“Carpenter Bird” will be released Sept. 18th with a show at Club Passim, then David and the band take off for 3-weeks of non-stop touring up and down the East Coast.

Click below to a song from the new record, go to clubpassim.org to buy tickets for Sept.18th, or pre-order your copy at davidwaxmuseum.com!

Listen to it here!

In August, I went up to a summer camp I worked at through high school and college.  One week we did a kids choir, and the other I taught my first ever ukulele class!  This is an idea I’ve wanted to try for a long time, and I finally took the plunge, bought seven ukes, and recruited a few kids to take part.  Over the course of a week we learned a handful of chords, played lots of familiar songs, and then learned “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne.

Listen to it here!

My band, The Pretty Pennies, has it’s debut full length album E Pluribus Unum available on iTunes!  The album was recorded and mixed by myself at Streetlight Sound.  It features half covers of classic folk, soul, and country tunes, and half originals written by the band.  In addition to our normal instrumentation, we added dobro, Wurlitzer, pedal steel, banjo, Hammond organ and special appearances by guests Adam Ollendorf, Ellery Kimball, and Maddie Welch to flesh out the tunes.  Join us on Wednesday, August 19th at Johnny D’s to celebrate with us and hear songs from the album live!  We’re also busking a bunch this summer, usually on Thursday nights somewhere around Davis Square.  Come say hi!

The Jazz Times:

The jazz trio of Charlie Apicella And Iron City show reflections of ‘60s guitar-organ combo based blues with snippets of modern intonations that let audiences know this trio’s voice is in the present. The group’s latest release, Put The Flavor On It, is produced by bandleader/guitarist Charlie Apicella, who also holds the responsibility of arranging all of the tracks. Apicella plays to the grooves, blending his movements with drummer Alan Korzin as organist Beau Sasser deepens the sizzle in their bluesy tones with dark underscoring and propulsive movements that tickle the senses. There is something about the trio’s music that is reminiscent of Hawaiian-based blues bands, California’s psychedelic jazz artists, and New York City’s Blue Note Club’s regulars, though Charlie Apicello And Iron City don’t come from Hawaii, California or New York, but rather from Amherst, Massachusetts.

The trio’s remake of Burt Bacharach’s classic pop tune, “Walk On By” puts an upbeat glint in the gloomy fires, and a salvo of jiggling vibrations and softly beaded nuances in Jerry Butler’s track, “Hey, Western Union Man,” which rinses the number in a trippy aura. The body language in the trio’s music flexes with an array of trippy blues swirls and acid jazz vibrations that draw from the psychedelic era of the ‘60s, but the band infuses it with a modern draft that keeps it fresh like in the trio’s rendition of Dave Stryker’s tune, “24 For Elvin.” The songs don’t sound outdated, though it is noticeable that they speak in a dialect that ’60s blues-jazz musicians communicated with and felt a connection to. The trio does perform several original tracks including Apicella’s piece, “G’s Blues” which features dynamic aerials performed by the guitar chords and Sasser’s organ, and Apicella’s smooth blues serenade, “Delia Soul” which could mollify an angry gorilla to swoon and moon over his lady love.

Charlie Apicella And Iron City are modern day stewards of trippy blues and psychedelic jazz. Their latest album, Put The Flavor On It isn’t just for fans of ’60s blues jazz which permeated through the walls of clubs in Hawaii, California and New York. No, this trio’s sound can be heard in the music halls of New Orleans, the trendy bars of Chicago, or the taprooms of Boston. The trio’s music is more widespread than their counterparts of the ’60s, and speak in a dialect that modern blues fans can relate to and find engaging.

Dobro sample

Pedal steel sample

You can make a strong economic argument, even in conventional terms, for more localized economies…  Tangible commodities such as timber and apples are not the only ones that might be localized.  Take entertainment, for instance.  During almost all of human history, people provided it for themselves: music (like food) was something you produced, and the pleasure was as much in the production as the consumption.  With the advent of recording, and then of broadcasting, all that changed; the new technologies allowed us to be more efficient and single out the best musicians and let everyone else listen to them simultaneously, much as factory farming allowed 1 percent of Americans to feed the rest of us.  We began to take it for granted that music came from somewhere else: Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, Nashville.  Now, of course, new technology is beginning to undermine that century-old system: file-sharing allows listeners to, in essence, wander onto the big farmer’s fields and glean what they like.  The recording industry’s short-term solution was to sue file sharers, and the slightly longer-term fix was to sell their music over the Web; if they can’t protect the profit margin, they argue, there will be a “reduction in creative activity” because without the possibility of growing rich, fewer people will write songs.

Perhaps.  But people wrote songs for millennia before they had any chance of making big money at it.  At most, you could make a decent living as a wandering bard – a profession that seems to be coming back into style.  The New York Times rock critic Jon Pareles wrote recently that while “selling pop music on expensively produced and promoted CD’s is a paradigm under siege,” “jam bands” in the tradition of the Grateful Dead and Phish ‘have flourished as concert mainstays and as an alternative to canned music,” and in the process bring “music’s ancient business model – the roving troubadour – to the interconnected modern world.” Imagine, he says, “current pop turned inside out.  Playing concerts would be a living rather than a promotional tool, bands would take music chances nightly, wardrobe would be an afterthought… Music’s past would be a foundation rather than a scrap heap.”  Such changes aren’t only only taking place in America.  In England, government figures showed “a live music renaissance underway across the country,” with half of pubs, clubs, and restaurants featuring at least occasional live acts.  Bands still sell recordings, but more and more, they sell them to the people who come to the shows, audiences that are interested in a shared community at least as much as virtuosity.

It’s as if musicians were suddenly, like the new wave of farmers, able to grow smaller quantities of more interesting crops and find reasonable profitable markets for them.  The live shows that provide more of their revenue are the equivalent of farmer’s markets, places that customers love not only for the product, but for the experience.  No one gets superrich, a la Mariah Carey or Archers Daniels Midland or Exxon Mobil; but plenty more people get to do something lovely, whether it’s grow berries for their neighbors or write songs for their region.  This parallel musical universe may not replace the centralized global one, but it’s clearly gaining.  How far might it go?  Here’s a statistic that gives some small indication: in 1900, in the state of Iowa alone, which was then crowded with small farmers, there were also thirteen hundred local opera houses, all of them hosting concerts.  “Thousands of tenors,” writes Robert Frank, “earned adequate, if modest, livings performing before live audiences”.

So why does all this matter to Streetlight Sound?  Well, I’ve been thinking lots about ways I can use my little studio to better serve the musician community in Boston.  The endeavor of recording music has changed more in the past 10 years than in the whole 100-year past that preceded it.  As a producer, as a studio owner, and as a musician, I’m dedicated to being part of a new model that allows songwriters and singers to create a decent living for themselves, and to provide a hungry listeners with music that speaks to their lives.  I don’t want to say too much now, but I’m really excited about some things that are on the horizon for Streetlight Sound.  Stay tuned!

Medicine Line – She’s Almost