Greg Burk

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Ghosts

Greg Burk
GHOSTS Musicians wake up in a sweat, feeling the grip of Armstrong and Parker on their clavicles and wondering how to keep peace with the ghosts. It’s a dread responsibility, and few pull it off with as much triumphant joy as Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Jazz Orchestra under James Newton......
Hypocrisy

Nile and Hypocrisy

Greg Burk
NILE, HYPOCRISY at the Key Club, January 19 The trailer-trash metallurgists of Sweden look, talk and twirl their hair just like ‘Merica’s, but they often play better, because they’ve done more time. On the road, I mean. Extant for some 15 years, Hypocrisy drive home the essential metal stakes as......
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Welcome To L.A.

Greg Burk
WELCOME TO L.A. Welcome to L.A. gets this city right. The Alan Rudolph film, starring Keith Carradine, came out in 1977, when pianist Billy Childs was 20. Maybe Childs saw it. It reminds me of his music. In Welcome, soft light soaks everything, even when it’s dark. Surfaces are important,......
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Lou Rawls, 1933-2006

Greg Burk
There was never a more complicated time to be an African-American entertainer than the early 1960s, when Lou Rawls’ populist soul was hitting mass saturation. On his 1962 Capitol recording of Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue” — which the great border-crosser Louis Armstrong had already milked — Rawls moaned, “I’m......
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400 Blows, Free Moral Agents, Labwaste

Greg Burk
400 Blows, Free Moral Agents, LabwasteThe Echo, January 6 Near chaos on the second of two showcase nights from the Gold Standard Laboratories label. This is an imprint for artists who dance on the edge, and sometimes, yeah, they fall over. Labwaste is an MC in a hard hat and......
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Rock Like an Egyptian

Greg Burk
Part One: The Resurgence of Nile-ism The day after the planes hit the towers four years ago, Bush shoulda converted to Islam. Same God, what’s the problem?Instead, just like in one of those reelybad cinémas d’horreur, George blew the lid off hell, releasing all the Mideast’s demons and undamming a......
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Hard and Harder, Abstract and Abstracter

Greg Burk
Metal-Plus Top 14What a phantasmagorical year for metal.Cephalic Carnage, Anomalies (Relapse). Out of Colorado, a wondrous horror of disciplined textures. Weed as study tool.Behemoth, Demigod (Olympic). Poland exports dark complexities that engorge the faithful. You shoulda beheld the awe that greeted drummer Inferno at the Key Club in December. And......
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In Memoriam: Derek Bailey, 1930–2005

Greg Burk
Derek Bailey died on Christmas at age 75. It seems strange that such a pleasant, thoughtful Englishman was one of the most radical improvisers on his instrument, the electric guitar. But trailblazers are not always terrors.I interviewed Bailey by phone from his London home four years ago, when he was......
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Metal Memoir

Greg Burk
Buy this rock chick a beer and let her blab, cuz she’s fun to hang out with. Is she disillusioned with her few years scribing on the tattered outskirts of the ’80s–’90s Hollywood metal scene? A little, maybe, but in Nërd Girl Rocks Paradise City, Anne Thomas Soffee disposes of......
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Laptop Laserium

Greg Burk
It was such a rush at the 1967 high school homecoming dance when the dudes from Electric Light Visuals projected vermillion and ocher oil blobs on the gym wall and gooshed them around while the Sonics trudged out the caveman chromatic riff to “The Witch” — and we weren’t even......