The Roots paid tribute to two musical legends with one inventive cover last weekend at UCLA’s JazzReggae Festival. By “go-go-fying” this take on the Beastie Boys’ Paul Revere, the Philadelphia natives honored both Chuck Brown and MCA. Ch-ch-check it out…
[via OkayPlayer]
The Red Hot Organization (@RedHotMusic) is prepping another compilation album to benefit the international HIV and AIDS awareness charity. Since 1990 the organization has tapped popular musicians to contribute tracks to differently themed releases. These albums often pair artists of varying backgrounds to perform collaborative tracks and the non-profit has tweeted some insight into one such combination.
Though the 2002 compilation Red Hot + Riot: The Music and Spirit of Fela Kuti focused on music from the Nigerian musician the above tweet indicates there’s more coming in tribute to the Afrobeat master. One such collaboration has Merrill Garbus of tune-yards (@tuneyards) recording with Questlove of The Roots (@questlove) and Ray Angry (@RayAngry) at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, New York (@bunkerbrooklyn).
We’ve compiled all of this week’s tour date announcements in one handy column…
We’re consistently impressed with The Roots and their ability to somehow find the time to not only be the hardest working band on late night, but also record and tour. If they’ve figured out some secret formula to slow down time or duplicate themselves I think we’d like to know about considering we all log time at full time jobs and manage to crank out content. Even when the Philly-based hip hop crew has some down time they manage to keep themselves busy, as on June 2 and 3, they will host their 5th annual Roots Picnic. The two-day event, which will take place at the Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing in their hometown, will once again feature an eclectic line up that leans heavily towards hip hop mixing classic, mainstream and underground acts like De La Soul, Kid Cudi and Shabbaz Palace, as well as a slew of indie-centric acts with St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs and a DJ set from LCD Soundsystem front man James Murphy all on the bill. Both single and two-day passes are currently on sale.
If you can’t make it to Philly to party with The Roots, then maybe you’ll be able to hit one of these recently announced tours…
Questlove sure took a lot of shit recently for The Roots‘ performance of Lyin’ Ass Bitch by Fishbone as the intro music when Michele Bachmann guested on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Now don’t get us wrong, he deserved some of the heat and he was naive to think that the move wouldn’t end up with his powers to pick intro songs usurped by NBC execs, which sucks for all of us.
[The Boss and Little Stevie's Reaction to Wiggle Waggle]
Fallon was put in a tough spot and even though the comedian seemed to throw Questo under the bus at points during the fallout from the incident, there’s no doubt Jimmy still has the utmost respect for the drummer. This was clear on Monday night during Fallon’s appearance on Rock Center.
The Late Night host told the tale of Bruce Springsteen’s visit to his show. During the interview segment, Bruce and Jimmy went over an old E Street Band setlist. One of the tunes on the setlist was Wiggle Waggle by Herbie Hancock and Springsteen asked The Roots if they knew the tune. The Roots said they didn’t, but a few minutes later when Fallon went to commercial the band started playing Wiggle Waggle to The Boss’s delight. Questlove pulled the tune up on YouTube and taught his band mates the tune by the time the interview was over. No rehearsal, no nothing – just another reason The Roots are the best in the business.
The Roots released the first tune from their upcoming album, undun, this week. The busy-bodied hip hop act has been heavily promoting the concept element of the record, which will retell the story of Redford Stephens - a regular guy turned criminal who died too young – using a “reverse narrative arc”. In other words, throughout the album the main character reflects on key points in his life – beginning postmortem and working his way backwards – to determine how and why he came “undun.” The thematic material sounds both ambitious and compelling with allusions to the topic of fate versus free will. Here is the second track on the album, Sleep.
On Tuesday night’s episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was one of the host’s guests and came out to the tune of Fishbone’s Lyin’ Ass Bitch as performed by the show’s house band The Roots. Of course Bachmann wasn’t familiar with the song and didn’t realize the intro music was a slight until every music blog wrote about the situation yesterday. Fallon wasn’t exactly pleased with the bashing and tweeted that Questlove “was grounded” and apologized to Bachmann. Today, Village Voice music editor Maura Johnston penned a wise piece on the fracas and correctly mentioned that the other candidates wouldn’t have been subjected to being called a bitch (or an equivalent) on national television.
I’m all for snark, and I’m certainly no fan of Bachmann, but Questlove was out of line on this one and put his boss, who has been extremely supportive of the drummer, in a bad spot. Plus, he’s making me feel empathy for Bachmann and that’s just not cool Questo.
Here’s a look at six other stories of note…
Finally, as Jeff mentioned in Tour Dates, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band revealed they will hit the road hard in 2012 in support of a new album. The big question on our minds is how do you fill Clarence Clemons’ role? Billboard put the question to E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren who replied, “I know, as always, he’ll do something special and classy as he’s always done, but that’s a real rough thing.” I tend to think Springsteen won’t bring in another horn player and will find a different way to emulate The Big Man’s sound. We shall see…
On Monday night, Bela Fleck and The Flecktones appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (@LateNightJimmy), performing Life in Eleven from their new LP, Rocket Science. Fleck (@belafleckbanjo) who is a relative newcomer to Twitter, let fans know before the show aired that he also sat in with The Roots (@theroots) for the entire show.
[via The Audio Perv]
After the taping, The Roots drummer Questlove (@questlove) tweeted out his extremely positive reaction to seeing The Flecktones in action, despite his tardiness in appreciating the group.
The Roots (@theroots) recently announced their new album, titled undun, will be issued by Def Jam on December 6. Their 13th full-length release will also be their first concept album, with ten songs telling the story of a character named Redford Stephens. Drummer ?uestlove (@questlove) started tweeting out information about what’s on the album, including a shot of the cover and even hinting that another album is only months away.
When Led Zeppelin tribute act Bustle In Your Hedgerow rocked Brooklyn Bowl in February, The Roots drummer Questlove took note of the group and mentioned he would rush the stage if they played In My Time of Dying. Questo finally got the chance to sit in with Metzger, Dreiwitz, Russo and Benvento last night when he joined them for two songs in the encore including The Wanton Song and Trampled Underfoot before his Bowl Train spinning session.
Questlove w/ Bustle In Your Hedgerow – The Wanton Song
[via NYCJamGal]
Bustle returns to Brooklyn Bowl tonight for the second of two shows.
Over the last few years, the legendary Booker T. Jones has experienced a bit of a career renaissance thanks in part to a couple of contemporary acts backing the influential organ player on his first studio albums in roughly two decades. In 2009, it was the Southern rockers the Drive-By Truckers, who gave the assist on the Grammy winning Potato Hole
Released early last month, The Road From Memphis
Stephen Colbert visited Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night for a special April Fools’ Day rendition of Rebecca Black’s Friday backed by The Roots. Colbert’s performance capped a week of the Fallon-Colbert Project that helped to raise $26,000 for DonorsChoose.org. Take a look…
As we’ve previously reported, on May 10 the legendary Booker T. Jones will release the follow up to his 2009 Grammy winning album Potato Hole
READ ON to check out the video for Booker T. and The Roots’ instrumental cover of Lauryn Hill’s Everything Is Everything…
In our continuing effort to keep you up to date on the summer festival season, we bring you news about The Roots Picnic. The one-day fest, hosted by The Roots, will take place on June 4 and once again returns to Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing in the band’s hometown of Philadelphia, PA.
Now in its fourth year, the event will feature an eclectic lineup that features Wiz Khalifa, Aerial Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Man Man, Little Dragon and more. Ever the gracious hosts, The Roots will also pull double duty that day as the backing band for Nas as well as Esperanza Spalding.
If you can’t make it to Philly for this all-day fest, then maybe you’ll be able to hit one of these recently announced tours…
Finally, as we’ve mentioned, The Monkees celebrate its 45th anniversary this year. As a way of marking the milestone, three of the band’s principal members – Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz – have announced that they will be hitting the road for the first time in a decade. The tour is promising a full multi-media experience, with the band performing “all of their ‘mega-hits’ and, for the first time ever onstage, songs rarely heard selections from their cult classic movie, Head
Filmmakers Jeff Baraka and Cam Be have put together a fascinating 10-minute documentary about The Roots, which profiles the human side behind the “band that never sleeps.” If you didn’t already love Questlove, you will after he details the group’s rise to fame on the back of lots of hard work.
[via Prefix]
For the second consecutive year, we concocted an innovative little experiment for our year-end Best Albums list. Instead of picking the old fashioned way, we opted for something a little different: a collaborative, collective list that incorporates the opinions of everybody here at HT.
To begin, we devised an all-encompassing list of well over 100 nominees, whereby most everything our contributors recommended made this list. Then, we invited our crew of writers to independently and blindly vote on each album within the list on a scale of 1 to 20 (20 = epic). We ended up with varying degrees of familiarity for the nominees as some folks voted on just about everything, while some ranked just a few. From there, we deployed our egghead algorithm for rating albums: (two times the average rating) + (the total number of votes). At that point, we took the top 25 highest scores and presto: Hidden Track’s 25 Best Albums of 2010. No bullshit, no big opinions; just the results.
Let’s kick off our week long countdown of our favorite albums of 2010 with numbers 25 through 21…
25) Sleigh Bells – Treats
Key Tracks: Tell ‘Em, Infinity Guitars
Sounds Like: Electric Guitars and Cheerleaders
The Skinny: Sleigh Bells came out of nowhere in 2010 to emerge as a break out of the highest order. Despite being a just a duo, the boy-girl tandem of Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss manage to slug out bombs with their stomping beats, cutting guitar attacks and anthemic vocal hooks. With Treats, Sleigh Bells have created a genuinely unique twist on amped-up party music.
READ ON for the next four albums in our countdown…
