare to throw down for the second set at the completely sold out Riverside Theatre. Speaking of ticket sales, I walked through an area outside the Theatre on my way in and saw at least 20 hands in the air, each needing one or two tickets. Word has clearly spread that Panic always bring their a game to Milwaukee.

READ ON for more on night two of Widespread Panic in Milwaukee…