As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

2017 XPoNential Music Festival, July 28-30, Wiggins Park (Camden NJ)


General – skipped Friday for a variety of reasons (absence of anyone I really wanted to see, ominous weather forecast that caused the organizers to completely abandon the River Stage, etc.) … Saturday was mostly cloudy and cool, but wound up with only a few minutes of light rain around 3:00 … Sunday was sunny and much warmer, but with some breeze … Cosmic was there as usual with wraps, as was the BBQ place that had jambalaya … parking was billed as “extremely limited”: didn’t have the big lots just south of the bridge, but lots on Federal Street were actually closer and had plenty of spaces when I arrived at 10:30, an hour before the gates opened
 
Saturday highlights
 
Preservation Hall Jazz Band – with no thunderstorm to cut things short this year, the band put on an amazing show, featuring the Latin-flavored self-written tracks “Santiago” and “La Malanga”
 
Rhiannon Giddens – hard to put her in a box; shows up most prominently on Amazon under “Traditional Folk”, but with plenty of spiritual, blues, and Creole thrown in … best songs were “We Could Fly”, “Get It Right The First Time”, “Freedom Highway”
 
Sunday highlights
 
David Bromberg Quintet – I didn’t know exactly what to expect from 70s icon David Bromberg and his 5 bandmates, but they did a great set; the crowd in front of the stage refused to leave until they came back from an encore. Folk-tinged blues (or maybe blues-tinged folk?) with exceptional musicianship and a lot of hilarity throughout – their performance of “Sharon” was one or two orders of magnitude beter than the studio recording, which is worth listening to in and of itself.
 
The Record Company – No one around today rocks any harder than these three guys, which they proved for the second year in a row. Guitarist and lead vocalist Chris Vos first tossed his guitar pick into the standees (I wasn’t quite quick enough to snag it), and followed up later by tossing one of his harmonicas to a 7-year-old (?) kid wearing a red Record Company T-shirt, but the music was more than enough to satisfy, starting with “Broken” (their latest single), with other highlights being “Rita Mae Young” and “Off The Ground”. As with Bromberg, the crowd demanded (and got) an encore.
 
Also worth mentioning – opening two sets by local favorites No Good Sister (country) and Hardwork Movement (hip-hop), Sweet Spirit (really rocked, although I’m still not a big fan of “The Power”), Marina Stage set by Joseph

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