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Bob Dylan: Royal Albert Hall, London
With A Mixture Of Folk, Rock And Comedy, Dylan Shows He Can Take Every Insult But Not A Compliment "EQUALITY, I spoke the word, as if a wedding vow, ah but I was so much older than, I'm younger than that now..." Bob Dylan thus changed. It all began with a song called 'My Back Pages' recorded some three years ago on an LP and reached its probable culmination at the Royal Albert Hall the other week when he performed his last British concert. As always, Dylan is logical and compromising. A full half of his concert is given purely to his...
Stevie Van Zandt’s TeachRock eyed for more Long Island classrooms
<a href="https://vimeo.com/teachrock/partnerclassroom"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-173346" src="https://teachrock.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2023-03-24-at-11.08.53-AM-1024x584.png" alt="" width="742" height="423" /></a> Freeport music teacher Stephanie Arnell wanted her students to learn about farmworker rights activist Dolores Huerta, so she played two songs associated with her life to the sixth-graders. For a lesson on the Jim Crow South, she turned to The Beatles and their refusal to perform before a segregated audience in Florida. Her classroom at Caroline G. Atkinson school is covered in band logos from Run DMC to Nirvana for students to appreciate the artwork.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> These lessons are part of a free curriculum called TeachRock, which offers online instruction plans, study units and materials for educators. Launched by rocker Stevie Van Zandt, the standards-aligned, open educational resource uses popular music from artists such as Beyoncé and Billy Joel to help teachers engage students.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> A newly announced partnership between TeachRock and the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame (LIMEHOF) aims to bring the curriculum into more local classrooms. The nonprofit LIMEHOF recently announced that it has adopted TeachRock as its education partner, and this fall, teachers across Long Island will be able to attend training at its newly established Stony Brook location. TeachRock offers more than 200 instructional plans online for grades K-12, covering subjects from algebra to world history. “We are trying to educate people in a very broad way through music,” Van Zandt told Newsday. “We are trying to give teachers the tools they need to deal with the modern world.” Tom Needham, the LIMEHOF vice chairman and education committee chair who is an educator in the Sewanhaka school district, learned about TeachRock through teacher training in New York City a few years ago. The nonprofit and TeachRock have held several events together, and in 2016 the organization’s Harry Chapin Award was presented to Van Zandt for his work in music education. <img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-173345" src="https://teachrock.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2023-03-24-at-10.50.31-AM-1024x574.png" alt="" width="742" height="416" /> <em>Stephanie Arnell is a teacher who specializes in using TEACHrock in the classroom, where popular music is paired with lessons from math to history. Credit: Kendall Rodriguez</em> When LIMEHOF opened in its new home on Main Street last year, Needham said he approached TeachRock about working together. "Let's do something bigger, and that's what we are hoping to do now — something beneficial for their organization and most importantly for the kids that attend school on Long Island,” he said.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Van Zandt, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, founded the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation (now the Rock and Soul Forever Foundation) in 2007, and the first 60 lesson plans of the TeachRock curriculum were published in 2013.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> He's on tour with Springsteen and is scheduled to play Long Island’s UBS Arena in April.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Prior cuts to arts education had concerned him, and he wanted to look for a way to improve graduation rates. A student who likes one class or one teacher is more likely to stay in school, said Van Zandt, who also has played a main character on HBO's "The Sopranos." “I don’t like the arts being treated as sort of irrelevant — something you do after school,” he said. “I thought it was extremely important that the arts be integrated into the DNA of the public education system.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> So far, 60,000 educators have registered with the online site, and other states are using it, too. In 2021, Connecticut officials announced they were integrating the curriculum into public schools statewide.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> The free lessons are tailored by genre, subject and grade. A math lesson for middle schoolers incorporates Beyoncé's Instagram account and how ratios can be used to identify social media audience engagement. Instruction about the Cold War includes a video of Billy Joel’s 1987 concert in the former Soviet Union.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> “We want our curriculum to be practical, to be useful, to have a purpose,” Van Zandt said. Some artists, including Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, have created online lessons specifically for TeachRock. Hart, in an online video available on the website, shows children how math can be tied to the musical vibrations of a drum.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Locally, LIMEHOF plans to promote the curriculum to schools through monthly email blasts, as well as posting updates on its website to highlight lessons each month.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Starting in the fall, the LIMEHOF museum will host TeachRock teacher training sessions. The location can accommodate class field trips.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> "Our dream for the curriculum for kids is that you get the spirit of popular culture into the classroom and the kids forget that they're in a classroom and they start just having fun," said Bill Carbone, executive director of TeachRock."The truth is that can happen for adults, too."<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Arnell, the Freeport teacher, is considered a TeachRock ambassador and has collaborated on numerous elementary lesson plans and articles with it. Her school is the only partner school in the state.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> She has been using the lessons for years and has helped train other teachers in the school. Under her curriculum, there are no tests, as the lessons are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> “Maybe you're an ELA teacher, maybe you're a social studies teacher, but there's something on this website, something about this curriculum that you could bring to your kids,” Arnell said. “And then once you're aware of it, there is something to being trained in terms of understanding how can I use this? Will it work with what my district already requires me to do?”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Her recent lesson for Women’s History Month on Dolores Huerta showed video footage of the activist in California, including her work alongside Cesar Chavez. She played the song “De Colores,” which often was sung at United Farm Workers gatherings, marches and rallies. The lesson culminated with the poem “A Street Called Dolores Huerta” by Los Angeles poet Nikki Darling, set to music by singer Alice Bag. Arnell recognizes that some artists may not be familiar to the children. Van Zandt once dropped in virtually to the classroom, and though the students did not know who he was, they peppered him with questions about his life. “We do a lot of rock and we go all the way back,” she said. “We use Chuck Berry, we use Elvis, and I always try to connect it with today's music. If it wasn't for these people a long time ago ... then we wouldn't have what we have today.”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> Student Kaiden Tucker, 11, said the class helps him learn about more than just the arts.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span> “All of Miss Arnell’s lessons, they weren’t just around music — they’re all around every subject and they help us,” he said. “It helps us understand everything.” By Joie Tyrrell Newday.com
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Dick Clark: The Beat Goes On
THE MOST AMAZING thing about Dick Clark is not that "America's Oldest Living Teenager" still fits that role at age 61. It's not that he's one of the most successful (and wealthiest) people in show business. It's not even the fact that nearly all the great (and plenty of not-so-great) artists in the history of rock 'n' roll have appeared on his American Bandstand. The most amazing thing about Dick Clark is that he can't dance. He's admitted it. Dick Clark has two left feet. Beginning August 5, 1957, the Monday afternoon when he took over as host of the longest-running variety...
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Gram Parsons: GP
GRAM PARSONS is an artist with a vision as unique and personal as those of Jagger-Richard, Ray Davies, or any of the other celebrated figures. Parsons may not have gone to the gate as often as the others, but when he has he's been strikingly consistent and good. I can't think of a performance on record any more moving than Gram's on his 'Hot Burrito No. 1', and the first album of his old band, the Flying Burrito Bros.' Gilded Palace of Sin, is a milestone. The record brought a pure country style and a wrecked country sensibility to rock,...
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Roxy Music: The Sound Of Surprise
PAUL THOMPSON's tom-toms ground slowly to a shuddering halt as Eno's synthesiser simulated the sound of Firestone Wide Ovals being pushed past their limit around a fast curve. The short final chord was almost obscured by the cheers and clapping. This was last Sunday night at the Greyhound in Croydon, South London's answer to Manhattan and Spaghetti Junction rolled into one. But it could have been several places over the past few weeks, because almost everywhere they've been, Roxy Music have been greeted with the kind of warmth that all new bands crave, but few ever achieve. To those who've...
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Unravelling the Legend of Robert Johnson
IN THE short space of seven months in the 1930s, a slender youth from Robinsonville, Mississippi, recorded twenty-nine blues sides in madeshift conditions, and a year later he was dead. But these two sessions, in Dallas and San Antonio, contain the greatest legend the blues has ever known, and precipitated a whole string of tales, theories, fancies and fabrications about the man which present such a incongruous pastiche when woven together that indeed Johnson’s life, his sudden fame and immediate death, is reminiscent of the kind of mysteries usually recounted exclusively in black magic anthologies. But as that great authority...
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The Sun King: Sam Phillips
BACK IN THE MID-'50s, the Sun Records studio at 706 Union Avenue was the epicenter of a sudden, wrenching shift in world consciousness. Tremors had been felt for several years, and then, one afternoon in early 1954, Sam Phillips was busy with routine work in the tiny studio when Destiny walked in. Actually, Destiny, in the person of a handsome, painfully shy but flashily dressed young man with longish hair and greasy sideburns, paced up and down the sidewalk outside for some time before summoning the courage to actually walk in the door. Phillips, a thirty-one-year-old radio engineer from Florence,...
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The Soul Stirrer: Sam Cooke
FEW ENTERTAINERS have fallen quite so far from grace as Sam Cooke did when he died, 30 years ago, at the Hacienda Motel in south-central Los Angeles. Whatever the doubts and suspicions surrounding the shooting – and there are still many – it is hard to see it as a martyr's death. Yet think of Sam Cooke and you think: Grecian good looks, irresistible charm and style, and a voice that rings out like a glorious, golden peal, cooing ‘You Send Me’ down the corridors of eternity. For the best part of 15 years, Cooke was an archangel, a black American...
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Johnny Cash
(1932 – 2003) With his rumbling baritone voice, spare, percussive guitar and imposing, black-clad presence, Johnny Cash was an iconic figure whose influence spans the 50s Rockabilly explosion, multimedia stardom in the 60s and a late-life comeback in the '90s. Cash remained a beloved star in the Country field for decades, despite his refusal to play by the genre's established rules. Meanwhile, the empathy for the underdog and passion for social justice that fueled much of his music aligned him with the Rock counterculture from the '60s onward. The Arkansas-bred Cash first recorded in the 50s for the Sun label, where...