It wasn’t long ago that a fellow musician and I were having coffee near Cowles Mountain and trying to figure out Scott Tournet’s new project. We’d both listened to his new album with his new …

They started in college in 1967 as a Top 40 cover band. They called themselves the Big Thing. There were seven of them, and their original songs showcased the opposite sides of the band: tight-assed …

“No, this is not the sort of thing that you’d expect to hear in the library.” Laurie Bailey is the arts, music, and recreation librarian at the Central Library in East Village. She’s talking about …

By the time Marc Ford hits Ramona, his new album, The Vulture, will have been released. And some of the critics who had written him off before are now saying he’s making the best music …

“I think I’m done with music. I’ve taken it as far as I can.” Riot House Records label owner and bassist/guitarist Brian Jenkins has joined the growing list of hometown musicians-turned-filmmakers with the release of …

Are we all not musical descendants of the Beatles? Or, have too many spins of Abbey Road left an indelible impression on one’s ability to hear music in any other way? There’s a distinctive Fab …

And now for some banjo love: many have tried to make that instrument cool and failed. Danny Barnes, 55, from Temple, Texas, claims to not be affected by the limitations of it. And there are …

Peter Sprague alone on the small stage is enough. But double down by putting the show in an arts venue where there is no bad seat, and add Leonard Patton, Nina Francis, and Gregory Page …

As a recording unit, Cosmonauts are so tied in to pop culture’s past that they sound like many eras and genres all at once. The dudes can shift around from jam-band stuff not unlike demos …

Drought cost him 20 percent “Here? I do the trimming, the fertilizing, watering, and so on. This client, a commercial storefront on Herschel in La Jolla Village, wanted to save on watering, so they had …

When that whole indietronica thing broke big, it was everywhere. It seemed oddly familiar, and friendly, as if it had always been around. It hadn’t, of course. Part of it was media push: during the …

“This is the one that officially makes me feel old,” Bart Mendoza says. Manual Scan, the band he started right out of high school with a few of his friends, will play their 40th anniversary …

The Seratones, from Shreveport, Louisiana, are touring now in support of their debut album Get Gone. Each of the bandmembers has managed, in their short lifetime as a functioning unit, to incorporate at least half …

“Sean Davenport and I decided to move to New York.” Michael Alan Hams offers this as the main reason behind Hills Like Elephants’ recent disbanding. Two days after the August 25 release of Tacet, the …

“I’m a songwriter,” Natasha Kozaily explains. “And when I teach music to my private students, I encourage them to write songs.” Not so much the method-book approach, the 30-year-old says about the curriculum at the …

Sam Outlaw, the country singer from Los Angeles, presents something of a cultural paradox. Country-music haters complain that their music’s lost whatever authenticity it may have had back when Merle Haggard and Patsy Cline and …

“End of an era. The neon sign is up for grabs. If interested email,” @BarDynamiteSD tweeted on August 10. A couple of weeks later, the new construction dust had barely settled inside the dance club …

For those among you who never had the pleasure, the Tedeschi Trucks Band is about as close as you will ever come to approximating a 1970s spectacle known as the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour. …

Who does Deep Purple, Stevie Wonder, and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi all have in common? That would be Glenn Hughes, the singing bassist from Los Angeles by way of England. One loses track of how …

The sound of being pissed off, along with bad hair, leather jackets, black T-shirts, craftily damaged jeans. Rebellious vocals, same timeworn guitar chords, and the old one-and-three ground-pounders coming off the drums. Sound familiar? Not …

A stray dog for Christmas Without a safety net: JoAnne (not her real name) earns $12 per hour driving a shuttle for a major auto dealer. She also drives Uber and Lyft on the side …

Through classic-rock radio’s reliance on one song, over the decades Foghat has been reduced to a footnote in the pantheon of rock and roll. Listeners young and old seem never to tire of hearing, yet …

Yeah, that’s his real name. Kurt Samuel Vile, from Philadelphia, fronts a psych-pop band called the Violators and he plays his guitar with banjo-like sincerity. That was his first stringed instrument, the banjo, and he …

Although you wouldn’t know it by the way he plays the blues, Gary Clark Jr. calls Michael Jackson’s Bad tour one of his earliest musical influences, perhaps the first big push that had him playing …

Yes, they are getting on in years, but, somehow they don’t sound like it. Indeed, the Jayhawks — now touring in support of their latest release, Paging Mr. Proust — could just as well be …

“Superstars in the making,” is what Los Angeles tastemakers KROQ radio once called them. Bad Suns is a young band (ages range from 20 to 23), and they started in a garage in a Los …

“Candye Kane was a great musician.” Guitarist Serena Geroe, age 15, admits she never saw the late blues diva perform live but says she follows her on YouTube. In July, the band that Geroe fronts, …

Something to see, when the dude pulls off a headstand using his big fat red Gibson as a counterbalance, and not missing a beat while grinding out a note-for-note textbook-perfect guitar solo. The deep back-bends, …

“Joel was once the director of photography on a film about a guy who had a watermelon for a head,” filmmaker Jared Callahan tells me by phone from Atlanta. Joel P. West, member of local …

He was about to quit music three years ago, the folk singer Joe Pug claimed to anyone in the media who would listen. And, there were many. A couple of years earlier he’d ditched school …

Sonny Smith seems like one of those individuals who has no trouble whatsoever bending people to their various whims. One example: half a dozen years ago, the Bay Area author/songwriter/filmmaker invented 100 bands, none of …

An 80-year gig: jazz-guitarist Mundell Lowe was with Peggy Lee at the White House in 1970; he played Playboy Jazz in the ’80s when it still meant something; spent years as music director with the …

Toots and the Maytals have been coming around for so long now that news of their arrival is taken in stride, much like the way one might embrace a change of season or impending weather. …

“I’m getting my old band back together.” Diana Death is jet-lagging from her recent trip to London and back. She tells me the original plan was to travel as part of the El Vez Punk …

Doubtless that anybody in the Green Circle Bar in San Diego in 1993 heard a future Rolling Stone when the house deejay introduced his latest project, a collaborative between the turntables and live music he …

This band Giuda is for real. No, not a sardonic comedy act, although when I first heard them I thought they were jesting a couple of my favorite eras in pop music — punk and …

They got older. And as a band, they got better. But, where does Nada Surf fit into the bigger picture today? There’s good argument that Nada Surf is a one-hit wonder. Lightning struck only once …

And now, here’s Tom Brosseau on the radio, on NPR, and while a listener does not straightaway recognize the cadence and distinct voice, there comes that smile of recognition when the identity is finally laid …

The Schizophonics blast the compilation Hardcore Matinee wide open with a two-minute scree of post-punk rock violence called “Red Planet,” which sets the tone for the 21 original tracks to follow from hometown artists such …

David William Kearney, from Houston, tells many entertaining stories about music-industry luminaries such as Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Guy and Guitar Slim, and for all I know, they’re true. Even though his own star never …

The keyboard player from a long-defunct San Antonio band digs deep into his memories to come up with the last time he played San Diego. “I think it was back in the ’90s,” says Augie …

Fat Lando’s Chili 2 cups corn 2 cans kidney beans 20 oz can tomato sauce Chopped tomatoes Onion – one cup chopped Garlic – to taste Bell peppers – two cups chopped 1 pound ground …

Don’t let the name the Funk Ark fool you. Taken together, the words funk and ark imply some kind of salvage of the old-school (James Brown, P-Funk, Maceo Parker). Not the case. The Funk Ark …

"Records Collecting Dust is a documentary centered in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,” says Jason Blackmore. “Those were the three cities I focused on the first time around, on the underground punk-rock scene …

“That would be the goal that I’d like to achieve. Longevity.” Brendan Boyle bought Folk Arts Rare Records from the owner/founder, Lou Curtiss, who was an old man at the time of the sale. Boyle …

No, jazz is not dead after all. While a fairly recent Nielsen rating revealed that jazz listenership in America had sunk to a comatose low, I predict that the art form will survive well into …

If all goes according to plan, by the time Music Band plays here in April, their debut full-length will be a couple of weeks old. For reasons unknown, the band picked April Fools’ Day as …

Who’s killing the great parrots of Ocean Beach/Point Loma?

“I’m gonna just lose it. I’m gonna give people a reason to talk about what they saw.”

Enough bands like the Shelters, and Los Angeles could come back to its former glory days as the bull’s eye of the rock-and-roll business. It used to be that way until the digital age scrambled …