Jacob Fred will be at Dulcinea's in Denver on July 2nd at 9pm (a Wednesday unfortunately). The only other Colorado appearance that has been announced is August 27th (another Wednesday) in Steamboat Springs.

Rumor has floated around that the Fred is avoiding Colorado because of the small crowds they get at the show, so if you can possibly make it (even if you have to leave early) you should - in the hope that they will be inspired to add a few more dates to their busy schedule. Tell your friends!

SKERIK'S SYNCOPATED TAINT SEPTET: DATE SET: JUNE 24TH SKERIK (n.insane seattle sax hero. see, ie, garage-a-trois, critters buggin, mad season, les claypool). SYNCOPATED (vt. to place the accents on beats that are normally unaccented). TAINT (n. a trace of something bad, offensive or harmful. SEPTET (n. any group of seven persons or things. skerik's syncopated taint septet - coming june 24th from the outrageous side of Ropeadope.

...because he's releasing his first 'solo' album on my Birthday on Ropeadope.

In avant-garde jazz circles in the mid-1960's, Henry Grimes was one of the most respected bassists working. Trained at Juilliard, he had already played with Anita O'Day, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins when he was in his 20's.

He went on to play on some of the seminal albums of the free-jazz era, by such musicians as Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders. He was known for his ability to alternate from long Eastern-sounding bowing to hard pizzicato plucking, all of which generated tremendous calluses on his hands.

But in the early 70's, after moving to California, Mr. Grimes disappeared. For three decades nobody in music circles heard from him. Several reference works listed him as dead.

And that is how the story of Mr. Grimes might have ended if it were not for a determined fan from Athens, Ga., named Marshall Marrotte

Henry Grimes played at the Vision Festival in NYC earlier today. The New York Times covers a bit of the story, but I read the whole thing a few months back when Mr Marrotte told it in Signal to Noise Magazine. If you don't already subscribe, you should.

I have been neglecting my music category for a while now. This must change. As an extremely nerdish audiophile, I have, for many years, eschewed mp3 players as a waste of money. I was wrong, or at least I'm now wrong. The new iPod's are the bomb. A few weeks back, I bought one. I have not regretted it. The AAC encoding provides an audibly superior advantage over MP3 rivals. I have a very hard time distinguishing it from CD in most cases. In addition, over the last few weeks, I've discovered that the convenience of being able to carry a good portion of my CD collection - in an extremely listenable format - in my shirt pocket just frickin rocks!

More importantly, as I've posted previously and continue to believe, the iTunes Music Store might just save the music industry. Along these lines, here is a list of albums, or partial albums, that I've purchased from the iTunes Music Store:

• The Donnas - Spend the Night
• Praxis - Transmutation
• The Bad Plus - These Are the Vistas
• The Streets - Original Pirate Material
• Tony Williams - Turn It Over
• The Mighty Mighty Bosstones - Live From The Middle East
• Sonic Youth - Sister
• Cibo Matto - Stereo Type A
• Afroman - Because I Got High (just the one song because that shit is funny)

All of these items are things that I was on the fence about purchasing or were for backfilling my current CD collection with things I used to have on cassette. I probably never would have considered them if they were more than $9.90.

If anyone is on the fence about purchasing an iPod, just do it. Apple has a huge winner on it's hands, and combined with the iTunes Music Store, could very well own the online-music biz for quite a while unless something changes quickly.

Let's face it, CDs are a pain. They are a great way to store your data, but when you have hundreds, or even thousands of CDRs and not much physical space, storage becomes a problem. With the advent of DVD+/-Rs DVD-RAM and Blu-ray this problem will not go away, since we all will collect thousends of those in the coming years. Jewel cases take up too much space; CD folders are better, but still wasteful (and expensive); and spindles are great, but you can't find anything. I've toyed with the idea of buying paper CD envelopes, and fill up a couple of old-fashioned 5 1/4" floppy cases with CDs (those were efficient: 200+ floppies in a plastic shoebox!), but there may be a better solution out there. So, Slashdot: how do you store your CDs?

Holy crap! Something useful on Slashdot!

A good thread on various and sundry ways to store your cd's.
Music From Wozz
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Everyone who has TiVo (TIVO) loves TiVo; it is to television what Macintosh was to computing -- a revelation. Which is exactly why Apple (AAPL) should buy TiVo and once again redefine the intersection of culture and technology.

This is a very interesting idea. TiVo has already announced they will be using Rendezvous, allowing TiVo's to access media files stored on a Mac. And Steve Jobs has demonstrated he has at least some influence with media companies through Pixar and the recent Apple Music Store. Can Steve Jobs resolve Big Media's concerns with TiVo?

The music service Jobs unveiled is a delight. Called the iTunes Music Store, the service -- it's available only on Apple machines for now but will be ready for Windows "by the end of the year" -- is fully integrated into the company's jukebox software. Users can search for songs to purchase in the same way they'd look for songs they already have on their machines. The system is foolproof: You type in a name, a song comes up, and you press a button to buy it. That's it. You're in the hole for 99 cents for each song you download ($10 for each album), but you see none of the transaction details; all the purchases are "one-click." And here's the stunning thing: Once you've bought a song, you own it. You can do (pretty much) whatever you want to do with the songs you download, including burning them to CDs, transferring them to iPods, or sending them to other Macs.

$0.99 a song, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it when you're done - legally! The system uses AAC rather than the popular MP3 format - and at the same event, Jobs announced new ipods (and upgrades for existing ones) to handle the new format. AAC allegedly provides higher quality in less space than MP3. Itunes 4 (with Quicktime 6.2) can encode to it for those wanting to take advantage. I've put off the purchase of an MP3 player, since I haven't been happy with the sound quality, but the combination of better quality, and cheap music may push me over the edge. The new ipod's come out Friday.