Our fine fiddler Billy Oh was invited onstage to jam with Toumani Diabati and his band last night @ Logan Square Auditorium. Here’s a blurry cameraphone shot of the festivities. Click on the image for a larger, blurrier version.

It was painfully cold in Chicago last night, but I doubt that anyone in attendance regretted venturing out into the snow. Diabati’s band was one of the finest I’ve ever seen — a collection of virtuosi who exhibited remarkable restraint in their ensemble playing.

Our fiddler Billy Oh is probably too modest to tell you himself, but he will be playing this evening at Logan Square Auditorium, opening for the great Kora player Toumani Diabati. He’ll be fiddling with the Princes of Futa.

The show is all-ages, no-smoking, and will be held in a very nice ballroom at the corner of Kedzie and Logan, above Lula Cafe.

We had a hugely productive day yesterday at King Size, pushing our as-yet-untitled third CD closer to the finish line. We were also honored to have the great photographer Paul Natkin join us for a quick photo shoot.

More later.

Answer songs have a long, mostly inglorious history. There are some great answer songs, such as Kitty Wells’ ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’, (an answer to Hank Thompson’s ‘Wild Side of Life’, and a rare case where both the original and the answer are of exceptional quality), but most are dreadful and veer dangerously close to song-poem dreck.

My friend Ryan Jerving once said that the key to a successful answer song is to willfully misunderstand the original. Ryan has the distinction of being the only person in history to write an answer song to Freakwater, the Kennett Brothers’ ‘One Big Union’, answering the Freakwater tune of the same name.

I was very pleased to see WFMU’s Beware of the Blog post this beautiful answer song today: Rainbo’s John, You Went Too Far This Time (MP3). In it, a teenage fan expresses outrage at John Lennon’s ‘Two Virgins’ record sleeve, featuring the former Beatle wearing nothing but Yoko Ono.

Rainbo, not to be confused with pint-size metal maven Ronnie James Dio’s ‘Rainbow’, is a very young Sissy Spacek, and she gives an appealing performance here. The production values are higher than your average answer song, and it’s a well-written tune (if you can get past the cringe-worthy lyrics). The switch to 6/8 for the chorus is a nice touch. Ed Burch first played this tune for me a couple years ago, and I’m glad to be able to snag it in MP3 form.

John, You Went Too Far This Time (MP3)
Courtesy of WFMU’s most excellent Beware of the Blog

You can now become a fan of Tangleweed on facebook.com. Just in case MySpace wasn’t enough to satisfy your online social networking appetite!

No it’s not the teacher from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” but U.K. businessman Guy Hands CEO of the private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners, and the new leader of the EMI record label. Since the record industry has been driving itself into the ground it may take an outsider to straighten things out.

Matthew Lynn wrote a commentary on the Bloomberg website that highlights some of the changes, pros & cons occuring at EMI. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on the current state of the music industry.

bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aECFx9Ako770&refer=home

Here’s a very young Frank Zappa playing the bicycle on the Steve Allen show. Even then, Zappa described himself as a ‘composer’ rather than a ‘guitarist’ or ‘musician’. And the sounds he gets reveal an affinity for Musique Concrète, which he would explore further with works such as ‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny’. Enjoy.

And… part two:

Thanks to Ed Burch for passing this along.

There’s not a lot of video footage of the legendary Congolese guitarist Jean Bosco Mwenda, so this footage on YouTube is a treat. If you’ve not heard his Masanga, you owe it to yourself to track it down–the instrumental version was a revelation to a generation of fingerstyle guitarists.