Nicki Minaj, Glen Campbell, Wilco among L.A.'s top summer concerts

Southern California’s summer pop music calendar includes Hard Summer, Make Music Pasadena and Rock the Bells festivals.

Nicki Minaj. Skrillex. Glen Campbell’s goodbye tour. Wilco. Some big names in pop are coming to Southern California this summer, promising a decent warm-weather season and the extension of a concert year that already has promoters singing.

Last month, promotion giant Live Nation, which also operates Ticketmaster, reported a 6% increase in ticket sales for the first quarter of 2012 compared with the same period last year -- no doubt due to a spring that has seen Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, the Beach Boys and Roger Waters touring; the Beverly Hills-based company also just promoted three sold-out Coldplay shows at the Hollywood Bowl. With artists such as Justin Bieber and Madonna not making it out West until the fall, the year’s blockbuster tours would seem to conveniently miss L.A.’s summer months.

But music fans still have a lot to celebrate this summer.

The annual downtown dance event known as Hard Summer has expanded from one day to two, and the yet-to-be-announced rock-centric festival known as FYF, also downtown and produced by the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival promoter Goldenvoice, has also stretched from one to two days over Labor Day. A festival spokeswoman says to expect the lineup to be revealed by the end of this month. What’s more, the Dave Matthews Band, one of the concert industry’s biggest stars, will swing through Southern California in September.

Gary Bongiovani, editor of concert-tracking publication Pollstar, also notes that tours are maximizing value: “We’re seeing good solid three-act shows these days. One way to stand out of the fog is to combine and offer fans real value. We see Enrique Iglesias, Jennifer Lopez, Wisin Y Yandel. That’s a great tri-bill. In previous years, we may not have seen that combination of talent.”

Here’s a look at just a few of the big-name acts and can’t-miss shows coming to the L.A. this summer.

Animal Collective, Norah Jones on 2012 Hollywood Bowl schedule

Psychedelic rock act Animal Collective and jazzy chanteuse Norah Jones are among some of the more pop-leaning acts on the 2012 Hollywood Bowl schedule, revealed today on our sister blog Culture Monster. The full lineup will be unveiled Tuesday, and will include a performances of Mel Brooks' record-setting hit musical "The Producers," a tribute to Pixar's animators and a Fourth of July program headlined by Barry Manilow.

Animal Collective, with its contrasting mix of technicolor imagery, abrasive noise and intoxicating harmonies, will headline a Sept. 23 night as part of the Hollywood Bowl's annual KCRW World Festival Sunday lineup, a show that will also include Tuvan throat singing group Huun Huur Tu. Other performers participating in the KCRW series are electronic-pop acts Hot Chip and Passion Pit (Sep. 9), as well as Black Eyed Peas rapper-DJ Aple.de.ap, who will celebrate his Filipino musical heritage on July 22.

Also of note to Pop & Hiss is the Bowl's continued booking of R&B acts and crossover jazz artists. Jones will be featured Aug. 10, and look for summer appearances by Diana Krall, Anita Baker and Grammy Award-winning bassist Esperanza Spalding, as well as the Neville Brothers, on what's being billed as their farewell tour.

PHOTOS: 2012 Hollywood Bowl highlights

Expect plenty of additional rock and pop artists to be unveiled as summer nears and the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival passes. Some of the Hollywood Bowl's more mainstream bookings are handled by outside promotors or cannot be unveiled until artists have played other Southern California dates. 

Head to Culture Monster for a deeper look at some of the Bowl's classical offerings, as well as an interview about the upcoming season with Arvind Manocha, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's chief operating officer.

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Image: Animal Collective at Coachella. Credit: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times

Peter Gabriel's 'New Blood' tour documented on new CD, DVD/Blu-ray

Maybe artistic freedom isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Just ask Peter Gabriel, the British rocker whose bold and innovative career choices musically, visually and theatrically would seem to make him the poster boy for the benefits of the unfettered artistic imagination.

Yet, as he's about to release the latest manifestation of a constantly evolving vision -- a new CD and a DVD/Blu-ray set from his "New Blood" tour for which he reconceived his own songs and favorites by other writers for full orchestra -- Gabriel talks like a musical Dirty Harry: a man who not only knows his limitations but welcomes them.

"I always think that the best way to frustrate an artist is to give him absolute freedom," Gabriel, 61, said in the same gentle, sandpapery voice that characterizes his signature songs "San Jacinto," "Biko," "Don’t Give Up," "Red Rain," "Shock the Monkey" and "Sledgehammer," some of which he revisited as part of his collaboration with the New Blood Orchestra, some of which he intentionally left out.

"If you want to give artists some support, make rules about what they can't do," he said. "So I've been trying to generate those rules for myself. In this case, John [Metcalfe, arranger for the New Blood Orchestra] and I wanted to strip away the rock crutches: the guitars and drum kits. Obviously, we use classical percussion, but we thought this created a situation where I couldn't hang on to the side any longer; I'd have to dive into the deep end of the pool and really explore the dynamic range of an orchestra. … What wasn't played was every bit as important as what was played."

Gabriel looks at the "New Blood" CD, released earlier this month, as an extension of last year's "Scratch My Back" album and tour, in which Gabriel recorded his interpretations, with John Metcalfe’s edgy orchestral arrangements, of songs he admires by other musicians such as Lou Reed, David Bowie, Randy Newman, Stephin Merritt and Arcade Fire. 

For the second leg of that tour, he included a larger dose of his own songs, newly arranged for orchestra. He alludes in the DVD to the originally planned second half of the “Scratch My Back” project -- an album of other artists interpreting his songs -- as still alive and well, albeit with no specific release date.

More than just adding strings to his best-known tunes, he and Metcalfe conceived a set list from the ground up.

Gabriel described the possibilities -- and limitations -- of working with the orchestra as "absolutely critical" in choosing which songs to adapt, and which to avoid. Jagged violins and ominous cellos and basses lay the sinister undercurrent for "Intruder," timpani provide the percussive thunder while violins and violas saw metronomically and insistent horns and woodwinds build the tension in "Rhythm of the Heat," and strings pulse powerfully rather than sweetly caress for "In Your Eyes."

"I didn't want to do a hits record," Gabriel said, "So 'Sledgehammer,' 'Big Time' and 'Games Without Frontiers' were consciously left out." That didn’t, however, stop some hits-minded fans from shouting out those titles when Gabriel first brought the project to the Hollywood Bowl in the spring of last year, before embarking on a more extensive tour last fall and winter.

"I was also trying to choose songs that might fit together as a sequence," he said. "I'm still old-fashioned enough to like an album that told me a story from start to finish. When I go to a film seminar, I may love the short films I see there, but I also sometimes want a film that may take an hour and 10 minutes or an hour and a half to get me to some other place.

"I'd rather have that when I want them than just the fast-food version for every little bit," he said, "which is obviously the way the culture has gone."

For the "New Blood" album, that left space for deeper cuts such as "Intruder" from his 1980 "Peter Gabriel" solo album, "Digging in the Dirt" from 1992’s "Us" and "Darkness" from 2002's "Up."

The DVD/Blu-ray set, which arrives today, also incorporates the evocative visuals that Gabriel, one of the masterminds of the music video in the early days of MTV, fully integrated into the New Blood performances. The "New Blood" DVD was shot at his performance earlier this year in London, which was enhanced with 3-D visuals. (A deluxe three-disc Blu-ray version also will be available.)

Yet there's another limitation that arises in shifting from the live arena to home video: the drastically reduced  size, which compromises the emotional impact those visuals contributed in the live setting. Gabriel embraces it as one of the givens of presenting his ideas across different media platforms.

"We did the 3-D version of the show in London, and one thing I love about the 3-D gimmick is that you can sit inside a space," Gabriel said of the presentation that included crimson-hued raindrops deluging the audience in "Red Rain," among other special effects. "In the same way that we were born with two ears, so stereo seems more natural than mono -- it’s spatial -- somehow, I feel exactly the same way with the visual.

"You can hold a slow pan much longer in 3-D and deliver more than you can maybe in 2-D because people can sense it from the inside of the space rather than looking from the outside," Gabriel said. "I don't know if it's perfect yet; it will be much easier when we don't have to wear glasses. But I love the fact we can do that; maybe that will be that future of the visual medium."

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Photo: Peter Gabriel during a London performance on his "New Blood" tour. Credit: York Tillyer

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Live: TV on the Radio, Arctic Monkeys and more at Hollywood Bowl

For one of the last hurrahs of the summer, the Hollywood Bowl presented a mini-festival of nervy rock from a pastiche of traditionalists, visionaries and, most successfully, those acts that combine both impulses.

With five bands on the bill Sunday, Bowlchella was a night designed for those who’d rather brave a hipster occupation of Highland Avenue, marching with their canteens of Trader Joe’s Merlot, than a drunken army of them loose in the desert where a secret economy based on traded American Spirit cigarettes and after-party details thrives.

Once a crowd of fedora-wearing women and slinky men in black jeans were in place, the two first acts were dispensed with, offering no sentimental lingering. Chicago’s glam revivalists Smith Westerns played for 20 minutes, and then the local quartet Warpaint took to the stage for only five minutes longer, looking like the long-lost sisters of Jane’s Addiction circa 1995.

Working their occult chemistry, the ladies treated the audience to swirls of darkly sweet guitar bolstered by Stella Mozgawa’s tribal drums hit with mallets. They played a fine, if unremarkable, version of “Undertow” and then bowed out on a rotating stage with lacy flourishes stitched on to the end of “Elephant.”

The intensity picked up with Panda Bear and his knob-pushing sideman Sonic Boom, from the defunct psychedelic outfit Spaceman 3. Known to his parents as Noah Lennox, Panda Bear takes harmonies and vocal lines out of the Beach Boys scrapbook but then envelops them in dense thatches of electronic soundscaping that oscillates from tense to lulling. Think Brian Wilson riding the sine waves.

Playing disembodied cuts from his latest album, “Tomboy,” Panda Bear is the lone woodsman, but instead of his gorgeous vocal calls coming from an isolated forest, it’s the cry from where two vectors meet at the end of a video-game grid, unmapped and unexplored. Technology is the new rugged terrain and Panda Bear is one of its most restless pioneers, pushing forward but always with one eye cast back.

Making an abrupt but enticing left turn, the Arctic Monkeys walked out to the strains of Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing,” with little else but guitars and other instruments played by their forefathers in the British Invasion. Whereas Panda Bear and Sonic Boom blazed trails with some reverb gizmo dubbed the Ekdahl Moisturizer, the Arctic Monkeys wielded primitive tools but with timeless wit.

With the blue lights on his determined face, front-Monkey Alex Turner, in a pompadour fit for “West Side Story,” ticked through meters of insouciant lyrics that bounced off of the band’s pliant riffing. A history lesson of Western rock was touched upon; shadow licks from the Smiths, Metallica, the Pretenders and David Bowie were referenced and then broken down, smoothly recalibrated into something lively and unique to the band.

The contrast between Panda Bear and the Arctic Monkeys created an ideal vacuum for New York’s TV on the Radio to slip into. Once heralded as the progenitors of a new edgy future, the art-rockers have now stepped into a comfortable position as respected statesmen. The start of their set, dipping into older material, sounded a bit muddy and lax but once TVOTR dug into their latest album, “Nine Types of Light,” the energy and focus intensified.

TV’s music often carries an exciting tension between song momentum and experimental atmospherics, but in moments, that once-brooding undertow can seem predictable. One spirited stunt can help make it feel fresh again. Frontman Tunde Adebimpe asked the crowd, “Has anyone here ever felt overwhelmed by the darkness?” Then he paced the stage, demanding that the house lights fire up again and again, the drums thundering behind him. It’s easy to imagine TV on the Radio kicking through the darkness and finding the new light.

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Photo: Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys performing at England's V Music Festival in August, 2011. Credit: Joel Ryan / Associated Press

Review: Serge Gainsbourg Tribute at Hollywood Bowl

Dear good people of France: Give singer Mike Patton a permanent residency at the most disreputable lounge in Paris, posthaste. Dressed like one of the lowliest hit men of the “Sopranos” crew, the former Faith No More and Mr. Bungle shredder brought a louche elegance to Serge Gainsbourg’s “Requiem pour un Con” at the Hollywood Bowl.

There was no shortage of singers pleased to slip into Gainsbourg’s white Repetto shoes at Sunday night’s Beck-produced Gainsbourg tribute, including his progeny, Lulu — but Patton, possessed of a slithery outlaw charm, was the evening’s breakaway lead. As the bass slinked around beatnik conga drums, he half spit and half savagely whispered in French his regards to life lived as a jerk. Occasionally he wriggled his eyebrows or widened his eyes, as if he’d just spotted a cold-blooded femme across the room.

With the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by Scott Dunn and Gainsbourg collaborator Jean-Claude Vannier and a crack live band reunited from Beck’s 2002 album, “Sea Change,” the true star of the evening was Gainsbourg’s towering songbook, a four-decade flirtation with every style of music that caught his eye — from chanson to ye-ye pop to Afro-Cuban jazz, American folk and reggae. A re-creation of the “Lolita”-like concept album written by Vannier and Gainsbourg, 1971’s “Histoire de Melody Nelson” was performed in its entirety for the evening’s sweeping finale.

When dealing with material that demands so much personality, perhaps more than it does technical skill, the singers who brought their own style to Gainsbourg fared the best. The diminutive goth singer Zola Jesus brought a throaty swagger to her version of “Harley Davidson,” but she also knew when to downplay her Joplin-at-the-opera tones, as evidenced by her gentle backup vocals on the breezy meringue, “Sea, Sex and Sun.”

Live review: Global Soul with Stevie Wonder at the Hollywood Bowl

 
“What is soul?" Ben E. King asked way back on a 1966 single, but his definition endures: “it ... comes from deep inside ... something that you can’t hide.” Stevie Wonder’s opening remarks at the Global Soul show on Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl were identical: “Soul is about the feeling in the heart ... at its deepest, most sincerest.” The sentiment’s generosity undoubtedly inspired "The Tonight Show’s" Rickey Minor, who conceived of the evening to highlight different shades of soul from around the world.

The concept, part of KCRW-FM (89.9)'s annual World Music Festival series, was well-intentioned. Though  in serving too many ambitions, the show’s opening half felt awkwardly disjointed. For one, all the obviously “global” acts -- including the energetic Nigerian guitarist Bombino and L.A.’s eclectic Latin rocker Ceci Bastida -- were conspicuously sequestered into that first half. Moreover, though Minor’s band backed every act, the different artists’ musical range was so broad -- spanning the Soul Seekers’ gospel gravity to the folk pop of Mia Doi Todd to Rocky Dawuni’s Afrobeat bombast -- it played havoc with the half’s sense of momentum.

For example, Brooklyn’s “Screaming Eagle of Soul,” Charles Bradley, earned the night’s first spontaneous standing ovation through his balladry’s emotive intensity -- not to mention James Brown-inspired stage chops. However, the next artist, Grace Potter of Vermont’s Nocturnals, surrendered some of that goodwill through an oversung/screeched performance, trying to invoke Tina Turner’s ferocity but lacking much of her nuance.

Live review: Dolly Parton at the Hollywood Bowl

The singer operates with a queenly mettle in an aggressively cheerful concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Dolly Parton employed the royal “we” so often Saturday night at the Hollywood Bowl that when she sat down at one point you half-expected her to land on a throne. In fact, the seat was as humble as the handful of old country songs she performed from it: “Coat of Many Colors,” for which she accompanied herself on autoharp; “Precious Memories,” delivered a cappella; “Tennessee Mountain Home,” with its exactingly drawn description of “a straight-back chair on two legs leaned against the wall.”

Yet throughout this aggressively cheerful concert — the second of two at the venue she referred to as “the Dollywood Bowl” — Parton operated with a queenly mettle that spoke to her five-decade journey from Appalachian hardship to Nashville aristocracy. She hardly required a throne to establish her position of power.

Nor, evidently, did she need to engage in an act now below her station — namely, singing live. Parton, 65, appeared to lip-sync large portions of Saturday’s 2 1/2-hour show, most noticeably when the tempo climbed above a rootsy shuffle, as in an aerobic rendition of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves or in “Together You and I,” a spirited pop-country tune from “Better Day,” Parton’s lovable new studio album. Later, near the end of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” she strapped on a saxophone and delivered a solo that felt like the precise musical equivalent of the blond wig she’d admitted to wearing earlier; the sound, it seemed, came from someone, just not the body to which it was attached.

Country music at the Hollywood Bowl: From Patsy Cline to Dolly Parton, some highlights

Dolly Parton is headed to the Hollywood Bowl on July 22-23. She's the latest in a long line of country acts to perform there. Patsy Cline, Garth Brooks and Carrie Underwood did too.

 
Dolly Parton will play the Hollywood Bowl on Friday and Saturday, her first full concerts at the hillside amphitheater in a career that has spanned nearly half a century. The news prompted Pop & Hiss to take a look back at some of the country artists who have performed at the storied venue during its 90 seasons. Click here, or on the photo of Dolly above, to see a gallery of some highlights.

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Photo: Singer/Songwriter Dolly Parton performs during the "Better Day" world tour opener at the Thompson-Boling Arena on July 17, 2011 in Knoxville, Tennessee. Credit: Rick Diamond/Getty Images.

Dolly Parton takes on Harold Camping and end-of-time predictions in new song 'In the Meantime'

Dolly Parton doesn’t mention apocalyptic preacher Harold Camping by name in her new song “In the Meantime,” which addresses end-of-the-world prognostications in a lighthearted yet serious way, but it’s clear the Bay Area-based radio evangelist figured prominently in her decision to include the song on her new “Better Day” album that came out Tuesday.

“I started writing it years ago,” she told me Thursday from her business office in Nashville. “I was very inspired to write it when some other crazy loony tune was saying the world was coming to an end.  Some people are just so scared they don’t know what to do.”

In her perky song, Parton sings:

Well, nobody knows when the end is coming/But some people tell you they do/It might be today, it might be tomorrow/Or in a million years or two/In the meantime, in the between time/Let us take time to make it right/And let us not fear what is not clear/Faith should be your guide.

“I had demoed the song two or three times, and I recorded it two or three times, but now I know why I never put it out before -- it’s supposed to be out now,” said the 65-year-old Country Music Hall of Fame member.

“The end of time and the end of the world are two different things,” she said with an audible grin. “We’re more apt to blow up the world than something else happening. But God knows when the end of time is -- not some fanatic.”

A full profile of Parton will be coming in Calendar before her new “Better Day” tour arrives at the Hollywood Bowl on July 22 and 23.

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Photo of Dolly Parton. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.

 

TV on the Radio and Arctic Monkeys headline Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 25

On Sept. 25, the Hollywood Bowl will host one of the largest bills of the season with five acts: TV on the Radio, Arctic Monkeys, Panda Bear, Warpaint and Smith Westerns. Call it a mini-Coachella for fans of au courant rock, except it won't be repeating itself a week later.

All the bands have released fetching albums in the last year or so, or have albums on the near horizon, with TV on the Radio's "Nine Types of Light" praised as a crystalline gem of "brilliant clarity" by Pop & Hiss' Chris Barton. The U.K. football-loving Arctic Monkeys will be releasing the rather bluntly titled "Suck It and See" on Tuesday. Closer to home, Warpaint, the favorites of Chili Pepper John Frusciante, released its Rough Trade debut, "The Fool," last year, garnering praise from England to the foursome's home base in Los Angeles.

Except for TV on the Radio, all the acts are Bowl newbies. Animal Collective's Noah Lennox, a.k.a. Panda Bear, will radiate the September air with his static-and-synth onslaught from "Tomboy" in what will be his only West Coast performance in support of the album. Despite all members being born in the '90s, Chicago's Smith Westerns raided the '60s for its bright, psychedelic pop-influenced album, "Dye It Blonde."

Tickets go on sale June 18 at hollywoodbowl.com or at the box office.

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Photo: TV on the Radio, courtesy of the band.