One of the world’s greatest musicians has died.
Mali’s Ali Farka Toure, rice farmer and one of the greatest guitarists ever, was best known in the west for his work with Ry Cooder, but unlike others he continued to live and play along the banks of the River Niger even after he was world famous.

Alvis Edgar Owens Jr. 1929-2006
A songwriter’s songwriter, he may be more remembered for hosting Hee Haw, but in my mind no truer picker ever walked the streets of Bakersfield. Obit in WaPo. Buck’s Crystal Palace site. Little clips of “Act Naturally” and Buck and Dwight.

Thank god musicians have each other, because they aren’t likely to have health insurance.

Ex-Butchies drummer Melissa York, who recently joined former Gerty members Shirlé Hale and David Koslowski to form The Ex-Members (pictured above) needs some help right now. On Tuesday, York underwent surgery on her spine to repaire a ruptured disk in her neck, according to her bandmates. They’ve put out the call on MySpace to raise money for medical bills via Paypal donations.

“Because she is such a Bad-Ass Rock Star and has committed her life to Rocking for you she doesn’t have the best health insurance,” says the email from Hale and Koslowski.

A part-time graphic designer, York does have insurance. But she pays for it out of pocket and it has a $2,500 deductable. On top of that, Hale estimates she will need at least $3,000 for living expenses and physical therapy during her six-to-10 weeks of recovery.

So, thanks to a six-hour delay on a flight out of Missouri last night, I’ve had three hours of sleep. But I’m commited to seeing a show tonight, and that’s the problem. Jonathan Kane plays a pretty awesome bill at Duke, and I’m working on a big story on him and the Table of the Elements crew for a magazine.
But, just announced, is a Reservoir show with Une Deux Trois, the new band from Mt.Moriah/In the Year of the Pig player Jenks Miller and Bellafea playa Heather McEntire. I’ve heard some of the demos, and it’s pretty rad. Also, Jenks has a new dance he calls “The Hey.” What’s more, John Darnielle is on the bill for a solo set and Dim Mak’s Pony Up!, who have a really great song about Matthew Modine on a split 7” they did with Ben Lee a year ago, open.

The requisite thing to say about Jonathan Kane’s music is that he is the co-founder of Swans, the seminal no-wave, New York band he started with Michael Gira in 1977. That band slowed rock songs down to impossibly haunting, dynamic-defying dirges, Gira’s voice and throbbing bass shaking loose as his apoplectic howls came pitted against Kane’s heavy, in-the-pocket blues drumming.
It was rock ‘n’ roll of a sort, played at a Thorazine pace and with a nervy unease. Kane takes credit for the deliberate rhythms and complexity of Swans’ early work, attributing it to his lifelong love of the blues. Before Swans, he and brother Anthony had opened for Muddy Waters and James Cotton as the Kane Bros. Blues Band, two Woodstock, New York teenagers obsessed with the mystique of Chicago’s south side.
But there’s more to Kane’s music than blues or no-wave notoriety. Even though it is always mentioned only as a corollary to that bit of history, his deep involvement with minimalist music and the modern avant-garde, as both a composer and a musician, is as important as it is fascinating.
For 25 years, Kane has worked with new music pioneer Rhys Chatham, combining his own heavy, blues-based beats with Chatham’s massed-guitar compositions, epitomized by Guitar Trio. In Trio, several rock guitarists (the last live rendition included Thurston Moore, Chris Brokaw and Doug McCombs) employee careful picking by to obtain melodies using only the overtones of single notes played by Chatham. Throughout it all, Kane pounds behind the drums, playing persistently for twenty minutes at the time. Last year, Kane recorded his own massed guitar work for the first time, elaborating on his work with Chatham on his first solo release, February. Imagine roadhouse blues guitars en masse, goaded by Kane’s combustible, clamoring drums.
“Jonathan has been placing my music for a long, long time. He could play it in his sleep,” Chatham recently said, sitting downstairs in an Austin, Texas church as Kane played upstairs in the sanctuary hall. “But what he’s done with work I began is fascinating to me: He’s taken the overtones and put them back down on the fretboard, using precisely the same rhythms.”
Jonathan Kane’s February plays at Duke Coffeehouse on Wednesday, March 21.

Shirlette Ammons has recorded a song in response to the Duke Lacrosse incident. It’s called “Bad Peaches,” ostensibly inspired by Nina Simone’s “Four Women”: “My skin is brown/And my manner is tough/I’ll kill the first mother I see/ ‘Cos my life has been too rough/I’m awfully bitter these days/because my parents were slaves/ What do they call me?/ My name is PEACHES.” You can here it on Myspace.

Five of the best things I’ve seen thus far:
Serena Maneesh
Four members of Wu-Tang
The Castanets with Jana Hunter
Rhys Chatham’s 9-Guitar Army with Thurston Moore
Britt Daniels’ Solo Set

Five (of 1,000) things I’ve missed:
The Flaming Lips … twice
Surprise Beastie Boys set
Cut Chemist
Echo & The Bunnymen with Spoon & Tapes ‘n’ Tapes
Every Drive-by Truckers performance at SXSW XX, though I did see Jason Isbell, Shonna Tucker & Brad Morgan