Oregon Music News

Vicki Green intro Welcome back to the Café at Artichoke Music for another OMN Coffeshop Conversation. I’m Tom D’Antoni, as you may know. Do you need a coach? Think about it. Wouldn’t that be nice? To have someone on your side who wants to help you improve your work….and can’t fire you? With me is Vicki Green who is a Performing Artist Coach. What’s that? That’s what we’re here to find out. In addi...

I always like it when I Have someone in the Artichoke Music Café who I’ve enjoyed and admired but have neve met. One of those people is Sarah Clare who is here in the Café with me. I’ve known about her for years for her singing with Dirty Revival. They were getting ready for a tour with Galactic when we all got smacked down with the virus. That has not stopped her. She’s been doing a lot of live-s...

Yes it’s me with a smoky voice not because I want to sound like Barry White (which I actually do want to) but because of the smoke. When we recorded this conversation with Michael Quinby, leader of the Roseland Hunters (I ask if there’s a chance they’ll get back together), all we had to worry about was the pandemic and the election. Michael was the leader, vocalist and guitarist for the Roseland H...

Steve Berlin, long-time saxophonist with Los Lobos, and a Portlander for years is in the Artichoke Café. He’s here to talk about the work on a new Los Lobos album and how he has spent all of this damned time off re-learning how to play the saxophone. After decades of playing it one way, he’s spent months learning a different way to play it. We’ll hear about that and a lot of other things. Hey, if...

Bill Frisell tells us about a dream that changed his life.

I am with Tucker Martine, one of the world’s best producers and recording engineers. I could read you the list of the people he’s worked with but it would take the rest of the podcast, and that’s only slightly exaggerating. Here are just a few, Roseanne Cash, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Don Henley, the Avett Brothers. I could go on but you get the picture. One of his most...

Lee Fields. came up in the 1960’s, did pretty well for himself, known as “Little JB” for James Brown because of his voice, his dancing abilities and because he was just downright funky. When disco hit, he wanted to remain true to his art, so he quit the business for a few years. He was a part of the great Soul music revival in the late 1990’s and hasn’t looked back since. He has a tight band he ca...

When you hear the start of this, you will notice that you're not hearing the Coffeeshop Conversations theme. Good catch. The regular theme doesn’t have men imitating birds and frogs. No, this is Martin Denny’s Quiet Village which ushered in a whole new thing when it was released in 1957…called Exotica. And it was. It was also a huge hit and so were the Martin Denny lp’s that followed. Well, today’...

The rather spectacular Lisa Lipton is in the Artichoke Café. She’s the Executive Director of Opera Theater Oregon and their principal clarinetist and so much more. She’s a very busy human. She has a live streamed event on her birthday, Tuesday August 25 at Polaris Hall which will feature Micah Hummel on drums, George Colligan on Piano, Mark Dubac on Clarinet, Camille Marie Sherman, Mezzo-Soprano,...

After a visit to Falcon Recording Studio last time, we’re back at the Café at Artichoke Music for episode two-hundred and fifty-six in the endless podcast series Coffeeshop Conversations. With me is Darrell Grant composer, pianist, teacher and central to Jazz music in Oregon for decades. He’s the Associate Director of the School of Music at Portland State University which has fueled the developmen...

Dennis Carter has been operating the Falcon Recording Studio on SE 15th Avenue for thirty-five years. He’s recorded much of the musical history of Portland. We’re in his studio because he has a client on the way over and that’s how our schedules fit. Like everyone in the music industry, including us, Dennis is looking for ways to keep the lights on. But when you sit here and think about the music...

Recorded message by the animator/filmmaker/cartoonist on August 10, 2010 at cartoonist John Callahan's memorial at the Mission Theater in Portland.

August 10, 2010 at the Mission Theater in Portland Oregon. It was pre-recorded for the occasion.

Jim Brunberg on getting money to save Oregon's music venues by Oregon Music News

I’m six feet across the table in the Artichoke Cafe from composer, producer, singer, multi-instrumentalist, mentor and scenemaker…the man who introduced the Dookie Jam to Portland and who has just finished a run of releasing twenty songs in twenty consecutive weeks with “What Is Love” Featuring Rain Ezra… I’m talking about Tony Ozier…that tall, lean gentleman who has been an important part of musi...

We are back to the Skype machine this week but we’ll be back at Artichoke Music next week with a conversation with Tony Ozier. Right now we’re going to talk with Lady A. Not the band that used to call themselves lady Antebellum, but the Soul and Blues singer from Seattle who has been calling herself Lady A for decades, has made many appearances in Portland including many times at the Waterfront Bl...

One of the busiest, most productive and most versatile musicians around here is Farnell Newton. It’s been way too long since Farnell has visited the podcast…five years, even. Are we that old? I guess we are. He’s back as trumpeter, composer, producer and label owner. He had multiple working ensemble before the tribulations hit. Those tribulations have not stopped him from composing, playing and st...

Karl Denson interview from 2013 / Waterfront Blues Festival by Oregon Music News

Today Portland Cello Project’s Skip vonKuske is in the Artichoke Music Café with me. That’s not the only ensemble he’s involved with. He has lots of projects and after we’re done talking you’ll hear a track from the latest album by Groovy Wallpaper, the duo he has with Don Henson. Skip has been pretty busy during the current tribulations. He’s been live-streaming, recording and writing but he miss...

Today we’ve got the two sides of drummer/composer Tony Coleman…or TC as he is known. He was BB King’s drummer for 35 years. He’s here in the Artichoke Music Café, six feet away and masked. I did an interview with TC a few months go for another podcast I was doing at the time and it centered on music. When the Black Lives Matter protests spread world-wide I knew we had to ask TC to come in and give...

It’s our second week back in the Artichoke Music Café. Today we’ve got Andrea Algieri from the band Mbrascatu. He’ll be performing Sunday, June 14 at 6pm as part of the OMN Live streaming series. Our friend Denise Kowalczyk wrote in an OMN story in June of 2012, “From Calabria to Firenze to Portland, Andrea Algieri's Mbrascatu is a fusion of the cobbled streets and cafés of the Old World and the c...

The last time we sat in the Café at Artichoke Music and recorded an episode of Coffeeshop Conversations was March 11th, nearly three months ago although it feels like another century ago. Well, guess what? Even though Artichoke isn’t fully open yet, here we are back in the Café and six feet away from Artichoke CEO Bob Howard who is full of news, not only about Artichoke but about the future of all...

Unless there’s a change of some kind…always a possibility…this will be the last in the series of Skype-recorded Coffeeshop Conversations (Not) @ Artichoke Music. Next week we’ll be back in the Café at Artichoke and I can be in the same room with the person I’m talking to. Thanks to Storm Large, Terry Currier, Jim Brunberg, Jeremy Wilson, Lloyd Jones, Andrew Woodworth and the others who have been g...

Back for another Coffeeshop Conversation (Not) @ Artichoke Music. It’s looking like we’ll be back in the Café for real in a couple of weeks. The café won’t be open to the public but I’ll be able to sit in the same room and talk with people. Today, continuing what we’ve been doing, checking in with folks to see how they’re doing and how they’ve been doing it, Lloyd Jones is on Skype with me. He’s g...

We’ve been checking in on folks to see how they’re doing during the current tribulations. We checked on Jim Brunberg, Jeremy Wilson, Storm Large and others and today we’ve got Music Millennium’s Terry Currier on Skype. They’re still open, doing curbside delivery but everything is tenuous. Life itself. They’re still getting new product in every week at Music Millenium so let’s find out how their do...