Sasquatch Festival 2006 looks like one of the coolest festivals happening this summer. It takes place at one of the most magical music venues on this planet, the Gorge Ampitheater which is near the Columbia River in central Washington (about three hours southeast of Seattle). Sasquatch festival takes place over the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of memorial weekend. The lineup this year is phenomenal! This is one to see for sure if you can swing it!

Nine Inch Nails, Special Guest - to be announced, HIM, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Wolfmother

Mainstage: BEN HARPER & The Innocent Criminals, The Flaming Lips, The Shins, The Tragically Hip, Neko Case, Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Gomez, Rogue Wave Wookie: Sam Roberts, Constantines, Architecture In Helsinki, Bedouin Soundclash, Matt Costa, The Brunettes Yeti: Tim Seely, Korby Lenker, Common Market, more artists to be announced

Mainstage: Beck, Death Cab For Cutie, Queens of the Stone Age, Matisyahu, The Decemberists, Nada Surf, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Blue Scholars Wookie: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Arctic Monkeys, We Are Scientists, Chad Vangaalen, The Heavenly States Yeti: Rocky Votolato, Laura Veirs, Mercir, The Village Green, more artists to be announced

And to keep your feet moving, check out this killer Matisyahu sound board from Madison Square Garden:

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival 2006 lineup was announced today. Its so great to hear that the tradition is continuing. The lineup this year is incredible. I think that many musicians have opted to play to show their support for carrying on the Jazzfest tradition in wake of Katrina. Some of the noteable acts include Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Dave Matthews Band, Elvis Costello and Ani DiFranco and many more. You can check out the complete lineup here.
Here is an exerpt the official press release:

New Orleans, LA (February 15, 2006)—Heralding the comeback of New Orleans music and culture, organizers of the 2006 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell today announced a music lineup filled with hundreds of New Orleans’ most beloved musicians, an array of superstars who have delivered some of the Festival’s most thrilling performances, and major artists making their Jazz Fest debuts at the first post-Katrina event on April 28-30 and May 5-7.

And just to keep your ears happy, check out this killer String Cheese Incident performance from Jazzfest 2000:

I’ve had a chance to play with the new open source music player for windows, Songbird and I see a ton of potential there. I like the idea of being able to connect to any music store (iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, etc…). The interface is comparable to iTunes and has a slightly better interface for browsing your library. Songbird already boasts a laundry list of features that iTunes doesn’t have. Songbird is still a little rough around the edges, after all the current release is only a user preview (version 0.1).

What makes Songbird a candidate for iTunes killer is that it is open source so anybody with a great idea (and a little technical inclination) will be able to create plugins. Songbird is built using the same XML user inter face language that firefox uses so developers can easily build application user interfaces for Songbird. This makes me wonder if Songbird will be to iTunes what Firefox is to Internet Explorer.

Another thing that I like about songbird is that it is light weight, using about half the memory that iTunes requires. iTunes works great on a Mac or a PC with tons of memory to spare, but if you’ve got a clunker PC forget about it.

It will be interesting to see how well Songbird will play with my iPod. Songbird has a long way to go before it presents any significant competition for iTunes, but the day will come when an open source music player contends with the big boys.

Here is another great review of songbird that goes into a little more detail about the UI and includes screenshots. ARS technica also has a great article about Songbird here.

You can download (8mb) Songbird here:
Mirror 1 Mirror 2

With everybody on broadband these days and thanks to the live music archive, there’s not much live music trading going on anymore. Sure there are the hard core collectors out there that will always be trying to perfect their collections. But for most people there is so much live music available at the click of the mouse that there is no need to strike up a trade or BnP anymore.

The days of trading ftp server logins have been taken over by bittorrent and high quality streams. All the new technology is great and I love having a never ending supply of live music, but I miss the connections that I made as a trader. Something about the whole process of doing a good old fashion snail mail trade was a ton of fun. I’d sit there and burn the CDs and carefully label them and send them off to their happy new owner. I’d constantly be getting great shows in the mail, which is almost like getting a present! Not anymore. Now, all I have to do is point my browser over to the live music archive and queue it up. Way easier, but lacking some of the nostalgic qualities. Maybe I’m just getting old, but part of me misses the good old days when I had to actually work to listen to great live music.

If you are interested in starting up an old school snail trade, check out my list and let me know if you see anything you like!