Max Diez

Tune in on Monday, April 1st @ 4pm to hear Ears of Maize speak with North Carolina based songwriter, Rosali.  Together they will discuss her new album on Merge Records, Bite Down, how her backing band has helped influence her direction, and a look inside her songwriting process.

Rosali makes songs that take their time in revealing their full power. What might appear to be restrained, introspective compositions will stretch slowly outward, snagging your attention with a sideways guitar lead or an exceptionally raw lyric you didn’t catch the first time around. Her softly glowing music is deceptively fluid, able to appear patient and refined at the edge of unraveling.

Dan Bejar of Destroyer says:

“It’s hard to talk about Rosali’s music. Songs that reach outward like this, but then constantly disarm with their intimacy. What do you call such inner searching that is hellbent on rollicking? Songs that long for a sense of peace and songs that want romance, all on equal footing in the same plot of earth? Performed wild, but always centered around the incredible lyrical calm that is Rosali’s voice.”

Join Excuse My French on Wednesday, April 3rd @ 12pm when he hosts Bay Area based pianist Kadie Kelly ahead of her upcoming concert at The Center in SF on April 7th.

Kadie Kelly is a classical piano musician who is a member of the Women’s Audio Mission and leads an all-female group called the Kadie Kelly Quintet.

Kelly’s stories and music center around her life journeys, both physical and existential. From a large, diverse family in Detroit, Michigan, where she learned piano and discovered her public speaking skills as the student body president of her high school, she went on to explore living in Provo, Utah, at Brigham Young University. Later, she proselytized in French in the south of France before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she finished college and raised her two sons as a divorced, single mom.

Completing her studies with a master’s in Public Policy from Mills College, she founded the short-lived Oakland Single Parents’ Network and served as a guest lecturer at Touro University’s Public Health Department while always teaching piano lessons and writing music.

Her debut studio album, Journey to Innocence, is partially influenced by her time spent living in the south of France and pays homage to the French romantic, modern/minimalism periods, and film composers.

Tune in on Wednesday, March 27th @ 2pm to hear Excuse My French in conversation with pianist and composer Ethan Iverson before his run of shows at SF Jazz on March 30th & 31st.

A far-ranging new project full of twists and turns, new album, Technically Acceptable finds Iverson at the helm of two different trios—with bass/drum teams Thomas Morgan/Kush Abadey and Simón Willson/Vinnie Sperrazza— performing a set of striking new originals plus singular new versions of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” the latter featuring Rob Schwimmeron theremin. The album concludes with the recorded premiere of Iverson’s Piano Sonata which is given a tour-de-force performance by Iverson himself.

The history-spanning wealth of influences and eras that Iverson has investigated as pianist, composer and critic all emerge, in often surprising and delightful ways, throughout Technically Acceptable. In the past Iverson has used his leader dates as a way to connect with and learn from elders like Billy Hart or Jack DeJohnette, the latter who appeared on Iverson’s 2022 Blue Note debut, Every Note Is True. Here he’s working solely with younger musicians who find ample space for freewheeling invention even within the concise forms of these short tunes, whose pop-like precision harkens back to his days with The Bad Plus.

Through a repertoire that alights on myriad points on the jazz and classical timelines in playful yet inventive ways, Iverson allows himself the credential that christens the album. “If I’m taking the measure of my own work: I’m on a journey, but I don’t think it’s finished yet. My first album was called School Work; maybe in another ten years I’ll create the album Flawless Masterpiece. For now, I’m Technically Acceptable.”

Photo Credit: Keith Major

Join Donut Monoxide on Wednesday, March 27th @ 3:30pm when she hosts a visit from writer, book artist, teacher, bon vivant, and creator of music Muzikifan.com, Alastair Johnston.

Alastair will talk about and play tracks from the recently released compilation The Soul of Congo – Treasures of the Ngoma Label on Ilunga Records.  He will also fill us in on the fascinating story of the Singers and players who came to Congo’s capital Léopoldville from all over Central Africa to record music for Ngoma Records. While Ngoma was not the only record label in Léopoldville during Congo’s emergence from Belgian colonial rule; it was the label that best captured the energy, spirit, and variety of the music at the time and place – the meeting of African Rhythms with Caribbean, Cuban and European tunes then popular in the capital.

The Soul of Congo was the result of dedicated record collectors coming together to pool their collections, which were then assembled and annotated by Johnston.  Tremendous effort went into tracking down long lost musical gems- to the point where some songs were located in dead stock from a forgotten Tanzanian record store. Great care was taken to select songs for the CD and LP versions of the compilation.

Tune in to learn all about it!

Tune into KALX Live! this Saturday, March 23rd at 9pm when Oakland’s own SMOKERS fires up the KALX airwaves with a live in-studio performance and interview hosted by Play Doe!

SMOKERS is a four-piece punk band mixing strains of old school East Bay, garage, and some Bunnymen-inspired gloom, featuring former members of Nuisance, Black Fork, the Pattern and St. James Infirmary. Their newly recorded album The Rat That Gnawed the Rope (Mouth Records) is slated to be released this spring.

“Equal parts WIPERS and CELEBATE RIFLES… power pop mongers will eat this up, greasy rockers will eat this up, and punks worth half a cigarette will inhale deeply… essential and timeless.” – MAXIMUMROCKNROLL

SMOKERS will be warming up with a show at The Ivy Room the prior night so things are sure to be HOT on KALX Live! this Saturday!