Gianluca Tramontana
Sitting with Fuzztones Co-founder Deb O’Nair
To celebrate psychedelic punk revivalists The Fuzztones 45th anniversary, Deb O’Nair – co-fouder and former keyboard player, takes Gianluca through a history of the band and the New York City downtown music scene of the 70s and 80s.
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This Is the Room Your Favorite Song Came From
LISTEN HERE This summer, Nashville was buzzing with the news that one of the most prolific music studios in a city full of them, RCA Studio A, had been sold to a developer who intended to tear it down and build condominiums. Studio A isn’t the only landmark in town — RCA Studio B, where Elvis recorded,…
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Honeyboy Edwards
LISTEN HERE Before he was a famous blues guitarist known as “Honeyboy,” David Edwards was a different kind of legend — a boxcar hobo. Gianluca Tramontana visited him on the South Side of Chicago.
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Cuban Organ
LISTEN HERE Music journalist Gianluca Tramontana took a bumpy, 8-hour bus ride from Havana to the remote eastern province of Granma —- the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane country — to find an extraordinary relic: a hand-cranked mechanical organ that is still the life of the party.
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The J&M Records Story
LISTEN HERE At the edge of New Orleans’ French Quarter sits the Clothes Spin Laundromat. Sixty years ago, rock ‘n’ roll took its baby steps there. As Gianluca Tramontana discovered, it’s a hidden piece of music history.
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Family Toasts John Phillips’ 66th
Actresses and singers Mackenzie, Chynna and Bijou Phillips hosted a small reception in New York on August 28th to celebrate the release of Phillips 66, their father John Phillips’ posthumous new album, two days before what would have been his sixty-sixth birthday (hence, the album’s title). The party took place at the Phillips Club on —…
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Peter Green Still Has Blues
Very quietly, blues legend Peter Green has just released Time Traders, the fifth release by his band the Peter Green Splinter Group since it began in 1996. The former John Mayall guitar player and founder of Fleetwood Mac was once a leading light of the British blues scene as well as author of some of the era’s classic tunes like…
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‘Wild Thing still gives me the chills!’ Chip Taylor
Aretha Franklin, Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin and dozens more sang his songs, which spanned country, rock, R&B and beyond. Now 83 and having treatment for cancer, Taylor explains why he’s still reaching for his guitar hip Taylor is best known for a song of restless raunchiness – the three-chord groin-thrust of the Troggs’ Wild Thing…
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‘Our government sees it as cute but unimportant’
Post-revolutionary France tried to stamp it out, but working class communities kept speaking it. Now Occitan powers a vivacious and political European music scene Gianluca Tramontana It’s May Day in Marseille, and beyond the celebrations – and the ongoing protests against President Macron raising the retirement age – another smaller but just as potent group…
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Keeping France’s Occitan language alive
Post-revolutionary France tried to stamp it out, but working class communities kept speaking it. Now Occitan powers a vivacious and political European music scene It’s May Day in Marseille, and beyond the celebrations – and the ongoing protests against President Macron raising the retirement age – another smaller but just as potent group are taking…
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