Tag: BGS Podcast Network

The Show On The Road – Agnes Obel

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, The Show On The Road features a conversation with renowned Danish pianist, experimental composer, and atmospheric-folk songstress Agnes Obel. 

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Recorded high above Hollywood in the famed Capitol records building (Obel was recently signed to Blue Note Records), host Z. Lupetin takes an intimate tour of Obel’s newest work Myopia, which shows the pianist and composer at her most personal and aurally fearless.

Born in Copenhagen and based in Berlin, Obel’s albums warrant repeat listening, as it’s often hard to know exactly what instruments are playing at any given time. At times the darting, looping piano and quicksilver string work seem like a chamber orchestra, or maybe the songs on Myopia are secretly the technicolor backdrop and emotive score to a film that only she sees.

It’s been nearly a decade since her transcendent DIY debut album, Philharmonics, put her into many people’s minds (she may not be very well known yet in the States, but she is a gold-record selling, underground star in many parts of Europe). This past spring, Obel was set to play the expansive Greek Theater in Los Angeles before COVID-19 forced her to stay in Berlin — which, for an artist that creates hushed, often lyricless songs you probably can’t dance to, is an impressive leap.

 

The String – Brandy Clark

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

In an era where women are marginalized on country radio, Brandy Clark is at the top of most people’s list of women who should be on the air a lot more.

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She’s written hits for others on Music Row, but her own records are beautifully produced and full of insight about people and humor that would have tickled Roger Miller. Clark’s shared a Grammy Award for writing Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” and earned numerous nominations as an artist. Her latest is called Your Life Is A Record. Also in the hour, the prophetic and passionate folk and protest music of Eliza Gilkyson who focused on what she knew would be a pivotal year in history, producing the album 2020.

The String – David Bromberg

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

David Bromberg is one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted figures in roots music, a pioneer of the Americana idea decades before the term came into being.

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In the 1960s New York folk revival, he was a guitar player and multi-instrumental sideman who specialized in the blues. Then as an artist on Columbia Records, he made dazzling varied roots albums while supporting stars like Bob Dylan and Jerry Jeff Walker. He took nearly 20 years off the road to become the nation’s pre-eminent expert on American violins, and now at 74 he divides his time between his Wilmington, DE violin shop and recording and touring. We complete our hour of blues with Clarksdale, MS phenomenon Christone Kingfish Ingram.

The Shift List – A Final Course

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

“Food, like a concert, is never the same experience twice,” Chef Edward Lee told me during our interview back in October 2018. “You can’t remove the human element from either.” 

Back at the end of March of this year, about two weeks into the nationwide shutdown, we re-released Chef Lee’s episode to highlight the work he has been doing through the Restaurant Workers Relief Program and the Lee Initiative to feed and raise funds for out-of-work restaurant workers all over the country. The human element was removed from both the restaurant and concert industry in a way that no one could have predicted just three weeks earlier. 

The Shift List was created to explore the creative relationship that chefs have with music, and to that end, the unique experience and vibe they provide to diners at their restaurants. Over two seasons as host and producer of the show, I’ve been fortunate to speak to thirty chefs in four countries and a dozen world-class cities, including London, Copenhagen, Montreal, and my hometown of Los Angeles. It was a privilege to eat their food in the restaurants that they built. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty around when we’ll all be able to eat out at restaurants freely, the way we used to, so for now, The Shift List will conclude its 30-episode run and serve as a time capsule for an experience that we never knew we were taking for granted. 

To commemorate this, I’ve selected five episodes to help inspire your own cooking playlists, and have included a few of my personal favorite discoveries from the show that always set a great tone when I want to focus on cooking at home. A special ‘Best of The Shift List’ playlist is up now over on our BGS Spotify page. — Chris Jacobs, host

Ashleigh Shanti (Benne On Eagle) – Asheville, NC 


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If Chef Ashleigh Shanti weren’t running the kitchen at Benne On Eagle, a restaurant that pays homage to the rich African American culinary traditions that once thrived in an Asheville neighborhood known as The Block, she’d like to try her hand at being a rapper. Her Shift List included A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick Lamar, and plenty of Pharrell Williams.

Favorite tracks: 

  • A Tribe Called Quest – “Check The Rhime” 
  • Nina Simone – “My Baby Just Cares For Me” 
  • Kendrick Lamar – “DNA” 
  • The Neptunes – “Frontin’ (Feat. Jay Z)”

Tom Harris (The Marksman Pub, St John) – London 


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Chef Tom Harris explained what a proper English pub is, threw down some amazing jazz/funk/Afrobeat playlists (including Fela Kuti, Roy Ayers, and James Brown), and explained why recipes should be described in musical terms.

Favorite tracks:

  • Fela Kuti – “Mr. Follow Follow” 
  • Johnny “Hammond” Smith – “Shifting Gears” 
  • Moses Boyd – “Rye Lane Shuffle” 
  • The English Beat – “Mirror In The Bathroom” 

Jessica Largey (formerly Manresa, Providence, Simone) – Los Angeles 


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Chef Jessica Largey’s Shift List included The Clash, David Bowie, and Neko Case. In her episode she reveals why Nina Simone was the namesake of the DTLA restaurant she helmed for a year in 2018.

Favorite tracks:

  • Shakey Graves – “Dearly Departed” 
  • Ben Sollee – “Mechanical Advantage” 
  • David Bowie – “Golden Years” 
  • Gap Band – “Outstanding” 

Miles Thompson (formerly Michael’s Santa Monica) – Santa Monica 


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When Chef Miles Thompson describes food, it sounds like jazz – “salt, umami, acid, sugar, spice, crunch!” His Shift List included the trippy guitar stylings of Bill Frisell, the rootsy wanderings of Jason Isbell, and classical suites from the likes of Debussy and Isaac Albéniz.

Favorite tracks:

  • Bill Frisell – “Telstar” 
  • Bill Frisell – “Del Close” 
  • Agustiín Barrios Mangoré – “Julia Florida”
  • The Beatles – “Savoy Truffle” 

Matt Orlando (Amass, noma, Per Se) – Copenhagen 


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Chef Matt Orlando’s Amass restaurant in Copenhagen is a fine dining establishment located in a sprawling industrial warehouse that is covered in graffiti and proudly blasts obscure and “sometimes aggressive” hip hop. His Shift List included Bay Area legends Hieroglyphics, plenty of Wu Tang Clan, and some obscure Scottish reggae music to round it all out.

Favorite Tracks: 

  • Hieroglyphics – 3rd Eye Vision (Note: this is the entire album. Just let it run. There is no better music to cook to!)

 

Jerry Douglas – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

For the final episode of season one of Toy Heart, we have host Tom Power’s 2019 sit down with legendary artist, musician, and sideman Jerry Douglas at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual business conference in Raleigh, NC.

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Douglas talks all about hearing “Uncle Josh” Graves for the first time with Flatt & Scruggs and, in the early days, using a toothbrush to turn his own guitar into something like a Dobro. He tells stories of his father’s band, the The West Virginia Travellers, and being discovered by the Country Gentlemen. He shares about his lifelong friendship with Ricky Skaggs — and his connections with Tony Rice, J.D. Crowe, Alison Krauss, Ray Charles, to O Brother, and more. Jerry Douglas will go down as one of the finest American musicians of his generation, but for this episode we focus on his true love — his life in bluegrass.

The Show On The Road – Dave Stewart (Eurythmics)

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature an intimate, long distance talk with British-born super producer and new wave songwriting titan Dave Stewart.


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Stewart grew up obsessed with Delta blues, but also with the futuristic beats and dancehall magic found in synthesizers. He somehow fused those two worlds into an indelible body of work that has won him a Grammy and sold over 100 million records and counting. While most people know him as one-half of the foundational synth-soul group Eurythmics, which he formed with longtime friend and muse Annie Lennox, churning out genre-defying hits like “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” and “Here Comes The Rain Again,” that still burn up radio today.

Since the 1980s heyday of Eurythmics, Stewart has forged a singularly cosmopolitan career as something of a modern sound collector, both in creating his own bluesy solo work and producing records for a cavalcade of stars like Mick Jagger, Aretha Franklin, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Joss Stone, and more. He has also been acknowledged as one of the most tireless boosters for AIDS research, even working directly with the late Nelson Mandela to raise money for the cause.

His newest musical adventure has him rejoining Louisiana-based blues interpreter Thomas Lindsey for the forthcoming full length Amitié. The striking single “Storm Came” is available now.

The Show on the Road – Listen to These Black Voices

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Something powerful is in the air. While we may have said that after similar unrest in the past — after Rodney King in LA, Trayvon Martin in Miami, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and countless others — something about what is happening now feels deeper, heavier. Maybe it’s actually sinking in.

I normally try to put out a new episode of The Show on the Road podcast every other Wednesday. This week, that simply wasn’t possible. It was time to stop giving my endless opinions, to stop waxing poetic about harmony, to shut up about finding the meaning in every lyric and just be quiet, listen and learn.

I’ve been lucky to talk with truly amazing Black artists, songwriters, and performers in the two years I’ve been creating The Show on the Road. I ask you to go back into our archives and listen to these voices. — Z. Lupetin, host

Sunny War


Discover a young, deep-voiced folk/blues artist like Sunny War, who overcame a troubled past with drugs and being unhoused in Venice Beach to create a series of critically acclaimed records that have brought her to festivals and venues around the country.

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Bobby Rush


A sonic elder statesman, Bobby Rush came north from Mississippi during the great migration to work in the heyday of the Chicago blues and soul scene with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Rush has been making brashly funky and fearlessly sexy songs for decades, finally snagging his much-deserved first Grammy at the age of 86.

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Birds of Chicago


Based in Nashville by way of Chicago by way of Montreal, Birds of Chicago are centered around the powerful chemistry of husband-wife duo JT Nero and Haitian-Canadian banjoist and clarinetist dynamo Allison Russell, who gives every audience chills when she sings about her fallen ancestors. How she is not an international star astounds me. You may have seen her newest creation as part of the African American, female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters with Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, and Leyla McCalla.

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Dom Flemons


If you need to go back in time and educate yourself about Black cultural history (which you do), listen to our double episode with the great American songster Dom Flemons, who came up in the renowned Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops. Of course, he has since struck out on his own to become a sought after, roving ethnomusicologist and music historian. His newest Grammy-nominated record brings us back into a forgotten world of Black cowboys, who don’t get the credit they deserved in helping settle the West.

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Liz Vice


If you’ve been having a crisis of faith and need a little musical medicine, Liz Vice’s episode is the ticket. Vice grew up in Oregon singing gospel music with her family and aiming to be a filmmaker. Her career as a songwriter and performer blossomed with homemade, deeply felt, deliciously soulful and social-justice-forward records (examining her faith and our ever-evolving relationship to a higher power). We recorded in an old church in LA, and her renewed version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is haunting.

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The War and Treaty


Finally, if you need a shot of pure, joyous harmony and unabashed rock ‘n’ roll spirit, our episode featuring The War and Treaty is exactly what you need. They show us how music can be a healing tide to rise all broken ships. How it can be a force for good, bringing now power-couple Tanya and Michael Trotter together against all odds after Michael came back from a trauma-filled tour of duty in Iraq and needed a way to reenter society and share the songs that had been brimming in his heart for decades. Hearing them sing together, how they complete each other totally, is all the hope I need right now.

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The String – Steve Earle and B.J. Barham

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Two of the most exceptional and provocative songwriters of their respective generations take on America’s political divide and inject some radical empathy in the red/blue schism.

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Steve Earle addresses coal mining from the heart of a state that didn’t vote like he does in Ghosts of West Virginia. BJ Barham caps off 15 years of leading American Aquarium with the amazing Lamentations, which debuted atop the Billboard Americana chart. This is a timely and complimentary pair of conversations.

Tony Trischka – Toy Heart: A Podcast About Bluegrass

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Host Tom Power speaks with progressive banjo legend Tony Trischka at the home of his friend and former student, Béla Fleck.

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Trischka and Power talk about the time he saw and met Bob Dylan when no one was sure how to pronounce his name, and when he went to the first bluegrass festival weekend. An innovator on an archetypically traditional instrument, Trischka also discusses how he fuses jazz and experimental music with bluegrass, the intersection of the folk boom and bluegrass, and the time he played “progressive” banjo in front of Ralph Stanley. The episode covers ground from his recording debut with the band Country Cooking, to his first solo album, Bluegrass Light, having had Bill Monroe over for dinner when he was a kid, his teaching Béla, to carving out a life in acoustic music (and about what the term “bluegrass-adjacent music” means, too).

 

The Shift List – Mark Buley (Odd Duck, Sour Duck Market) – Austin, TX

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, host Chris Jacobs continues The Shift List’s feature on music and restaurants in Austin, Texas with Mark Buley, chef and partner at Odd Duck and Sour Duck Market.

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In 2009, Bryce Gilmore opened a food truck, the Odd Duck Farm to Trailer, with his brother in South Austin. The trailer featured dishes utilizing fresh and locally-sourced ingredients, which was still something of a novel idea at the time, and it became the cornerstone philosophy behind all of their endeavors moving forward, including the eventual brick and mortar version of Odd Duck and the more casual Sour Duck Market.

Mark Buley, originally from a small town in Wisconsin, journeyed to Austin in 2012 to partner with Gilmore in anticipation of Odd Duck opening as a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The pair have been working together ever since, and in the last decade, the Odd Duck collective has become a staple of the Austin food scene — fun and interesting, not too serious, and done well. Perhaps more than any of the restaurants recently featured on The Shift List, Sour Duck Market is intentionally communal. It’s a bakery, cafe, coffee shop, outdoor patio, and multi-service kind of place that’s designed for customers to stay a while.

Sour Duck and Odd Duck are both open for curbside pickup as things in Austin still move to fully open up during the coronavirus pandemic; listening to this conversation is a reminder of how much we’ve temporarily lost and have been taking for granted, but it also serves as a hopeful promise of what we’ll get back when the time is right.

In the meantime, if you want to bring the Sour Duck ethos into your own home, order a copy of The Odd Duck Almanac, a recently-released, annual cookbook/magazine-style publication that’s as true of a representation of the restaurants as you can get while we wait for everything to reopen.