Bargain books, CDs and DVDs from Daedalus

Book, music, and movie lovers (along with those who buy gifts for book, music, and movie lovers) should know about Daedalus Books and Music. We've received catalogs from them for awhile and, with their amazing prices on some items, we just couldn't resist placing an order with them any longer. Our recent purchase included the classic The Women DVD for $6.98, a two-fer DVD of Holiday Inn and Going My Way for $6.98, a Billy Taylor Trio CD for $5.98, and a gorgeous big softcover book of The Posters of Mauzan for only $9.98 (which is a huge savings compared to Amazon). They might not have everything that you are looking for but, with these low prices, you feel free to be more adventurous in buying things that you're not as familiar with (we'd never heard of Mauzan and don't know much about Billy Taylor either) so you can enjoy the thrill of discovering something new. While they don't offer the free shipping like so many online retailers are this season, a flat fee of $5.95 for standard shipping isn't too bad, especially the more that you buy.

Wayne Newton at Hoosier Park

The Wayne Newton concert was just as much retro fun as we thought it would be. We had never been to Hoosier Park before and were happy to see that The Terrace Showroom was very intimate. We were surprised that so many musicians joined him on stage; some from his Las Vegas show and some Hoosier musicians who were tapped to play with him since it is a logistically challenging to take all of his musicians with him throughout the country. Everyone did a great job, particularly the back-up singers; Francis, Genevieve, and Darlene. Francis Lee was one of the back-up singers and Wayne told us that she is a very accomplished gospel singer. She sang "Amazing Grace" and her voice is amazing. We hope that we can find some of her solo work to download. Wayne's voice wasn't the strongest (he is 67), but we could not have asked for more energy or enthusiasm from him. He is the ultimate showman.

Here's Francis Lee bringing down the house with "Amazing Grace":
As the evening progressed the tie was loosened and Wayne dazzled us with his talents on the piano, guitar, banjo, and fiddle.

Happy 100th Birthday Johnny Mercer

We think it sounds like really big campy fun to go see Wayne Newton in concert and we're so glad that he'll be doing a show at Hoosier Park in Anderson. If you think it sounds like fun too, tickets go on sale today for the December 6th show.

The Best is Yet to Come

We usually don't go for contemporary singers covering The Great American Songbook; we'd rather hear the classic artists singing them. However, this ad in Time Out New York featuring the gorgeous cover art of The Best is Yet to Come- The Songs of Cy Coleman caught our eye. Maybe we were more open minded to purchasing it because, aside from the title song, we weren't as familiar with Cy Coleman and his songs as we are to say a Gershwin, Cole Porter, or Hoagy Carmichael. The arrangements are lush and beautiful and we highly recommend downloading the entire CD. We hope that Fiona Apple continues her career as a torch singer; she does lovely renditions of I Walk A Little Faster and Why Try to Change Me Now. We embarrassed to say that we didn't really know Cy Coleman's name but, with this compilation, we are enjoying changing that.

We're off for a little fall break on the island of Manhattan.

My Space Music Finds

Occasionally we get emails from marketers and individuals wanting us to promote things on the blog. Generally we just delete them unless it is something that genuinely grabs our interest. The music of local artist Pres Maxson we do genuinely like. Take a listen on his MySpace page (where you can also download the songs for free).



We also recently checked out another musician's MySpace page because a paper that we picked up in Columbus, Ohio had an article about her comparing her to an angry Patsy Cline. How could we not listen to Lydia Loveless after reading that? We are looking forward to her first CD.

We salute you Les Paul. We love your take on our big favorite, Caravan.

By the way, Neko Case just KILLED IT last night at Clowes. We were a little worried about the light crowd when the opening act started (Jason Lytle of Grandaddy who we really liked) but the crowd filled in by 9 when Neko took the stage. She belted out her great songs for nearly 2 hours and we were so glad to hear that she enjoyed her day in Indiana. She mentioned enjoying her meal at Hollyhock Hill and she mentioned that the folks at Clowes at been very nice to her (even letting her dogs periodically join her on stage). You've got to love Clowes' acoustics; the girl's got some amazing pipes and that was the place to hear her.

For some reason, the ad in Nuvo for Ha Ha Tonka's upcoming show at Locals Only (June 27th) caught our attention. Listening to their recently released CD, Novel Sounds of the Nouveau South, we think they sound good. We won't be around this weekend but the show might be worth checking out if you like "foot stompin indie rock".

Area Etta James fans will want to note that she will be at the Louisville Palace on 8/16/09 and tickets just went on sale. We think she is worth the short drive down south and can't wait to see her and the theatre.

Lucinda Williams was in fine form last night at The Vogue. She looked great sporting dark hair and sounded absolutely impeccable. If you're Googling this in another city wondering if she's worth seeing live, she absolutely is. There wasn't a lot of in between songs chit-chat, mostly she just told us the name of the song and sung it beautifully. Buick 6 did a great job backing her up and really got the place rocking, especially near the end with fantastic renditions of Come On, Honey Bee, and Joy. She finished the encore with It's A Long Way to the Top (if you want to rock and roll). We don't know if other people consider her at the top but we do and last night she certainly proved that she can rock and roll.

While we love the facade of The Vogue, and we love that it is still there, we can't say it is our favorite place to see a concert. The combination of general admission and limited seating isn't for us but, for Lucinda, we were glad that we went.

Sunday morning combo...

...listening to Adele and reading a Pearls Before Swine book. (the Pearls link is to creator Stephan Pastis' blog which has a funny video on it- we love this guy and his work!)

We've got to hand it to local artists who manage to find us on Facebook or our My Space page because we really don't do much with those. Friends via My Space, Mumbai Taxi let us know about upcoming shows and we recently found out about local reggae group Mistyc Reign. We love reggae and they sound good.

Neko in Indy!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the second time in about a month, while casually flipping through Nuvo, we were happily shocked to discover a favorite female artist is coming to Indy. First, it was Lucinda Williams and now it is Neko Case! We thought that all of her concert dates were already set and we were almost thinking we'd go to Pittsburgh later in the summer to see her. She's coming to Clowes and it's even on a Friday (July 17th). We are so excited (well, Mrs. WYA! is beside herself with excitement- Mr. WYA! has never really listened to her so he'll be putting her CDs in heavy rotation for awhile to get acquainted with her). We think this is way bigger news than the Elton John/Billy Joel show that is getting the big press treatment but, our tastes never were very much in line with the mainstream.

We love jazz and realize that our collection is woefully incomplete. We were glad to run across this list of "The 100 Greatest Jazz Albums of All Time" to give us an idea of what we still need to buy. It looks like there were a lot of criticisms of the list by the comments but that is probably the nature of any such subjective list. We started listening to some of the artists and ended up buying the iTunes Essentials mix Jazz Chillouts "Basic Cuts" with artists like Charles Mingus and the Oscar Peterson Trio. It's not that we don't like hot jazz, we are just in a chill mood this week. Let us know what jazz you think is "essential".

Record Store Day tomorrow

Don't forget, April 18th is Record Store Day. Check out the website for the independent record store near you and give them some love tomorrow.

(there's no particular reason we chose the Breakfast in America image to show here- it just came to mind when we thought back to real vinyl that we enjoyed back in the day)

Mumbai Taxi

We don't get out to listen to local music much (we leave that to Nora) but, via My Space, we recently became aware of the local band Mumbai Taxi. The music clips on the My Space page sound really good so we thought we'd share that link with you and let you know that they will be at The Chatterbox this Saturday, April 18th.

Woo-hoo! Lucinda Williams is coming to the Vogue on June 9th and tickets are on sale now! (it's a non-smoking show- whew!)

Maysa Matarazzo

How cool is it that we emailed a question to The New York Times music critic and we got a prompt, personal response from him? We are very grateful to Ben Ratliff for that and for introducing us to Maysa Matarazzo, a Brazilian singer from the 60s that we had managed to get this far into our lives without hearing about before. We read this article in Time Out New York back in November and then wanted to pick up Maysa's Barquinho CD. Her CDs aren't easy to find in stock online so we emailed Mr. Ratliff and he kindly suggested a Chicago record store, Dusty Groove America. Barquinho was out of stock then but we made an online account on the website asking for an email notification when it was back in stock. This week, we got an email that it was available so we excitedly ordered it. We're going to keep Dusty Groove bookmarked because it looks like they have a lot of fascinating music (we just wish that they had sound clips available). Yesterday, our CD arrived and it is so lovely. We don't have a spring break vacation coming up but the music transported us to this cruise on the cover.