Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - We've Got a Live One Here - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

In 1972, my friend Freddie Herrera opened a small nightclub in San Francisco. It was a hip joint where I met and worked with Elvin Bishop, the Pointer Sisters and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. We were the third or fourth band in there, we had a ball, got in a lot of trouble, rocked out, etc., etc., etc. The place was cool and became wildly successful and soon, Freddie opened Keystone Palo Alto and later Keystone Berkeley, buying up a large dump up on University right near campus where Creedance began their career and the owner of that joint didn't like my band very much. Things changed after Freddie bought the place; it turned out to be a major Berkeley dive, right up there with Mandrakes and the Longbranch/Babylon hellhole. Needless to say we fit right in, enjoying many rocking nights there in the middle seventies- in fact I lived about a mile away from there (vertically). We were practicing our double live album for Warner Brothers and had a decent recording company (Wally Heider) and we used the Keystone Berkeley as out trial balloon before heading out to London and Hammersmith early the next year. This was John Tichy's last gig and he went off to R.I.P. to become a famous 'perfesser' while we worked Ernie Hagar in on steel guitar. The end was near for the Lost Planet Airmen but we went down swinging. George Frayne InchCommander CodyInch Nov. 13, 2017

Enstrom / Bartlett / Pearse - Hushers [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/03/2017

Only a few chamber music ensembles of the world-famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra are allowed to have the addition InchGewandhausInch in their name. That obliges! The musicians of the Gewandhaus Brass Quintett are all award-winning brass players and present the multifaceted diversity of their instruments with unusual programmes ranging from swinging baroque to jazzy groove. Their latest focuses on compositions written especially for the quintet. Compositions in the traditional style, onomatopoetic and rousing pictures by the Californian Kevin McKee, tonal experiments in the work of Steffen Schleiermacher or melancholic-jazzy harmonies with a touch of melancholy. The fundamentally different sounding world premiere recordings convey an impression of the colorful complexity of the brass sound.