Greg Burk

Border Garde

Greg Burk
“I think artists need to draw attention to the things that are overlooked. We’re here to be an outside voice, in the same way shamans and medicine men used to be.” Well, Kraig Grady is part Ojibwe Indian, a tribe that values dreams. Medicine man? Maybe: He has a little......
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The Gospel of Charles

Greg Burk
Charlie Parker’s mid-‘40s sessions are the bop New Testament; everything after is just commentary. The Jesus role of course belongs to saxophonist ”Yardbird“ Parker, whose eight-CD The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings (1944-1948) (not omitting his crucial 1945 Guild and Musicraft sessions with Dizzy Gillespie and some less canonical......
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A Little Bit of Chaos

Greg Burk
Summer Saturday evening at West Hollywood’s Schindler House. Flat ’20s Modern architecture. Pre-televisional vibe of dead artists who once drew lines here. The concrete interior retains the bake of the departed sun; the courtyard lawn is cool after watering. It’s a night of solo horns, played from inside the house,......
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A Little Bit of Chaos

Greg Burk
Photo by Debra DiPaolo Summer Saturday evening at West Hollywood’s Schindler House. Flat ’20s Modern architecture. Pre-televisional vibe of dead artists who once drew lines here. The concrete interior retains the bake of the departed sun; the courtyard lawn is cool after watering. It’s a night of solo horns, played......

The Elixirs

Greg Burk
”A man tells his personal truth, with such loving passion and honesty and intelligence and fire, and ecclesiastical everything-he‘s-got, on his knees. And it transforms the mundane, it transforms the molecules.“ Charles Lloyd. Improvising. ”There is no time, there is now. When I hear these guys playing in the now,......
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Fuckin’ Z

Greg Burk
Dodger Stadium, day after Memorial Day. The security and publicity folks are a little keyed up: They‘ve just heard Zakk Wylde torture his electric guitar through the sound check for his imminent rendition of the national anthem. How was the rehearsal? ”Definitely . . . different,“ says a straw-hatted security......
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What the Hell?

Greg Burk
Photo by John Eder You know what’s gotta be the toughest thing about being Rob Halford? Though he’s been screaming the metal message for nearly 30 years, every time he does something new he has to go around explaining himself again. Like, he’s got this just-released album, Resurrection (Metal Is......
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Selling Really Weird Music

Greg Burk
It’s a club. It‘s a brand. It’s a religion. It‘s the Knitting Factory, and it’s coming to Hollywood. KnitMedia, the Knitting Factory‘s corporate entity, is an exponentially reproductive mini-empire named by Inc. magazine as one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies. Okay, now put that fact alongside the New York club‘s......
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Big Love

Greg Burk
The first thing I see, on the hotel-room floor by a little table, is a pair of Nikes, each one as big as a birch-bark canoe. Nobody’s come out of the bedroom yet, so, what the hell, I peek inside a shoe. Size 18. Then arrives the footgear’s owner. Still......

Don't Read This Story

Greg Burk
Photo by Debra DiPaolo YEAH, HE'S PRETTY QUIET. PIANO IS ITALIAN for quietly. Brad Mehldau gets heard, though. Because: He turns old tunes into bright new lamps. He writes songs that mean something. He catches fleeting moments and holds them up -- see, this is what it is. He's a......