Trombone Shorty's love affair with New Orleans

At age 26, bandleader Troy 'Trombone Shorty' Andrews is the heir to a legacy of Crescent City musical royalty that includes Dr. John, the Marsalis family and the Neville Brothers. With a hip-shaking sound that mixes New Orleans jazz with funk, hip-hop rhythms and rock guitar, Andrews earned a Grammy nomination for his 2010 album 'Backatown,' which was the same year he earned notice playing himself on HBO's 'Treme.' His latest album features guest turns from Jeff Beck, Kid Rock and the Rebirth Brass Band, and Wednesday he performs at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the Neville Brothers' farewell tour. Speaking by phone between tours, Andrews talks about his beloved hometown and hints at some next moves.

What's the first thing you do when you come home after one of these long stretches on the road?

First thing I do, no matter what time it is, I run to my grandmother's house and try and get some New Orleans food that I've been missing. She always makes sure that she knows that I'm coming to town, and she always gets me some good food.

What was the experience like working on HBO's 'Treme'?

It's been really cool. . . [it's] one of the most exciting shows we've ever had to portray New Orleans culture. At first, [the work] seems very long and then when you look at it, it's maybe not even two minutes on the screen, but we took six hours to film it. But it's cool; I'm used to that. It just reaffimed some discipline I need when I go to practice. You know -- patience.

You grew up playing New Orleans jazz, but somewhere along the way you started incorporating other sounds such as hip-hop and rock into your music. How did that start?

When as a kid I was placed in different genres of music not really knowing that there was a difference. At 10 and 9 years old, I was at Cyril Neville's house listening to him play, and then my brother [trumpter James Andrews] would put me in situation where we were able to play onstage with Dr. John . . . and as a kid I just thought music was music. So when I made my music, I was just taking my experience of being in different genres without even knowing it.

It sounds like your record is as much a portrait of New Orleans as it is you.

Definitely. You can go down Frenchman Street and there's maybe 10 or 12 clubs right next to each other where you can go in and hear Ellis Marsalis to going down the street and hearing the rock band Cowboy Mouth and walking across the street to hear a traditional band playing music from the 1920s and '30s -- all just one minute apart. In New Orleans, we have no borders, no genres, everybody plays together.

What's the one thing people get wrong about New Orleans music if they've never been there before?

Well, one thing they would get wrong is some people come to sit down and listen to music from New Orleans. But that's not going to happen. If people are thinking that this is sit-down music -- even if you're going to listen to some of the traditional jazz bands -- they're playing in places with no seats and people are dancing. One thing I realized is New Orleans has a fan base itself, and people come to New Orleans and allow the music to take them wherever it's going to take them, and they just start dancing and parading around the streets with us. And they don't know what they're doing, but they know something in this music is connecting with their soul. It's something I've never experienced before, and I've traveled all over the world. It's really like a country inside of a country.

You've collaborated with an impressive roster of musicians in your career -- is there anyone on your wish list right now?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. I'd like to work with Trent Reznor. And I listen to Ministry, you know that band? And of course there's Stevie Wonder and Jay-Z, I'd like to work with those people.

I love the spectrum in going from Jay-Z and Stevie to Ministry.

Yeah, if you listen to my music you can hear some of that metal, hard rock influence on some of the instrumentals we do. I've played with country bands. The only thing I haven't really done is gotten up with a metal band onstage -- yet. I'm ready.

The Neville Brothers Farewell Tour with Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, The Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. Wed. 8 p.m. $1-$134 www.hollywoodbowl.com.

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Film of Elvis Presley's 1972 New York City concert on new reissue

An hour's worth of film shot by a fan during Elvis Presley's 1972 performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City will be included in a new 40^th anniversary deluxe reissue of the live recording from that show. The package also includes two of Presley's complete performances among four he gave over the course of three days in June 1972.

The film will get its world premiere Aug. 17 in Memphis, Tenn., a free event that's part of Elvis Week activities commemorating the 35^th anniversary of the singer's death in 1977. The box set, titled "Prince From Another Planet' from the headline on a New York Times review of the engagement, is slated for an Oct. 30 release. It was originally released as a single LP titled 'Elvis as Recorded at Madison Square Garden,' and it reached No. 11 on the Billboard album chart.

Using a hand-held camera, a fan filmed virtually the entire Saturday afternoon performance. The fan has requested anonymity and few other details about how his footage surfaced are available, according to a spokesman for Sony Legacy, which is releasing the package. 'Rarely is unseen footage of Elvis in concert discovered, so this footage lends historical importance to the package,' said a statement issued Tuesday by the label.

After making his national breakthrough from 1956 and 1957 appearances on New York-based television shows including Jackie Gleason's 'Stage Show,' Ed Sullivan's 'Toast of the Town' and 'The Steve Allen Show,' Presley didn't perform in New York again for 15 years until the Madison Square Garden shows.

The 'Prince From Another Planet' CDs include Presley's Saturday afternoon performance of 20 songs, and the evening show at which he sang 23 songs. The set lists were similar at both shows. His TCB Band included such respected musicians as guitarist James Burton, pianist Glen D. Hardin and bassist Jerry Scheff.

Presley also gave a 20-minute press conference on the day his Madison Square Garden stint began, accompanied by his father, Vernon, and his manager, Col. Tom Parker. That press conference also is part of the DVD portion of the three-disc set.

The Sony Legacy statement includes one exchange between a reporter and Presley: 'Which kind of song do you like doing the best?' he was asked. Presley responded: 'I like to mix 'em up.  In other words, I like to do a song like 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' or 'American Trilogy' or something. Then mix it up and do some rock 'n' roll, some of the hard rock stuff.  I'm not the least bit ashamed of 'Hound Dog' or 'Heartbreak Hotel'''

The two-CD, one-DVD box also includes extensive notes written by Patti Smith's longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye, who covered Presley's '72 performance for Cavalier magazine.

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Jonah Lehrer debacle lesson: Do your homework

The debacle of New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned from his job with the magazine this week after conceding that he had invented quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in his bestselling book 'Imagine: How Creativity Works,' leaves one glaring lesson: Do better homework.

In addition to Lehrer losing his job, his book is being yanked out of stores and has already disappeared from e-book sellers including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

A crucial part of Lehrer's thesis was that Dylan couldn't, or didin't want to, explain his creative process. The passage that brought Lehrer down had Dylan reportedly saying, 'I've got nothing to say about these things I write,' [Dylan] insisted. 'I just write them. There's no great message. Stop asking me to explain.' "

Lehrer, as has been widely reported, subsequently confessed to piecemealing together different Dylan quotes to get the one he used. He was called on the quote by longtime Dylan fan and Tablet magazine writer Michael C. Moynihan, who was trying to track down the source of the quotes Lehrer used.

Lehrer might have gotten exactly what he was after, however, if he'd researched a 2004 interview Dylan gave to The Times' then-pop music critic Robert Hilburn, which delved deeply into Dylan's creative process.

He spoke in depth about his own sources of musical and literary inspiration -- from Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, the Carter Family and Stephen Foster to such poets as Lord Byron, John Keats and John Donne to beat writers including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso.

At one point, he told Hilburn something very close to what Lehrer seemed to have been after: "I'm not good at defining things," Dylan said in 2004. "Even if I could tell you what the song was about I wouldn't. It's up to the listener to figure out what it means to him."

But he also did open up remarkably about how he viewed the art and craft of songwriting.

'I don't think in lateral terms as a writer. That's a fault of a lot of the old Broadway writers.... They are so lateral. There's no circular thing, nothing to be learned from the song, nothing to inspire you. I always try to turn a song on its head. Otherwise, I figure I'm wasting the listener's time."

Had he been more thorough in doing the research for his book, perhaps Lehrer could have been able to hold onto the success he seemed so desperately to want that he concocted quotes from the greatest songwriter of the rock era.

'How strange something like that messed him up,' Hilburn told me when I asked for his thoughts on the Lehrer incident. 'He didn't have to make up quotes about [Dylan] not wanting to talk about his music. Dylan talked about that all the time. Then to make up that excuse, which was easily checked. Sounds like a meltdown.'

Hilburn called the 2004 interview with Dylan one of the highlights of his 36 years at The Times, largely because, 'It was just amazing how open he was, and spending hours doing it.' He said Dylan spent close to six hours talking about songwriting when the two met over a couple of days while Dylan was on tour in Amsterdam.

'The thing that struck me was -- for all his mysterious, even elusive image/reputation -- he was so wonderfully generous with his time and comments,' Hilburn said.

A couple of things Dylan did say might be swirling through Lehrer's head now, such as this line from 'Love Minus Zero/No Limit': 'There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.' Or this one from 'My Back Pages': 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.'

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Quick Chat: Bon Jovi's David Bryan in theater mode with 'Memphis'

David Bryan calls his wife a "theater widow" for good reason. For the past decade much of his attention has been focused on "Memphis," the Tony Award-winning musical that begins a two-week engagement at the Pantages Theatre on Tuesday. He spoke to Pop & Hiss about how he balances Broadway with his day job as keyboardist for Bon Jovi.

What sparked "Memphis"?

[Playwright Joe DiPietro] was looking for a composer and he wanted a real rock 'n' roll guy, and not a theater composer that was going to write a rock score. I got a script in 2001 from an agent and I was immediately drawn to it.

Musicals take years to get to the stage. Was that frustrating, especially for someone coming from the rock world?

It took us eight years to get to Broadway, and [that span of time is] two rock 'n' roll careers (laughs). It's such a long, painful road. Every time you put up the production you learn from it. You make it better.

You're currently working on another musical?

Our next one, about the '60s and the Brill Building songwriters, is called "Chasing the Sun." We've started that process which is, once again, a long one. Hopefully, it's a little shorter because I have three Tonys on my mantelpiece.

Jukebox musicals have found success, but acts like Bono, the Edge and Billie Joe Armstrong are now behind original Broadway productions.

Oh yeah, it's funny when they jump into the game. I jumped into [it] nine years ago. When I first started there really wasn't rock 'n' roll in original scores. I mean Elton was doing it ["The Lion King,""Aida"], and Billy Joel for "Movin' Out" wasn't a score, it was his songs. I think because of our story, and what it has to do with rock, it really showed how important it was [to have original music].

How do you balance the demands of the music business with Broadway?

"Memphis'" is booked for over a year from now. [DiPietro] and I will start workshopping and developing "Chasing the Sun." The Bon Jovi record is next year; we're gonna put it out and tour. So 2013 won't be a lot of sleep, but it will be productive.

Review: Fiona Apple levels the Hollywood Palladium crowd

Just before Fiona Apple played her new song "Every Single Night" on Sunday, someone from the sold-out Hollywood Palladium audience ' perhaps one of the many young women in witchy lace dresses ' screamed at her.

It was hard to make out what the fan yelled, exactly. But it was panicked and earnest, and Apple, 34, took to the microphone to reassure her. "I thought you said you were feeling bad," she said. "So I was just going to tell you not to feel so bad."

This can happen at Fiona Apple shows, as she commands one of the most devoted audiences of misfits (alongside A-list fans like Kanye West) in pop music.

Apple's music makes private pain unifying. Over four albums, including this year's minimal and beguiling "The Idler Wheel '" she's remained an inimitable voice in pop with a writing style that dips into art song and R&B, deconstructed noise and chamber music purity.

But just as importantly, people come to see her: to see Apple's knife-wound stare and willowy frame channel wells of unnamable hurt, a feeling Apple calls her "second skeleton" in "Every Single Night."

That mix of astounding musicianship and emotional bloodletting puts her in rare company. Though names like Janis Joplin or Nina Simone are evoked far too often when a female singer-songwriter howls for the rafters or tears up a piano, those comparisons seemed entirely appropriate after Apple's astonishing Palladium set.

One of the first things Apple did when she walked onstage was apologize for being almost half-an-hour late. "I don't have any good excuse, I was just nervous," she said to appreciative laughs.

Apple's biography is rife with real trauma ' she's been candid about enduring sexual assaults and alcoholism. But onstage, she loves toying with (and detonating) the stereotype that she's always one flat tire or spilled drink away from a psychic fracture.

She opened with a volley of early-album cuts, starting with a take of 1999's "Fast as You Can" arranged as a Sonic Youth-style guitar barrage, then leavened with the blues-hall vamp "Shadowboxer." Her voice still shivers with low-end vibrato, but a decade-and-a-half in the pop spotlight added a reediness that only makes her more convincing.

The environment of "Idler Wheel" is a new setting for her, with arrangements pared back to a smattering of dissonant percussion and pings (the album was produced by her longtime collaborator Charley Drayton, whose engineering skills deserve their own Grammy). Freed from the bombast of previous records, they let her songwriting speak for itself onstage, revealing a Carole King-worthy melodicist on "Anything We Want," and a raw-nerve desperation on "Daredevil."

The set was surprisingly short on cuts from "Idler Wheel" (composing about a quarter of the night), but they gave the set its breathing room and intimacy.

Of course, Apple is also very famous, and will never entirely live down moments like her teenage-lingerie-orgy video for "Criminal" and her memorably acerbic 1997 MTV Video Music Awards speech. They created her public persona of a Crazy Chick, a reductive image that she's fought, subverted and embraced in alternating measure. As she sang on "Paper Bag," she's the first to admit such ' "I know I'm a mess he don't want to clean up."

But Apple's artistry is about making that mess into a coherent story. She closed the set with a fan favorite, her burn-the-house-down wail "Not About Love." One rarely hears such flayed, twitching emotion in a venue that size. To call those shrieks "primal screams" would to undersell the calculated, controlled ways she played them for high drama. Everyone in the crowd, not just the girls in green Renaissance Faire capes, looked leveled by them.

But her rage and range are so much wider than that. For an encore, she played one song, a pristine and devastating cover of Conway Twitty's "It's Only Make Believe." It summed up the one, pure need that runs through her music, and through all the best songwriting: "My only prayer will be, some day you'll care for me, but it's only make believe."

On Sunday, it wasn't.

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august.brown@latimes.com

Album review: Living large on 'God Forgives, I Don't'

Rick Ross

"God Forgives, I Don't" (Maybach Music Group/Def Jam)

Three stars (out of four)

Speaking recently to MTV, Rick Ross revealed the inspiration for "Diced Pineapples," a track from his new studio album, "God Forgives, I Don't." Last year, the portly, bearded Miami rapper suffered two seizures while attempting to fly to Memphis, Tenn., for a concert, and when he was leaving the hospital, Ross recalled, "the doctor told me, 'You gotta eat some more fruit, drink you some water ' and just relax for a little while.'"

Sound advice for the average Joe, no doubt. But for hip-hop's most fabulous fabulist ' a former Dade County corrections officer who now portrays himself as an untouchable drug lord ' the doctor's orders seem like risky business. Living larger than any of his peers ' and rhyming about it with little to no acknowledgment of its basis in fantasy ' is precisely what's enabled Ross to effect his unlikely transformation; he's succeeded by becoming too big to fail. Austerity measures would only weaken the bravado at the core of his act.

Happily, Ross declines to downsize on "God Forgives, I Don't," which arrives following a lengthy delay, presumably attributable to the rapper's health troubles. The new disc extends an over-the-top hot streak that began with 2009's "Deeper Than Rap" and includes "Teflon Don," from 2010; it's rooted in the same lush production sound and name-checks just as many ultra-high-end luxury brands ' even the Lear jet on which the second of his seizures struck.

"Five hundred for the car that I got on the strip / That's another hundred, what I got on my wrist," Ross boasts over a shimmering "Miami Vice"-style groove in "Maybach Music IV"; "Presidential," with a sumptuous beat by Pharrell Williams, describes the pleasure of "walking on Jewish marble."

For "3 Kings," Ross boosts the money talk further, hosting two pals from his rarefied tax bracket: Jay-ZandDr. Dre, the latter of whom uses the opportunity to rather artlessly plug his line of pricey headphones. Jay-Z is better ' or least more characteristically charming ' breaking down his negotiating tactics for an upcoming contract renewal with Live Nation.

Yet despite the satisfaction Ross obviously still takes in all this ' and despite how singularly good at it he remains, as in "911," where he beseeches the Lord to let him drive his Porsche to heaven ' "God Forgives, I Don't" reflects deeper stirrings. Ross isn't showing cracks in the facade he's built up so assiduously over the last few years; rather, it's an indication of his confidence in his back story that he's now looking to what happens next, as though the first several chapters were safely beyond reproach.

In "Ashamed," Ross grows reflective about his purported drug dealing over a dusty Wilson Pickett sample punched up by the pop-wise production duo Cool & Dre: "Maybe one day I could put this pain away," he raps, remembering his mother's struggle to raise a family on minimum wage, "Until then I'm-a be a D-boy, I'm ashamed to say." He treads similar moral-ethical ground in "Hold Me Back," a swarming goth-rap number that play-by-plays his introduction to the trade; it presents dealing as the only viable option for someone with an empty refrigerator and children to feed. "Everything went well ' I'm eating steak, no more soup," he reports after his first night on the job. "Then I parked the Capri, I went and got me a coupe."

There are self-aware moments here too that feel new for a Rick Ross record. In the low-slung "Pirates," he admits, "Fascination with fortune afford me mansion and Porsches," alluding slyly to a career that's become a kind of feedback loop. And in "Sixteen," he and André 3000 team up for a long meditation on how a rapper's standard 16-bar verse "ain't enough" to depict "exactly what life means to you" ' proof that Ross' unsatisfiable appetite is hardly limited to cars or cash.

Or food. If the song "Diced Pineapples" began as a bit of prescribed meal planning, it's become something else here: a plush encomium (with cooed chorus by Drake) for the latest lady in his life. It's not sweet, exactly ' not with the borderline-gynecological language he uses. But as Ross breathlessly enumerates the amenities she's in for ' "belt buckles" and "door handles" among them ' it's clear that far from chastening him, the rapper's midair brush with death only intensified his hunger. On this commanding, complicated album, he wants more out of more.

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Tomorrowland 2012: Avicii fireworks, Swedish House Mafia news

Sixty thousand dance devotees poured into Tomorrowland, the electronic music mega-festival in the Belgian town of Boom, for the kickoff dubbed 'Magical Friday,' many of them wrapped in the flags of their native countries and scant little else. A warm summer rain did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the crowd or their bright neon outfits, as Tomorrowland greeters dressed as "Alice in Wonderland" duchesses and wearing red velvet heart costumes welcomed them to the mushroom-decorated fantasyland of Flanders' De Schorre National Park.

Right away, the main stage acts made it obvious that this is not like the scene in the U.S., as a three-pack of Swedish DJ duos set the crowd in motion, including Qulinez, Cazette, and also Stockholm's Rebecca and Fiona, one of at least 13 female DJ acts to play Tomorrowland. That's a number not seen at other festivals, typically, and members Rebecca Scheja and Fiona Fitzpatrick both say they have to scrap for respect that's afforded automatically to their male counterparts.

'The audience is really excited because they've never seen [female deejays] before, but in the business, it's really hard because they don't take us seriously, because we drink and we're funny, but we're also producers and we're also girls,' said the pair in a Times interview on site. 'Everyone just wants us to sing on their tracks. We ask them [to collaborate], but they never ask us. Producers never ask how we produced that sound or what bass do you use. It's a prejudice.'

More on that, and Australian female duo (and twin sisters) Nervo, coming later.

All three Swedish openers spun just before a midday rain came shooting down. De Schorre, which is built in an old clay mining pit used for brick-making, seemed undiminished by the wet.  

Steve Aoki led the late-afternoon programming from the strobe-illuminated Dim Mak tent with his Fight Club posse by his side. Sheltered from the rain, thousands of damp sticky fans bounced to high-voltage bass while the Laurel Canyon native climbed on top of his deejay booth to hail the devoted crowd that returned homage with a lot of primal howling.

Aoki's set also featured a special guest as Lil' Jon stepped up to the stage, welcomed 'ladies and gentlemen' to Tomorrowland, and then tore into 'Turbulence,' an Aoki and Laidback Luke collaboration on which the king of crunk raps.

And while Aoki was ripping it at Dim Mak, you didn't have to trek far to catch legendary British deejay/producers John Digweed and Carl Cox at the Carl Cox and Friends stage, which featured a giant animated genie's face (a fixture of Tomorrowland decor) with creepy eyes that slowly panned back and forth over the crowd. It was a treat for fans to see Digweed and Cox share the same stage (though they did not play together) ' the two have long toured together and are close friends.

When the showers settled and the sun set, longtime electronic music icon Fatboy Slim turned in a classic two-hour set, then handed it over to Avicii, who opened his headlining set with a laser show and so many main-stage effects including fireworks that the lack of big bang during the finale featuring his tune 'Levels' was almost an anticlimax. Regardless, irrepressible dancing and uncontrollable fist pumping across a capacity crowd suggested otherwise.

The Bloody Beetroots, the wicked Italian electro house and dance-punk project, followed on the main stage and Zed's Dead, the young and multi-talented Canadian duo from Toronto, shut down the Dim Mak tent to close out the evening's bedlam. After the show, thousands of exhausted festival-goers funneled on to buses leaving the festival while the more fortunate who paid the extra money turned it into a late night at 'Dreamville,' the VIP overnight campsite.

Hopefully they also got a few minutes of sleep, as Saturday's lineup was looking like a dance stamina challenge, with Paul van Dyke, Sandro Silva, Laidback Luke, Skrillex, Sven Väth, Nervo, Martin Solveig, Dmitri Vegas and Like Mike, and what is set to be an epic performance by Swedish House Mafia ' quite possibly their final performance together as a trio. Stay tuned for more news on that as we can get it.

[For the record, 2:00 p.m, July 29: An earlier version of this post implied that Carl Cox and John Digweed played together onstage, but they did not. Also, earlier versions indicated that Avicii's set did and did not included fireworks, but it did -- but not during the finale. The earlier version also stated that Michelin-rated food for the festival was in the "Dreamville" VIP area, but these food offerings are elsewhere on the grounds.]

-- Adam Cucurull and Alessandro Stella also contributed to this report.

 

Lady Gaga vs. Carly Rae Jepsen is today's real competitive event

Forget that minor sporting business happening in London right now. Today's most cutthroat competitive event is actually the jokey Twitter flame war brewing between Lady Gaga and the current face of danceable chart-pop, Carly Rae Jepsen.

Jepsen, the 26-year-old Canadian singer with a metaphysically intriguing concept of relationship space-time, just notched her seventh straight week atop the Billboard Hot 100 charts with the inescapable "Call Me Maybe." This streak bests Gaga's record for "Born This Way," which lasted six weeks at the same spot last year, and Gaga is not taking it lightly.

The dance diva fired a tongue-in-cheek warning shot at the Bieber-aligned Jepsen today, promising "@carlyraejepson (sic) I SEE you just swooped in and broke my BORN THIS WAY record of the most weeks at #1....DONT GET COMFORTABLE IM COMING FOR YOU." 

She's not the only one. The U.S. Swim Team weighed in with a funny tribute, but Jepsen's also been fending off scurrilous rumors of a leaked sex tape and racy photos from a computer hack (she's denied the authenticity of the photos, and called the whole thing "ridiculous. Obviously not me."). Gaga, meanwhile, recently previewed new music in a surprise NYC parking lot listening session.

We know the two just met (on Twitter), and this is crazy, but can Gaga beat Jepsen's number? Call it a "maybe."

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London Olympics: Opening ceremony celebrates pop music

Watching the five-hour opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics was a fun game of "Spot The Song." Mute the volume, and you were likely to miss selections from the Sex Pistols. Or the Jam. Or Adele. Or music from "Monty Python's Flying Circus." 

As directed by celebrated filmmaker Danny Boyle, these Olympics got a tuneful kickoff that traveled at the speed of sound across this history of British pop. Boyle is known for his inventive uses of music in films: "Trainspotting" turned a whole generation on to the music of Iggy Pop (among other legends), and his "Slumdog Millionaire" paired electronic rapper M.I.A. with Bollywood legend A.R. Rahman.

Underworld, the electronic act Boyle first worked with on 1996's "Trainspotting," partnered with the director for the Olympics. The duo crafted original music for the ceremony and helped program extended musical segments such as for the Parade of Nations. All told, Boyle's opening ceremony was as much a celebration of song as it was sport.

LONDON OLYMPICS: Your TV-watching guide

Here, Pop & Hiss reviews the ceremony from a pop music perspective. 

Punk rock: The filmed opening montage for the ceremony was thrilling, a rocket-ride, perfect even. But it was cinema, and left a question: How can Boyle possibly keep up this pace for about five hours? The answer was: He couldn't, and once cameras dropped into the Olympic Stadium, the ceremony took a turn toward live theater on a huge scale -- and the filmed segment became a tour of Britain with a soundtrack of children's choirs and esteemed actor Kenneth Branagh reciting lines from "The Tempest."

No one, however, would have guessed that the Olympics ceremony would begin with a song by a band whose name can't even be printed on this website, yet there was "Surf Solar" from that unnameable band as cameras flew over London to fragments of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" and the Clash's "London Calling." Punk rock has come a long way in 35 years. The songs alternated with clips of high-speed railways and quacking ducks. This was all energy, all full-speed-ahead, but delivered with a sense of humor, recalling the magical feel of Boyle's "Millions." Added bonus: a shot of a Pink Floyd pig soaring over London.

LONDON OLYMPICS: Must-see moments  

Thanks for the tip on using drums, Beijing: Four years ago, the Beijing Olympics began with more than 2,000 drummers banging away in precise, haunting rhythm. It was a nod to ancient instruments, and it was given a sci-fi makeover, as Olympic musicians pounded away with light sticks.

Bejing's rhythms were impressive, delivered with militaristic steadiness; Boyle packed the Olympic Stadium with drummers as well, but he put the emphasis on emotion, staging the beats with exaggerated theatricality. Towers erupted from the ground, rings lifted to the sky and Branagh presided over all of it.

Celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie, deaf since a young age, led 1,000 volunteer drummers as factory smokestacks then burst through the greenery. If imagery ripped from the Industrial Revolution doesn't exactly scream "let the Games begin," the sheer rhythmic pulse of the moment was hard to resist. Said one BBC commenter, "It's such a sound, so powerful, to look at the Industrial Revolution this way. If you're at home and you have a remote control, turn up the volume just a little bit to get a sense of what we're feeling."

Indeed, these images, divorced from sound, wouldn't have had nearly the pull. Some actors were dressed as farmers, others as women suffragists, and the mix-and-match approach to English history was at times oddly jolting, especially when a crew of men looking like Abraham Lincoln began dancing with shovels as if they were in a Spice Girls video. 

Yet it worked. Even at its most silly the scene was driven by music that gave way to uplifting electronics and never swayed from its emphasis on the beat. The sound was all forward momentum, and when the rhythms took hold, the orchestration found a way to dissolve and rev-up. Sure, the whistling seemed uncomfortably close to "Wind of Change," but this was Olympic optimism at its most beat-heavy.

Sgt. Pepper! It was fun seeing marchers dressed in "Sgt. Pepper" garb, but it was a bit too facile as a reference for the entirety of the 1960s. It also distilled a generation into a pleasant cartoon. Granted, no one is looking at the Olympics to provide biting commentary of its host nation's past -- nor does anyone really want that at a party -- but the Beatles have better albums, and this was revisionist history at its most obvious.

The James Bond theme: Mixed feelings here. Once John Barry's Bond fanfare blared throughout the stadium, we knew what was to come. It was a wee bit odd to see Daniel Craig's James Bond treated as a nonfictional character, one who must open the Olympic Games, complete with the queen's corgis in supporting roles.

Yet anyone who has ever gotten swept up in a Bond film, or anyone who has fallen in love with the magic of any film, can no doubt appreciate the way in which Boyle blurred the lines between fiction and reality, seriousness and silliness. Our lives are filled with memories both real and imagined, moments witnessed on-screen and off, and Boyle took that premise and ran with it. After all, the idea that we could possibly live in a universe where James Bond is saving the world, and appearing at the Olympics, is one that is nice to imagine. If only our own lives could be scored with surf rock guitars and feature a loyal agent who could deliver us to safety. 

'The Exorcist': Yes, that was the theme to "The Exorcist." Or rather, it was the work of celebrated British musician Mike Oldfield. Since the music has such eerie undertones, and was performed while children read books and dreamed of Neverland, this choice could raise some questions in viewers' minds. After all, Oldfield's music is so closely associated with the horror classic that few can divorce it from the film. Strange that this segment started with "The Exorcist," and was rescued from "Harry Potter" villain Valdemort by the arrival of Mary Poppins. 

Still, and maybe I'm just an Olympics apologist, I'm giving Boyle the benefit of the doubt here. The Olympics -- and sports in general -- are for dreamers, and all of our lives are shaped by iconic figures, be they athletes or fictional characters from the books we read when we were children.

Boyle used contemporary references to pay tribute to the works that first inspired us to use our imagination, and this ended not with a burst of sunshine but an inspiring chiming of the bells, a grim reminder that we have to stop daydreaming at some point. It's a cynical age we live in, and easy to mock the idea of turning the Industrial Revolution into a dance segment, but this is where Boyle's vision -- his love letter to imagineers everywhere -- became clear.

'Chariots of Fire,' with synths and cheeky humor: The "Chariots of Fire" score is noteworthy, in part, for the way in which it placed electronics on par with symphonics. A British film about the Olympics, the film's presence here was a given. Still, it could have used less Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson), and one less flatulence joke. 

Stars of Colombia's past make new kinds of music on 'Ondatrópica'

Two dozen near-forgotten veterans of Colombia'smusical golden age gathered earlier this year in a Medellín studio ' the same place they made those old hits of the '60s and '70s. But this time around they were joined by younger artists and, co-directing the whole thing, a hipster English producer.

Amid the mix of old and new sounds were gaitas and champetas drawing on styles from Colombia's Pacific and Atlantic coastal regions, beat-boxing by the youngest participant (percussionist Chongo, 25) and a first-time rap from its eldest (flutist Pedro "Ramayá" Beltrán, 82).

And then there was the cumbia version ofBlack Sabbath's"Iron Man."

It's all on "Ondatrópica," the new, two-CD set drawn from the sessions, and can be heard Sunday at the Mayan Theater in downtown L.A., when a dozen of the participants from the sessions perform.

But what's perhaps most striking about Ondatrópica is that its mix and match of styles and eras is hardly an exercise in kitsch.

In fact, it's quite possible to listen to "Iron Man" ' here titled "I Ron Man" and sung in Spanish ' without even realizing it's the Sabbath song until a ways in. The groove is so strong, the performance so organic with its layers of percussion and horns, it sounds like something straight from these musicians' own traditions.

"I just think it's Colombian, isn't it?" says Will Holland, the hipster Englishman, better known under his performing/producing name Quantic.

It might have been done with a little wink, Holland allows, but it is no gimmick. Rather, he says, it's true to the progressive legacy of Discos Fuentes, the historic Colombian label and studio honored in this project.

"Otherwise it's all these people living their lives as a gimmick," he insists, on the eve of the touring group's debut performances in London as part of pre-Olympics festivities. "It's quite real."

That was crucial to Holland, who's made Colombia his home since 2006. He plays accordion with his band Combo Barbaro. Co-producer Mario Galeano, a Bogotá native, also fronts his own band, Frente Combiero.

The new touches, they say, fit the spirit of the classics from the Discos Fuentes catalog, one of the most creatively rich treasures of Latin American music.

Its roster sported the inventive architects and anchors of the era, many of whom are represented in Ondatrópica: Saxophonist Michi Sarmiento (who is also the son of Disco Fuentes' top arranger from the '60s sessions), timbales master Wilson Viveros, star Pacific coast singer Markitos Micolta and innovative '70s bandleader Fruko among them.

"We have really studied deeply how things worked in the '50s, '60s and '70s," says Galeano, 34. "Even though those things took place years ago, they were pretty progressive at the time. But today in Colombia a lot of people think this is grandparents' music. We wanted to show the heavy things from that era was not different from the generation we have today."

The whole thing was made possible through financial support from the British Council, the Colombia office of which had backed an earlier Galeano collaboration with Guyana-born dub star Mad Professor. The 40-odd musicians were flown to Medellín to record at the old Discos Fuentes studios, utilizing the facility's analog tape equipment under the guidance of engineer Mario Rincon, another veteran of the classic sessions. Holland and Galeano meticulously wrote out the parts for both the old and new songs. Paramount was the comfort, and confidence, of the veterans.

"A lot of the people who hadn't recorded for some time were worried we were inviting them to do a reggaeton or full-on rap thing, which they couldn't do," Holland says. "A lot were relieved when they came in and saw we had music on stands and microphones set up to have them all recording in the same room."

Superficially, this might call to mind the Buena Vista Social Club, which brought "forgotten" Cuban stars and sounds back to the spotlight. But the producers hope people will see beyond that.

"Not knocking the Buena Vista Social Club, but we didn't want to take a snapshot of the old guys," Holland says. "We were interested in progressive arrangements, using new colors and textures."

Adds Galeano, "We don't want to be perceived like some museum or folkloric thing. We really wanted to show new ways, the strong side of this, how alive it is."

Covering Black Sabbath might have taken care of that, though Holland insists that while many of the older musicians had never heard, or heard of, the metal group, it wasn't a big stretch: Sabbath hails from the same part of England where he was born, and heavy metal has a strong foothold among Colombian youth.

There will be at least one point in the concerts that never could be mistaken for a Buena Vista knockoff, something perhaps even more seemingly incongruous than "I Ron Man." It will come when octogenarian Ramayá will step forward and treat the audience to his rendition of Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy."

Out of place? Not at all.

"It's a cover he did in the '70s," Galeano explains. "So lots of people in Colombia heard his version. It was something that came really naturally in our first rehearsal days. He said, 'Look, we have to play this song.' And it worked."

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calendar@latimes.com

Bruce Springsteen adds December Anaheim date to Wrecking Ball tour

Those who missed Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band on the first wave of their 'Wrecking Ball' tour may have another shot with 16 new dates across North America that have just been added to the tour, including a return to Southern California for a Dec. 4 show at Anaheim's Honda Center.

The Boss has just wrapped up an extended trek through Europe, during which he and the band notched some of their longest performances in years, edging toward the four-hour mark. The new batch of shows starts Oct. 19 in Ottawa and runs through Dec. 6 in Glendale, Ariz., adding to 14 previously slated Wrecking Ball stops starting Aug. 14 in Boston and running through Sept. 22 in East Rutherford, N.J.

Tickets for most of the new shows will go on sale in August. Details are on Ticketmaster.com and Springsteen's website, www.brucespringsteen.net. On-sale dates for the Anaheim, Glendale, Ariz., and Portland, Ore., shows have not been set.

Springsteen played at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in April during the first leg of the latest tour.

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Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong is joining NBC-TV's 'The Voice'

Review: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Sports Arena

 

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong is joining NBC-TV's 'The Voice'

Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong, the punk rocker turned 21^st century Stephen Sondheim, is joining NBC-TV's 'The Voice' as a mentor on chanteuse Christina Auguilera's team, series officials announced Thursday.

Armstrong, the mastermind behind Green Day's 2004 concept album 'American Idiot' that subsequently became a hit on the musical theater circuit, confesses to being a fan of the show. He said he has no qualms about participating because: 'It's not molding artists, it's just giving them a little bit of guidance and direction without giving them a complete makeover.'

Not that he couldn't be a font of wisdom on that front: Since sprouting up as a pop-punk band in the Bay Area a couple of decades ago, Armstrong and the band have experienced quite an evolution. For starters, Armstrong could advise would-be pop stars about how to dress for air travel: 'Just got kicked off a southwest flight because my pants sagged too low.  What the [heck]? No joke!' Armstrong tweeted last September.

He noted that it's already been 'a lot of fun' working with Aguilera, one of four judges on 'The Voice,' along with country singer Blake Shelton, R&B artist Cee Lo Green and rocker Adam Levine of Maroon 5. The added national TV exposure won't hurt Green Day's volley of three new albums, '¡Uno!' '¡Dos!' and '¡Tré!' scheduled for release over five months, the first due in September.

Here's hoping the arrival of a punk rocker into the world of singing competitions gets the 'American Idol' team to broaden its horizons for the third judging slot still waiting to be filled following the recent departures of Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler, and the addition of Mariah Carey for one of those posts.

Pop & Hiss is holding out hope for former Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten or Steve Jones to come aboard and inject the show with some bona fide attitudinal adrenalin.

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Dirty Projectors swings to a different spirit in new album

David Longstreth is pretty sure he knows why people have been surprised by the infectious, often beautiful new record from his experimental rock outfit, Dirty Projectors.

"Maybe it's because I once made a concept album about Don Henley," he says, referring to 2005's "The Getty Address." "Or because I made one where I reimagined a Black Flag album from memory." That would be 2007's "Rise Above," which features the singer-guitarist's very loose interpretation of "Damaged" by the Hermosa Beach hard-core band.

Both discs established Dirty Projectors, in business since Longstreth's undergraduate days at Yale in the early 2000s, as deeply committed purveyors of abstruse art music. They are small-batch artisans unconcerned with the universal exhortations of Top 40 radio, yet engaging enough to attract the likes ofJay-Z, Björk and the L.A. Phil.

For "Swing Lo Magellan," released July 10, the Brooklyn-based group took a different tack, concentrating on "feelings and melodies and words" instead of the "surfaces and textures" that have come to define indie rock of late thanks to the work of acts like Animal Collective and Neon Indian. Spin called the album "a maximalist thinking minimal," while Pitchfork described it as "the band's least ornate batch of songs to date." Both reviews were raves.

"This record is about elemental stuff, in a certain sense," Longstreth said in a phone interview earlier this month, the day after Dirty Projectors played one of its biggest headlining shows, at Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The band's North American tour hits L.A.'s Wiltern on Saturday night. "On the other hand," he added with a laugh, "I'm doing this right at a time when people are more responsive to textures than ever before."

For all its newfound accessibility, "Swing Lo Magellan" still reflects a spirit of willful iconoclasm; it can feel as much like an interrogation of pop forms as an embodiment of them. In "Just from Chevron," Longstreth keeps punctuating a delicate folk melody with unexpected grunts, while "Unto Caesar" contains a bit of studio chatter in which Amber Coffman (one of the band's three female vocalists) appears to be making fun of the frontman's high-flown lyrics: "Uh, that doesn't make any sense, what you just said," she points out cheerfully.

"There's a lot of conflict in the band's music," says Los Angeles Philharmonic senior programming manager Johanna Rees. In 2010 Rees booked Dirty Projectors ' whose shifting lineup is currently rounded out by singers Olga Bell and Haley Dekle, bassist Nat Baldwin and drummer Mike Johnson ' to perform "The Getty Address" at Disney Hall on a bill that also featured orchestral pieces by Ligeti and Wagner. "It pulls from so many things, from Beyoncé to Ravel, that you think it's going to crash. But it never does."

"I like the idea of trying to go places emotionally that other pop music doesn't," Longstreth says. As an example he cites the new album's "Gun Has No Trigger," an unsettling avant-doo-wop number in which the women's voices shift suddenly from smoothly elongated harmonies to an aggressive hard-"A" attack. "It's this moment when beauty is curdling into fear," Longstreth explains. "The Beach Boys, you know, they sing all those soft ahs, but you can look to Dirty Projectors for the terrifying hard 'A.'"

Female vocals play an important role throughout "Swing Lo Magellan," as they did on the band's previous album, "Bitte Orca." (Angel Deradoorian, a member of Dirty Projectors for that record, sits out "Swing Lo Magellan.") Released in 2009, "Bitte Orca" spawned the underground semi-hit "Stillness Is the Move," which won over famous fans including David Byrne and Björk, both of whom have collaborated with the band. The adventurous R&B singer Solange Knowles ' also known as Beyoncé's younger sister ' even posted her own version of the song on the Internet.

"Amber's and Haley's voices are such powerful instruments, and they really understand how to work with them," Knowles says. "Their arrangements and the way they're able to build the instrumentation of each track ' it's mind-blowing."

Part of what those vocal arrangements do in new songs like "About to Die" and "Impregnable Question" is provide a splash of soul, which along with Longstreth's fleet-fingered guitar work might serve as Dirty Projectors' sonic signature. Coffman says she learned to sing by listening to R&B and names Minnie Riperton as one of her favorite vocalists; Longstreth mentions Ray Charles and Lil Wayne. And now that world has begun repaying the band's interest: In September Dirty Projectors are scheduled to play Jay-Z's Made in America festival in Philadelphia alongside Odd Future and D'Angelo.

Still, as befits his contrarian nature, Longstreth seems unwilling to align himself too closely with any one sound or scene. Asked what he admires most about the luminaries who've recently become pals, he answers, "Their evolution ' how it's not about going from one thing to a refinement of that thing. It's not linear."

Dirty Projectors' current mode ' busy but hook-conscious, off-kilter yet mindful of groove ' is "where my head is at musically right now," he says. "But it changes really quickly."

calendar@latimes.com

Ice-T speaks out against gun control

Ice-T, one of the pioneers of West Coast gangsta rap, has added his voice to the nation's ongoing debate over gun control, saying he does not want more regulations on guns.

The rapper-actor was on Channel 4 London News to talk about his recently released directorial debut, 'Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap,' when news broke about the mass killings at a screening of "Dark Knight Rises" in Colorado last week. He was then asked about his attitudes toward guns and why he defends the right to bear arms.

'I'll give up my gun when everybody else does' if there were guns here, would you want to be the only one without one?' he asked.

PHOTOS: Scene of the shooting | Hollywood reacts

When asked by Channel 4 London's Krishnan Guru-Murthy whether he had a gun at home, Ice-T told him he did, because 'it's legal in the United States. The right to bear arms is because that's the last form of defense against tyranny, not to hunt. It's to protect yourself from the police.'

Guru-Murthy continued to press the rapper on whether or not he saw a link between the right to bear arms and shootings such as the one in Aurora, Colo.

'No. Not really ' if someone wants to kill people, they wouldn't need a gun to do it ' You can strap explosives on your body. They do that all the time.'

He went on to say that the push for antigun laws that would come in wake of the Aurora massacre wouldn't change any legislation in the U.S. because the country was 'based on guns.' He also dropped a KRS-One lyric, saying: 'You'll never have justice on stolen land.'

Ice-T's opinions have come under scrunity and he's retweeted both support and criticism to his Twitter followers. And even offered a nod to the world of trend-driven journalism.

'my comment on guns got a lot of press.. They call me 'Gangster' don't forget 'US Army Vet,' ' he wrote Tuesday. 'I love how people are soooo SHOCKED to hear something thought provoking said by a rapper.. Hip Hop has changed to POP .. Nobody says [expletive].'

Watch the interview below:

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Korean pop group 2NE1 to play Los Angeles

The global tide of K-pop is finally beginning to show up in person on American shores. Following in the wake of the David Letterman-endorsed Girls Generation, who performed in Anaheim in the spring, the saucier and more hip-hop-inclined girl group 2NE1 has set an L.A. date on a forthcoming world tour. 

The group will headline the Nokia Theatre on Aug. 24, one of only two American shows (the other is on Aug. 17 in New Jersey). It's the first solo headlining tour for an all-female Korean pop group. 2NE1 was one of the groups profiled by The Times in an April  survey of the K-pop scene.

The group's sci-fi flash has won it some powerful fans, including producer will.i.am, who reportedly has been working with the group, and designer Jeremy Scott, who contributed costuming for the group's tour. Singles such as  "I Am the Best" and "I Love You" have racked up tens of millions of views online and created a powerful cult audience among Korean Americans and all sorts of curious fans in America.

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File sharing firm BitTorrent and DJ Shadow team up to make money

BitTorrent, the massively popular file sharing service, may be the last place music executives would go to generate profit for their artists. But the San Francisco company is looking to change that -- and the future of music distribution.

On Tuesday, BitTorrent launched a product with DJ Shadow aimed at generating revenue for the company and the hip hop artist.

Here's how it works: BitTorrent is offering its 150 million users a free download of content from DJ Shadow's new album, "Hidden Transmissions." The download includes three tracks, archival video from DJ Shadow's performances and photos -- all for free.

Here's where the money comes in: Downloaders have the option to "support" DJ Shadow by also downloading a separate piece of software, in this case a media player from RealPlayer. For every download of the software, BitTorrent and DJ Shadow receive an undisclosed referral fee.

"This is the first time ever that an artist has worked directly with BitTorrent to monetize content," said Matt Mason, executive director of marketing at BitTorrent. "It is kind of a giant leap forward." 

The arrangement is unusual because BitTorrent's technology for transferring data files at blazing speeds is the preferred method for online pirates to illegally share songs, movies, games and other copyrighted content.

To be clear, the company does not condone or encourage piracy, though many of its users are doing just that. As a result, record companies and movie studios don't hold BitTorrent in the highest regard, but neither are they filing lawsuits against the company (though individual users may have been sued).

Digitally intrepid artists, however, have done promotions with BitTorrent before, said Mike Fiebach, founder of Fame House, a digital marketing firm that ran BitTorrent promotions for artists Pretty Lights and Billy Van and is now representing DJ Shadow. Fame House published a case study on the BitTorrent campaign for Pretty Lights, the stage name for Derek Vincent Smith, who gave away his music in exchange for a lot of notoriety.

Now, BitTorrent, a profitable company that makes money licensing its software, is taking the next step to generate not just marketing fame but also money for artists.

"New business models built on top of the BitTorrent ecosystem are the future of content," said BitTorrent Chief Executive Eric Klinker in a blog post. "This is where fans are. It's time to bring artists, filmmakers and game developers into that conversation in meaningful ways, too."

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BandPage breaks out of Facebook

It's become fashionable to break free from Facebook.

BandPage, whose Facebook application has been adopted by half a million bands and musicians, on Tuesday announced it is launching beyond Facebook and onto the broader Web.

The San Francisco start-up is giving bands a way to market themselves outside of Facebook with a suite of free, dead-simple digital publishing tools. Using BandPage's new application, artists can update photos, videos, tour dates, band member bios and song lists. Any change that's made once through the application is automatically updated not just on the band's Facebook page, but also on their websites and blogs.

Don't have a website for your band? The company is also launching an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tool that any 6-year-old can use to create a custom site.

BandPage, formerly known as RootMusic, was once routinely ranked among Facebook's top 5 applications. It remains the top music application for bands on the social network, adopted by more than 500,000 artists.

But Facebook recently changed its policy for how band pages pop up on the pages of its 900 million active users. That tweak plunged BandPage and other third-party marketing applications such as Sprout and Wildfire into oblivion -- at least on Facebook.

While Facebook still has a formidable funnel of users that companies find valuable, it's also made them wary of the power of Facebook to unilaterally change their fortunes overnight.

It's no wonder that companies like BandPage and Zynga have looked for ways to become less beholden to Facebook by expanding their horizons on the Web.

In Zynga's case, the San Francisco social gaming juggernaut last year launched Zynga.com, a website separate from Facebook that features many of the company's top games. Zynga has also invested heavily in mobile games on non-Facebook platforms such as Apple's iPhones and iPads.

BandPage, founded two years ago by its 27-year-old chief executive J Sider, is not ungrateful to Facebook. But Sider's customers, believing that Facebook is not the be-all end-all, have been clamoring for a way to expand their reach on the Web for a broader audience.

"Bands have asked us to create a way for them to take their Facebook page with them," Sider said. "This allows them to do that while creating the best experience for musicians to set up their online presence"

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'American Idol' concert a mixed bag

The life cycle of the latest "American Idol" reached its conclusion Monday night with its annual "Idols Live" concert, a smorgasbord of performances from the season's top 10 contestants. Two years ago the concert was held in the Staples Center, but this year it was back at the cozier confines of the Nokia Theatre. Did the show measure up to the pomp and pageantry of "American Idol's" televised run? We sent two writers who co-led our "Idol" versus "The Voice" coverage to find out.

Todd Martens: "American Idol" publicists said there were no review tickets given to the media for this show. That makes sense, since "Idol" is critic-proof; its only kryptonite is a year-to-year decline in ratings. "Idol" publicists also said the show was sold out. It was not. We bought tickets, and had an entire row in the mezzanine to ourselves.

Chris Barton: And the show felt strangely unmoored in the absence of the judges to break up the performances. Good thing we were there.

RANKINGS: 'Idol' vs. 'The Voice'

TM: The first thing that struck me was how tonally off the show felt. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason when it came to presentation. One of the early group performances was Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger," staged beneath a backdrop of patriotic stars and stripes. That was before the 20-minute commercial break.

CB: Also, does "The Voice" know "Idol" was nicking Maroon 5? And was the rest of Los Angeles suddenly missing all its brightly colored animal prints last night? Because all of them may have been concentrated in "Idol's" set design during Heejun Han's turn withLMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," joined by Jessica Sanchez and Deandre Brackensick. This was right in Han's wheelhouse given his reign as this season's semi-jester, but big, dopey dance music isn't Sanchez's strength. Somebody get this girl a ballad.

TM: Right, throughout the show I kept trying to picture a career for these artists. Sanchez was flawless in her delivery, forgettable in her personality. She seems Broadway-bound rather than primed for pop stardom. Hollie Cavanagh was more charming than technically proficient, but didn't embarrass herself on Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." She could anchor a parade down Disney's Main Street. Elise Testone's take on Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" was about as thrilling as the taped introductions from Ryan Seacrest. VH1 personality?

PHOTOS: 'American Idol' tour hits L.A.

But two rows in front of us was a father sharing a rock 'n' roll experience with his young daughter, and it was charming to see them swaying to a classic rock song. Maybe, just, maybe, "Idol" could do some good for the world. Except then came Colton Dixon.

CB: Yes, much to the delight of the screaming girls voting bloc. After a yelping mall-rocker that was apparently a Switchfoot cover, Dixon pulled something from his album, which is tentatively due before the end of the year. His flamboyant, skunk-adjacent hairdo looked remarkable in the spinning lights during the swoony ballad "Never Gone," and I could hear roughly a thousand prom dreams taking flight. Somewhere in the "Idol" throne room, a sequestered Phillip Phillips surely nodded in approval.

TM: Some of these song choices started to make me a little squeamish. Colton sang Billy Joel's "Piano Man" and it was odd up against the feel-good "Mickey Mouse Club" optimism of the evening ' like a G-rated film suddenly turning NC-17. Here was a song that referenced "making love" to alcohol.... Nothing, though, could prepare me for Phillips' cover of Usher's "Nice & Slow." This bedroom slow-jam, in which Phillips demanded his lover "call out my name," was an awkward betrayal of "Idol's" down-home goodness.

CB: Exactly. We went from an innocent county fair jamboree to a fumbly dorm-room seduction in only a few short moves. Why does almost everything Phillips does sound like Dave Matthews' "Crash"?

TM: Isn't Phillips' whole career, such as it is, a fumbly dorm-room seduction?

CB: I have to give him credit for doing a little something different with his voice during Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know," but there were a lot of spinning graphics behind him so I might've been hypnotized. Still, with that smirk, Phillips always looks like he's getting away with something, and after Joshua Ledet's performance I kind of feel that he did.

As "Idol" ended, Ledet's "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World" became his signature move, and I couldn't help noticing that he was sweating when he dropped to his knees, which struck me as the most human-looking moment of the concert. It was a strong performance and he earned a nice ovation, which he took in with his arms spread. He may not have won the show, but I think he won the night.

TM: I agree, but does the audience? Remember those two older women who stopped us on the way out? "Did you just come from the Phillip Phillips concert?" one asked, as a car drove by blaring Phillips' "Home." It's Phillips' moment ' at least until the next season.

Martens and Barton ranked the performers all season, along with readers, in our face-off between 'Idol' and 'The Voice.' See whether they got it right.

christopher.barton@latimes.com

todd.martens@latimes.com

The Jacksons ignore family drama at Greek Theatre show

A handful of songs into their Greek Theatre concert Sunday, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon Jackson still hadn't addressed a week's worth of family drama that culminated with reports that matriarch Katherine Jackson had gone missing Saturday.

Their 82-year-old mother was the subject of much chatter on Twitter and the blog world after her nephew filed a missing persons report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office on Saturday night. 

Detectives with the LAPD later confirmed what son Jermaine had already tweeted: Not only was she safe and sound but she was also on a planned vacation in Arizona with daughter Rebbie.

'This incredulous claim was made for reasons best known to the adult/s who filed it but it seems no accident that it comes after we, the sons and daughters, put in place care-taking for our own mother, taking her to Arizona [the brothers played Phoenix on Wednesday] in line with doctor's advice following a check-up,' Jermaine tweeted before Sunday's show.  'It dismays me that such an alarmist 'missing person' report has caused unnecessary anxiety among Michael's children who will understandably react to what they misunderstand, hear or are told."

"No-one is being 'blocked' from speaking with Mother. She is merely an 82-year-old woman following doctor's orders to rest-up and de-stress, away from phones and computers,' he continued. 'Everyone has been well aware of this within the family, but I would like to reiterate my reassurance to the outside world that Mother is fine. In the meantime, thank you for all your thoughts and concerns.'

News of Katherine's whereabouts intensified after Michael's daughter, Paris, tweeted that she was worried about Katherine, who has been caring for the 14-year-old and her brothers, Prince Michael and Blanket, since their father's 2009 death.

"yes, my grandmother is missing. i haven't spoken with her in a week i want her home now," she wrote before tweeting the number for someone on Jackson's security team.   

Paris, in tweets that have since been deleted, lashed out at Randy and later apologized, but still questioned the doctor who is looking after Katherine and said he was  'The same doctor that testified on behalf of dr murray saying my father was a drug addict (a lie) is caring for my grandmother ... just saying.'

This news of Katherine being 'missing' added only more fuel to a mini-firestorm of reports focused on the family dynasty of late. Last week, several of the Jackson siblings made news when they sent a letter to the executors of Michael's estate, accusing them of fraud, forgery and abuse of their mother.

The undated letter, signed by Janet, Randy, Tito, Rebbie and Jermaine, claimed that Katherine was being manipulated by the executors, John Branca and John McClain, that her health had been affected and that she had suffered a mini-stroke.

The letter also claimed that Michael's will ' which left his fortune to his three children, his mother and charity ' was fake. Randy confirmed the legitimacy of the letter and Janet retweeted his statement.

Lawyers for Jackson's estate said they were "saddened that false and defamatory accusations grounded in stale Internet conspiracy theories are now being made by certain members of Michael's family whom he chose to leave out of his will."

None of this drama seemed to affect the brothers when they took the stage at the Greek on Sunday. They performed deep cuts from their Motown days, as pictures of their late brother Micheal were projected behind them. 

The last time the Jacksons performed as a group in Los Angeles, they were closing out six dates at Dodger Stadium during their massive 1984 Victory Tour. On the final night, Micheal announced that the tour would be their last.

Three years after Michael's death and nearly 30 years after that December night at Dodger Stadium, the brothers fought to recapture some of that allure.

They led the crowd through a 90-minute singalong of the two decades' worth of funk, disco and pop hits. Sure, there were plenty of nods to their fallen brother -- his trademark glitter-encrusted outfits and dance moves were present the entire show -- with Jermaine getting choked up when he stood alone and sang Michael's "Gone Too Soon."

Onstage, the brothers ignored the headlines. By now, they are very used to all the attention on their family. What mattered Sunday night was the music and not the drama -- a rarity when you're a Jackson.

New Order returns to Los Angeles, without Peter Hook

The legendary Manchester post-punks in New Order will play their first L.A.-area show in seven years on Oct. 7. Well, most of the classic New Order lineup will be there anyhow.

The band's much-anticipated local turn (its first since headlining Coachella in 2005) will stop by the Greek Theatre on Oct. 7 and is must-see viewing for local Anglophiles and latecomers to the electronica boom ("Blue Monday" famously remains the bestselling 12-inch vinyl DJ single of all time). No on-sale date has been set yet. 

Core members Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert will be playing along with more recent keyboardist Phill Cunningham and bassist Tom Chapman. But one noted figure who won't be onstage is the band's bassist, Peter Hook, who left the group in 2007. Though he remains an outspoken curator of the band's preceding act, Joy Division -- he assembled a band, the Light, to play Joy Division albums on tour last year -- he's not pleased with the New Order reunion news.

Last year, when New Order first re-connected without him for two charity shows, he posted on his website that "Everyone knows that NEW ORDER without PETER HOOK is like QUEEN without FREDDIE MERCURY, U2 without THE EDGE, SOOTY without SWEEP!"

ALSO:

Joy Division heard anew, at a human scale

Joy Division and Mickey Mouse: The mash-up shirt

Disney' Joy Division shirt: Peter Hook 'appreciates the irony'

'Rituals' visits musicians as they prepare to hit the stage

Backstage at a show in Guadalajara, Mexico, in March, Foster the People did vocal warm-ups and yoga stretches before crafting a set list. Then, just before the Los Angeles indie-pop band headed out to the stage, they touched one another's shoulders lightly and said, "Bless."

"There's a small moment before every show where we bless each other ' we've done that since Day One," says frontman Mark Foster, 28, over the phone. "That's a superstitious ritual ' it's the one thing we can't go on stage without."

Fans are privy to that ritual now thanks to a documentary short that chronicles the moment and has garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube since being posted a little over a month ago.

The film is part of a new series of shorts called "Rituals" produced by Ashton Kutcher's production company, Katalyst, for its YouTube channel, Thrash Lab. The goal of the series is to let viewers in on the intimate moments artists have before going on stage ' the routines, and idiosyncratic superstitions that fuel the performance the fans will see.

"Rituals" creator Kashy Khaledi calls the films his "love letter to rock journalism for the digital era."

Katalyst president and Thrash Lab co-founder Anthony Batt adds, "The Thrash Lab team is all about creating intimate experiences that celebrate the creative community including artists of all types. With Rituals, we offer an organic back-stage pass to their worlds. Thrash Lab aims to put culture back into pop culture with shows like Rituals, The Factuary, Subculture Club and many more to come."

To date, Katalyst has made six "Rituals," ranging from five to nine minutes, and featuring up-close-and-personal footage of legendary bassist Mike Watt, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros just before heading out on stage. Shorts have also been made of pop-culture curiosities like the controversial street artist Mr. Brainwash and of the comedian Patton Oswalt.

"From the beginning I tell people, 'Let's be clear. This is documentary, not reality television,'" says Khaledi, sitting with the prolific music video and commercial director Ace Norton and director Brinton Bryan in Norton's Venice living room.

Norton directed the piece on Mr. Brainwash, and Bryan directed the ones on Foster the People and Edward Sharpe. Khaledi, who founded the edgy arts and entertainment magazine Mean when he was 22, has long had a knack for recruiting savvy talent for his projects. He has also secured directors Julien Nitzberg, Tony Kaye and Christopher Storer to work on "Rituals."

All are directors whom Khaledi chose for their devotion to the art of storytelling. And all are fast workers ' they have only one day with their subjects to gather as much material as possible.

"It's all about getting in touch with the humanity of the artist," says Bryan. "The unglamorous side of being a rock star is not something you get to see very often."

Last year Katalyst became one of nearly 30 companies to enter into a partnership with YouTube, which invested $100 million to help these companies create premium content channels for the site. The idea is to launch YouTube into competition with traditional cable and sites like Hulu. Since YouTube gained superstar status on the Web via its user-generated content, the move was considered risky and was not received too kindly by the site's community. However, the channels are slowly picking up viewership and Khaledi hopes that "Rituals" will help attract subscribers to Thrash Lab.

"Rituals" shorts generally end when the band begins playing its first song. It's an interesting choice, one that makes the viewer feel privileged for having hung out with the band backstage. There are dozens of shaky smartphone videos of those live performances, but only one showing Foster standing alone in the dark at the side of the stage ' a look of intense concentration on his face as he psychs himself up to play.

" 'Rituals' approaches the whole thing from the underside," says Foster. "I think it captured a part of this band that hasn't been put in front of the public before."

That's certainly the case of the segment on Watt, the deeply unconventional co-founder of the seminal SoCal hard-core punk band the Minutemen who now plays with the Stooges. Directed by Kaye, Watt's story transports us to Watt's hometown of San Pedro, where Watt engages in the activities of his typical day: Kayaking in a yellow sweatshirt; eating a breakfast burrito; reading lyrics from one of his rock operas and nearly tearing up about the accidental death of his dear friend and Minuteman frontman D. Boon.

"That piece started off as a 'Rituals' but it ended up being about how the death of D. Boon affected Mike Watt forever," says Khaledi. "We want to tell a great story without letting the rituals part dictate the form it wants to take."

"I really wanted them to be in Watt world," says Watt of the film crew during a Skype interview. "They asked me, 'What do you do? What's your day like?' I'm Watty, bass man, son of a sailor, and I have to get through the day ' one life is made of many days."

Following artists through their normal routines is far from routine, however, says Norton, so as a director you have to be flexible.

"It's a bit scary," he says. "I'm used to having storyboards and a shot list and with Mr. Brainwash he was like, 'No, no, this is not going to work.' He just wanted to entertain the crew with this off-the-wall stuff so we just kept the camera rolling."

Where Mr. Brainwash seems to live for the spotlight, Alex Ebert, the singer of Edward Sharpe, appears to barely notice he's being filmed. Tall and lanky with long hair, Ebert roams around his messy house in Echo Park, which has blankets tacked over the windows and an unmade bed on the floor. He is also mystified by how to get a wine stain out of a cream-colored jacket. He tries bleach, but that only creates another stain, so he gives up. Minutes before he goes on stage at the Santa Barbara Bowl, he puts the jacket on anyway and is filmed from behind with both stains on prominent display.

It's a small but telling moment, and it's what makes "Rituals" shorts so unique in the cluttered field of music-related media.

"We don't want this to be VH1 'Behind the Music,'" says Khaledi.

jessica.gelt@latimes.com

Review: Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band at the Greek Theatre

Wanted: Accomplished musician for touring rock band. Minimum 25 years' professional experience. Ideal candidate has at least two Top 40 hits, maximum four from the 1960s or '70s; '80s may be acceptable. Plays one or more instruments -- not drums. Compensation: to be determined. Fringe benefits: playing with a Beatle.

Not that Ringo Starr ever had to place an ad in the Recycler, but that's the gist of what the ex-Beatle has called for every couple of years when he gets the itch to hit the road with his All-Starr Band, which wrapped up its five-week U.S. tour Saturday at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles.

This time out, Starr was joined by Todd Rundgren, former Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, Santana/Journey keyboardist Gregg Rolie, Mr. Mister singer-songwriter-bassist Richard Page and his rhythm section anchors Gregg Bissonette and saxophonist-percussionist Mark Rivera.

It's a share-the-wealth idea that gives Starr the opportunity to front a band or get behind his famous Ludwig drum kit when the mood strikes, hop from his contributions to the Fab Four's canon to his signature numbers from his solo career and in between turn the spotlight over to his guests.

Saturday was a typically feel-good evening with the most famous, and most charming, drummer in rock history in which Starr, having turned 72 on July 7, appeared as energetic and spry as ever.

Without the extensive catalog of his own era-defining music that former bandmate Paul McCartney can draw upon in his concerts these days, Starr has no problem getting by with a little help from his friends, to whom he's always given as much assistance as he's drawn from them.

He opened with the Beatles-era 'Matchbox,' went straight into his early solo hit 'It Don't Come Easy,' written for him by George Harrison, and then brought things into the present with 'Wings' from his latest album, 'Ringo 2012.'

The ever-present sense of humor came out when he introduced 'Wings,' asking whether anyone in the capacity crowd was aware that he'd put out an album earlier this year, then said, 'I'd like to thank the five of you who bought it, the seven of you who downloaded it, and the three of you who bought the vinyl!'

Rundgren, being the second-biggest star on the lineup, also served as the show's second-in-command stage presence, appearing in a tie-and-tails tux that had either been tie-dyed or run through the laundry with a pair of blue jeans that bled on it. Rundgren offered up his bouncy pop hits 'I Saw the Light' and 'Bang the Drum,' while Rolie brought a Latin rock accent into the mix from behind his Hammond B3 organ keyboard on Santana's 'Evil Ways' and 'Black Magic Woman.'

The latter number allowed the show's host a quick break -- he headed backstage and left the drumming duties to the ever-smiling Bissonette, who showed his masterful grasp of the syncopated accents and roiling beats integral to Latin rock. Lukather pealed off cascades of notes during his solo, a busier tack than Carlos Santana typically takes, making his contribution more a showcase of rock guitar hero virtuosity than Santana's excursions into the realm of musical soul.

Page nimbly delivered Mr. Mister's two biggest hits, 'Kyrie' and 'Broken Wings,' and Lukather also took to the microphone for Toto's 'Rosanna' and 'Hold the Line,' calling in backup for the highest melodic sections from Page and Rivera.

But the spotlight was never long away from Starr, who acknowledged his awareness of his own limitations at anything other than the drums before stepping up to an electronic keyboard to accompany himself in the opening of 'Don't Pass Me By.' He also took a self-effacing jab at his songwriting as he told the audience: 'When I wrote those words -- 'You were in a car crash/And you lost your hair,' I thought, 'Watch out, Lennon and McCartney!' "

Considering that his original All-Starr Band lineup in 1989 was brimming with current or future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members -- including the Band's Levon Helm and Rick Danko, Dr. John, E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, guitarist Nils Lofgren and Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh -- this year's lineup had considerably less star power going for it. Walsh, now Starr's brother-in-law after marrying the sister of Ringo's wife, Barbara Bach, made an unscheduled appearance, trotting out his big pre-Eagles hit 'Rocky Mountain Way,' complete with signature talk-box guitar effect.

Starr has long said that he simply loves to play -- and a drummer is at a distinct disadvantage compared to guitarists or keyboardists to do so on his own. There's obviously no shortage of musicians who are more than delighted to back him on some of the most beloved songs in pop music history: 'Yellow Submarine,' 'Act Naturally,' 'I Wanna Be Your Man' and, of course, 'With a Little Help From My Friends.'

Indeed, for that final number of the two-hour show, even more friends came out for an all-hands-on-deck finish. Starr was flanked by the Monkees' Micky Dolenz, Peter Frampton, Jeff Lynne, Walsh (and his daughter Lucy), Gary Wright, actors Bud Cort and Corey Feldman, drummer Jim Keltner and even former Guns N' Roses/Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum.

A splendid time appeared to have been had by all.

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Lifetime roll

Album review: Ringo Starr's 'Ringo 2012'

Ringo Starr and Make-A-Wish: A teenage drummer gets to meet the Beatle

Thais reconnect with a 1970s-era sound

' On a recent Saturday evening at the Cosmic Cafe here, young Thais with pixie haircuts and ornate shoulder tattoos chatted in groups, their faces illuminated by the soft glow of smartphones. Although the space was packed, the energy level lagged compared with Bubble Bar next door, which boomed with the latest hip-hop and techno tracks.

But the crowd surged to its feet when the DJ began playing 1970s-era luk thung and mor lam, Thai musical genres closely associated with hardscrabble life in the country's poor, rural northeast. Women squealed and gracefully twirled their arms in traditional ballet-style patterns, and some began mouthing along to the music's warbling, soulful vocals, backed by traditional Thai instruments and carried along by driving, syncopated beats.

This was the latest installment of Isan Dancehall, part of a small but growing cultural movement that is reviving interest in a forgotten era of Thai music and art. Similar trends have taken hold in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as a region hurtling toward the future begins to investigate its recent cultural past. Mor lam is a centuries-old folk music with religious themes that went through a lively period of experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s, when luk thung, meaning "child of the fields," incorporated non-Thai influences such as rock and disco.

The revival is transcendingThailand'sdeep social and class divides. The dancehall parties gather an unlikely audience inBangkok'syoung and hip ' those with university degrees, stints living abroad and jobs in creative fields ' to celebrate the music of Isan, a region perceived by many Thais as backward and unsophisticated. And in Thailand's fractured politics, Isan music is closely associated with the red-shirt political movement, whichBangkok'spro-monarchy yellow shirts ' who like the revivalists tend to be educated, urban and middle class ' blame for riots that killed at least 90 people in the spring of 2010.

At the center of the Isan music revival is Bangkok native Nattapon Siangsukon, a DJ, promoter and owner of the Zudrangma record label and store. After studying fashion promotion for six years in London, he returned to Thailand in 2006 and began buying worn-out copies of luk thung and mor lam records from dingy shops in Chinatown. Nearly all Thais are familiar with contemporary versions of this music ' it is ubiquitous in Bangkok's taxis, whose drivers tend to be migrants from Isan ' but middle-class urbanites consider it deeply unfashionable.

"People say to me, 'You studied abroad, you speak English. Why are you into this taxi driver music?' It's seen as low class," Siangsukon said. He was drawn to forgotten classics from the 1960s and 1970s for their experimentalism and high production values.

Siangsukon's pursuit has often felt like a race against time. "I went to a music distributor in Isan recently, and the guy told me he'd just burned 30,000 records the night before," Siangsukon said, sighing. Although he doesn't consider himself a historian, he is trying to expose his peers, many of whom favor cultural imports from Korea and the United States, such as Katy Perry and Jennifer Lopez, to their own heritage. "We don't know our own history. We are creating a country with no roots," he said.

Initially, it was a tough sell. Siangsukon and Chris Menist, an English DJ and fellow Thai music enthusiast whom he met digging for records, threw their first party in 2009 at a "run-down gallery-slash-bar in the middle of nowhere with lizards running across the dance floor," Siangsukon said. Two hundred people showed up, but most were foreigners.

Still, the pair pressed on. They began putting out Isan compilations and re-releasing singles on their own Zudrangma and Paradise Bangkok labels and touring Europe and Japan to acclaim. Despite the interest overseas, though, "our focus was still on Thailand," Menist said.

Slowly, their efforts began to pay off. Somrak Sila, 33, co-director of an art gallery in Bangkok, is one of a growing number of Thais to have attended the parties. She said she was struck by Siangsukon's bravery in championing a music that others had scorned. "I was amazed that he was able to bring back this old style of music and make it cool again," she said.

Not everyone has been impressed. Thai nationalists have told Siangsukon that the music is strictly for Thais, not foreigners, and that it should not be played alongside world genres like reggae and Ethiopian music, as Siangsukon and his fellow DJs like to do. He's also encountered resistance from Isan, which, culturally speaking, is light-years away from the nightclubs of Bangkok. Most of the musicians come from the northeast and sing in Lao, the region's language.

Isan accounts for roughly one-third of Thailand's land area and population and remains one of the country's poorest regions. The Thai government began a program of assimilation in the early 1900s that downplayed the region's distinct identity in schools and government administration. Music became a way for northeasterners to assert this identity.

When red-shirt activists began pouring into Bangkok in the spring of 2010 to demonstrate against the government of former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, they defiantly blasted luk thung and mor lam from massive speakers. The leaders also held massive fundraising concerts that poured money into the movement. "During these concerts, red shirt leaders would sing old songs but would change the lyrics to be political," said James Mitchell, a researcher at Macquarie University in Australia who studies Thai popular music.

Isan identity and the red-shirt movement are now nearly indistinguishable, Mitchell said. But as a wave of cultural pride and political consciousness has swept the northeast, resentment toward the red-shirt movement has grown in Bangkok in the wake of the death and destruction caused by the riots.

Siangsukon is sensitive to these tensions but says that his motives are purely musical, not political. "I don't care if an artist sings for the red-shirt movement," he said. "If the music is good, I'm open-minded to it."

calendar@latimes.com