This is the second time I have posted a video with Kate Davis, who has already cemented her future as a New York jazz club attraction, and I bet we’ll soon see her with the Boston Pops.
Category: Music
Special K3
HAPPY NEW YEAR from Kristel Verbeke, Karen Damen, and Josje Huisman!
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The British are coming to Boston… again!
HAPPY NEW YEAR! “One if by land, two if by sea, three if by music!” Andrew Sandoval‘s British Invasion Tour is coming to Boston! Thursday, February 26th. Denro and I will be front and almost center at the Wilbur Theatre to see and hear Peter Asher, Chad & Jeremy, Billy J. Kramer, Denny Laine (is in my ears and in my eyes) and members of the Searchers and the Hollies. This is going to be a fab show, for sure!
Glamming it up for Christmas
Four years ago (FOUR?) I posted Slade’s 1973 recording of “Merry Xmas Everybody“. Slade kept another Glam Rock Christmas record from reaching the top of the British Pop charts that year, from Roy Wood’s band Wizzard.
A Visit with Saint Nick
A couple of months ago I did a post with some Nick Lowe songs. Terry Gross had Lowe on Fresh Air yesterday.
Hearing Lowe’s new song “Christmas at the Airport”, it reminds me somewhat of the more recent compositions by Neil Innes.
Get me to the church on time!
For the first time in decades, this non-practicing Lutheran has attended a Catholic Church. Joe Sinnott’s son Mark told me we’d better not be late for Sunday morning Mass or Joe would give me heck. So I made sure we were there on time! Joe and Mark are in the area for the Super MegaFest Comic-Con in Framingham, MA, and I’ll be heading back there shortly.
A contemporary of Joe’s, the artist Ramona Fradon, is traveling with them. Ramona had a long and notable run drawing Aquaman for DC Comics, and I am a big fan of her work on “Super Friends”. Ramona was later hired to draw the comic strip “Brenda Starr”, which she did for fifteen years.
Speaking of Catholicism, if you’re a Silver Age fanboy you know that Joe inked Jack Kirby’s pencil art for Fantastic Four #5, the story that introduced the quartet’s most infamous villain, Doctor Doom. Get out a reprint of FF #6 (I assume if you have an original comic it’s sealed) and take a look at page #2. Most of that single page was inked by Joe, but everything else in the book was inked by Dick Ayers. Why? Because Treasure Chest, a publisher of comic books that were distributed to Catholic parochial schools, made Joe an offer he couldn’t refuse, to illustrate the life story of Pope John XXIII.
The story was released in serial form and now, for the first time, all of the installments are being collected in a single volume, scanned from the original art in Joe’s archives. This project, which means so much to Joe, is thanks to the hard work of Mr. James Tournas, otherwise known as Jimmy T., who ran a successful Kickstarter project to get the money together. See that $1500 pledge down on the right? I wonder who contributed that princely sum? 😉 There are 25 paperback artist’s proofs that were printed locally in Boston, and I’m looking at one of them right now. The final print run of 500 10″x15″ hardcover copies should arrive on (literally) a slow boat from China the first week of December.
Joe also has all of his original art to the story of the Beatles, authorized by Brian Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises and published in 1964 by Dell Comics.
It would have been great if a similar deluxe hardcover edition of the Beatles book were done, but a certain someone, through Apple Records, nixed it. “Saint” Paul said no, and so the decision was made for the Pope John book. A higher power than the Beatles must have been at work!