It’s summer in New York. You wanna be in Montauk, feeling the cool ocean breeze, eating outside, or people watching in Sag Harbor.
Well, this picture has nothing to do with that. Just happened across it and it struck a note.
Walking south through Soho, before the towers fell.

Proud to be on the playlist with such good company for Bonnie Raitt’s
guest DJ slot on LA’s 100.3 radio

• Mississippi Fred McDowell | Shake Em’ On Down - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Sippie Wallace | Women Be Wise- Buy Now: iTunes
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• Howlin’ Wolf | 300 Pounds of Joy- Buy Now: iTunes
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• Little Feat | One Love Stand - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Sarah Siskind | Dress Me Up- Buy Now: iTunes
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• Richard Julian | Photograph- Buy Now: iTunes
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• Tony Scherr | I Could Understand - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Eric Bibb | The Way You Are - Buy Now: iTunes
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• NRBQ | Feel You Around Me - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Larry John McNally | Folksinger - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Maia Sharp | The Girl On Her Way - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Ry Cooder | Cherry Ball Blues - Buy Now: iTunes
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• J.B. Lenoir | Mojo Boogie - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Taj Mahal | Queen Bee - Buy Now: iTunes
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• Stephen Bruton | Too Many Memories - Buy Now: iTunes



My song “Struttin’ On Sunday” appears in the opening montage of Episode 8, of the HBO TV series, “Treme.” Super cool show about New Orleans, city I love so much.
Aaron Neville sings it, and Aaron is great as I’m sure you already know.

This record was recorded a long time ago. It was the first song of mine to be recorded and holds a special place in my heart. I so loved the music that was coming out of New Orleans when I was growing up. Everything was regional then. The RnB from Philly was totally different from Motown, or Memphis, and like the food there, the flavor of NOLA was like no other.

I wrote “Struttin’ ” up in Maine with my friend Andrew Kastner. Later I ended up in New Orleans working for my sister, in the kitchen at a dinner theatre out in Metairie.
I’d walk the levee road down to the Camellia Grill, Uptown, then take the streetcar down to the French Quarter. I remember going to a songwriter open mic at a bar there and not having the courage to get up and sing a song. I was an observer, taking it all in, trying to figure out how I was going to do whatever it was I was going to do.

One day I borrowed my sister’s car and drove to Allen Toussaint’s studio with my demo tapes. For some reason, they let me in the door and listened. I guess it’s true that God watches over the young. These days you can’t get past the security guard at the front door of a music office. But, this was a long time ago, and my song ended up being recorded by Aaron. This was post the “Tell It Like it Is” phase of his career and pre Neville Brothers fame, pre Linda Ronstadt singing his praises.

The song first appeared on an Aaron Neville compilation from the UK label, Charly Records called “Sehorn’s Soul Farm.”

With itunes, it’s easy to wander through an artist’s past catalogue and it seems likely that that is how this song ended up on the show. The song was also recorded by Johnny Adams, another New Orleans soul great. It’s actually the same backing track, though re-mixed. Check it out on itunes as well.

Played a private party last night, adding a few new songs to the set list:

1. I Put a Spell On You (song I wrote with Adam Levy)
2. Nobody’s Girl
3. Long Drag Off A Cigarette
4. Roses Have Thorns
5. Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love
6. Shelter (new song from my next album)
7. Danny Boy/Romeo & Juliet in Belfast (on electric dulcimer)
8. Flower Girl
9. Just My Imagination
10. Manic Depression

the band was:
Lee Curreri
David Schwartz
Nichelle Monroe
and my friend Andres Ospina sitting in on percussion

Andres is my Columbian songwriter friend who I’ve been playing with lately.
We played a bunch of his music late into the evening, and I made my
debut on standup bass. I’ll need the rest of my life to gain mastery over that
beautiful unwieldly instrument!

Please stop on by! We’re going on at 7:30. Featuring David Schwartz on upright bass, Nichelle Monroe on vocals and percussion, Lee Curreri on keyboards and Melodica, and Danilo Arroyo on percussion.
Hang around for my long time friend from Maine, Jude Johnstone.

Morning after update:

What a fun time it was last night. The band is really coming together. We played:
1. Nobody’s Girl
2. Long Drag Off A Cigarette
3. Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love -Danilo is a very funky drummer.
The groove really came alive.
4. Roses have Thorns - Live debut.
5. Danny Boy/ Romeo & Juliet in Belfast (on electric dulcimer)
6. Flower Girl (on Dobro) -Live debut.
A bit shaky on my part but had a great vibe!
7. Just My Imagination - first time with Nichelle. Finally I have someone else
to sing with!

Played the ASCAP Expo ’songwriters in-the-round’ show last night in Hollywood. Nichelle Monroe sang with me and played percussion. She is great. She has got it ALL going! Talent and charisma. This was our first time singing together live. There will be more. The above pictures are from a show she did last summer.

So much fun to get out and perform and meet people. Thanks to all who came up to say hello afterwards, and thanks to Billy Steinberg, Robert Ellis Orrall and Steve Diamond for their candid stories and heartfelt performances.
To hear Billy Steinberg’s folk renditions of “Like A Virgin” and “I Touch Myself” was worth the price of admission, not to mention the roof lifting off the place with his tender performance of “True Colors.”

OBITUARY By MARK McDONALD
April 5, 2010 New York Times
Mike Zwerin, a jazz trombonist and bass trumpeter who became a prominent jazz critic and author, died on April 2 in Paris, where he lived, after a long illness. He was 79.

I picked up The New York Times the other day and saw that Mike has passed. It startled me. I thought we would all live forever, and it still doesn’t register that we won’t. Or perhaps, as my friend Brian Cullman says, “maybe we each have a different definition of “forever.”
I was playing in Paris with my friend Leni Stern and Brian suggested I call Mike. Mike was an expatriate music journalist in Paris, who wrote for the Herald Tribune. What a great guy. We met for a drink near the club, New Morning, where I was playing. He had a lot of history in his soul and on his face. Our meeting was brief, but part of the beauty of the circus world that is the world of the traveling musician, is the brief but beautiful encounters along the way. Mike was a fixture there. I assumed we would meet again.
It was a fun gig for me. The drummer was the great Dennis Chambers, John McLaughlin was backstage, along with lovely french girls, and french guys smoking Gauloises. I played lap steel and sang some blues and jazz standards. After the show we took a walk and found something to eat from a street vendor, late in the night, or actually, it was early in the morning. Paris. I could’ve stayed there forever, but my son was just a few months old and I couldn’t wait to get back home.
I won’t be seeing Mike again, not in this life. God bless him wherever he is.

The cause was a blood disease, his son, Ben, said.
When he was 18, nervously sitting in with Art Blakey’s group at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, Mr. Zwerin was noticed by the trumpeter Miles Davis, who complimented the young player and used him briefly in his influential nonet at the Royal Roost in Midtown Manhattan.
Mr. Zwerin later played with the big bands of Maynard Ferguson and Claude Thornhill. But it was as a critic and an author that he made his mark on jazz.
He was the jazz columnist for The Village Voice in New York from 1964 until 1969, then moved to Europe and served as that paper’s European editor until 1971. He also wrote for Rolling Stone and other magazines.
In 1979 he became a music critic for The International Herald Tribune in Paris, and in 2005 he became a music critic for Bloomberg News.
Mr. Zwerin also wrote several books about his own life in the world of jazz, most notably “Close Enough for Jazz” and “The Parisian Jazz Chronicles: An Improvisational Memoir.”
In his 1969 book, “The Silent Sound of Needles,” Mr. Zwerin wrote about his struggles with drug addiction. Using drugs was “part of the ethic of what I thought was being hip, which was really stupid,” he said in a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News. “When you’re that age, you’re immortal.”
Michael Zwerin was born in New York on May 18, 1930. He grew up in Forest Hills, Queens; went to the High School of Music and Art; and graduated from the University of Miami. He worked for his father at the Capitol Steel Corporation and became its president when his father died, though he continued to perform.
Music was his passion, especially jazz, and in 1964 he began writing about it.
Mr. Zwerin also wrote about the loneliness that can come with being an expatriate. In “The Parisian Jazz Chronicles,” writing about himself in the third person, he told his wife, Martine, that she “should sprinkle his ashes over the Atlantic.”
“He was an alienated American, a wandering Jew, a musician playing to empty houses on an endless foreign tour,” he wrote. “He was on permanent loan to Paris, like a painting in a museum.”
Beside his son, of Brooklyn, Mr. Zwerin is survived by his wife, Martine, and three daughters from his first marriage: Katie Hensler of Cocoa Beach, Fla., Laura Black of Miami and Donna Mosely of Long Island.



Saturday April 24th
Playing a few songs in the round at an ASCAP event.
5:30 - 6:45 pm

Round-Up: The Writers Jam
Grand Ballroom
RENAISSANCE HOLLYWOOD HOTEL
Host: Brendan Okrent ASCAP 


Steve Diamond- Songwriter, Producer, Performer - “I Can Love You Like That,” “I’ve Got a Rock N’ Roll Heart,” “Let Me Let Go,” “Consider Me Gone,” “According To You”


Larry John McNally- Songwriter, Performer – “Nobody’s Girl,” “The Motown Song,” “For My Wedding,” “I Love To Watch A Woman Dance”


Robert Ellis Orrall- Songwriter, Producer, Performer - “From Here to Eternity,”Beautiful Eyes, “What’s It to You,” “Dancing In Circles”


Billy Steinberg- Songwriter, Performer - “Like A Virgin,” “True Colors,” “Eternal Flame,” “I’ll Stand By You”

There’s nothing more inspiring than to hear a master songwriter perform his or her own song. This group of some of modern music’s most successful songwriters will share the fascinating stories behind their work and will perform them live in a fun, stripped-down, in-the-round setting.

Thursday, April 22nd

For Earth Day I’m playing bass with my Columbian/American friend, Andres Ospina.
Great, fresh singer/songwriter music with spanish lyrics.

Andrés Ospina & band

4/22/2010 7:30 PM at TreePeople
12601 Mulholland Dr, Beverly Hills, California 90210

Cost: Free
Album release party for his debut album ’Buenaventura’

Played a private party the other night. Warming up the band to tour.
David Schwartz on stand-up bass, Lee Curreri on piano/keyboards and
Arno Lucas on percussion and vocals. Have never performed with Lee or Arno before,
and they were great.

Here’s the set list:

Set One:
Sidewalks of Summer
Nobody’s Girl
Buddy Holly
I Put A Spell On You (new song I wrote with Adam Levy)
Ain’t No Sunshine
Long Drag Off A Cigarette
Love Train
Just My Imagination

Set Two:
Danny Boy/ Romeo & Juliet in Belfast (new song on dulcimer)
Mercy, Pity, Peace & Love/ If You Want Me to Stay
Real Good Thing
Why’s Your Skin So White
Little Satellite (on dobro)
Manic Depression

St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. Sorry to say I wasn’t in New York for the parade. When I hear the bagpipes echoing up Fifth Avenue, I’m wasted. Don’t ask me why, it’s just built in to my genetic code. Los Angeles on St. Patrick’s Day, doesn’t really cut it. There’s no public forum. No street interaction. What would I do, drive the freeway loop drinking green beer with a bumper sticker that says ‘Honk If You’re Irish’ !?

I used to think that I was a unique individual on this planet, but over time I’ve discovered that I’m just ‘Black Irish model# 22.’ Check the following that apply; Brooding personality, check, looking for a fight at every opportunity, especially when fueled by alcohol, check, always taking the side of the underdog, check, harboring resentment against the bastards who’re trying to drag us down, check, most comfortable with the following occupations- construction worker, cop, fireman, bartender, singer of sad songs, storyteller, check. Wait, do those last two count as occupations? As my mother constantly said, ‘Lar, you’ve never worked a day in your life!’

Been reading Dan Barry’s memoir ‘Pull Me Up’- it’s a beautiful book. It might as well be my own Irish American suburban story. He’s my brother, though he doesn’t know me. I read his column in the New York Times, for inspiration before starting my day. I grew up in the most mundane of circumstance and yet my mother saw the magic in everything around us. A million stories in the molecules of every moment.

Have you heard Patty Griffin’s song, ‘Mary’? I first heard it dubbed into the documentary film, ‘ The Ground Truth ‘ that has some of my music in it. Patty’s song echoing behind the imagery of men returned home from war, and those who didn’t return home from war-well, you’re not human if it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye. Patty is from a town in Maine about 15 miles north of my own. Even more hardscrabble than mine. I’ve heard that she grew up in one of those big Irish families of 8 kids, and that her song ‘Mary’ is about her grandmother. Perhaps only hearsay. Either way, a song as good as that one is always ‘about’ everyone and everything.