Maggie speaks with System Of A Down Singer Serj Tankian about the Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict -
Serj Tankian is a singer, poet, songwriter, visual artist, activist, and composer; Serj Tankian has always created music as an outlet to express his thoughts and feelings with a level of passion and consciousness that few in today’s world of music can rival. An Armenian born in Lebanon and re-rooted in Los Angeles, Tankian was introduced to the melding of cultures, ideas, and ideals from a very young age. The principles learned from this integration and adaptation have led to his understanding of the oneness of all things and have since maneuvered and transfigured into the music and art that he lives to create.

Source: https://loudwire.com/serj-tankian-warns-another-potential-armenian-genocide-artsakh/

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/the-racket/system-of-a-down-reunion-serj-tankian-armenian-conflict/12994878

Source: https://serjtankian.com

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54324772

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Maggie speaks with Grammy-winning author Ashley Kahn about his latest book, "George Harrison on George Harrison"  a collection of interviews and TV appearances Harrison gave during his too-short life. Kahn’s collection “covers [Harrison’s] biographical sweep as fully as an autobiography would,” the preface asserts, and though one might argue with that, by book’s end, we believe Kahn’s exhortation: “Read his words, and know the man.”

Ashley has received widespread critical acclaim for A Love Supreme: The Making of John Coltrane’s Signature Album and Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. His other books include The House That Trane Built and, as cowriter, The Universal Tone, Carlos Santana’s autobiography. He teaches at New York University, and his articles have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other publications.

Ashley Kahn is an author, educator, music journalist, and concert producer. A professor of music history and criticism at NYU who lectures at other institutions as well, his books include the A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Kahn’s writing has generated two Grammy nominations, three ASCAP/Deems Taylor Awards, and two Book of the Year distinctions from the Jazz Journalists Association.

Most recently, he has spoken, presented, and conducted interviews at a variety of festivals and conferences including: SXSW, CMJ, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Umbria Jazz Festival (Perugia and Orvieto), North Sea Jazz Festival (Rotterdam), the Detroit Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Barcelona Jazz Festival, Berklee School of Music, and other universities, music conferences and festivals.

Kahn’s byline appears in such publications as Rolling Stone, Mojo and The Wall Street Journal and his voice is often heard on National Public Radio's “Morning Edition”. During a thirty-year career in the music business, Kahn has helped produce countless concerts, tours and festivals including a ten-year stint as tour manager for a multitude of music groups, including: Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Debbie Harry & the Jazz Passengers and Britney Spears. He continues to work very closely with the Miles Davis family on a variety of projects, including a Miles Davis museum exhibition, tribute concerts and various panels and speaking engagements.

“Despite all the pressures of fame, George Harrison managed to stay grounded, and real, and to live a life in full. In George Harrison on George Harrison, Ashley Kahn has summoned up a portrait of the artist as public figure, as friend, as husband, as spiritual devotee, through a kaleidoscopic assemblage of letters, interviews, broadcast transcripts, and more. Harri-son was thoughtful, sensitive, honest, warmly funny, kind, and very, very smart. It all shines through in this beautiful collection.”  —Tom Piazza, Author of Why New Orleans Matters

Source: https://www.amazon.com/George-Harrison-Interviews-Encounters-Musicians/dp/1641600519

Source: https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/clive-davis-institute/1417614318

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked

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Maggie speaks with Vince Wilburn, Jr.  the nephew of the late, great jazz icon Miles Davis and oversees the Miles Davis estate along with Erin and Cheryl Davis (the son and daughter of Miles).  Vince is, most notably, a highly accomplished drummer, producer, bandleader and radio host, who has both toured and recorded with Miles on recordings and live performances

MILES DAVIS: MERCI MILES! LIVE AT VIENNE

Previously Unreleased Recording Featuring One Of The Jazz Legend’s Final Live Performances 

Miles Davis performed with the Miles Davis Group on July 1, 1991, at the Jazz à Vienne festival in France. Sadly, it was one of his last concerts before passing away on September 28 of that year. This previously unreleased concert will make its debut this summer during Rhino Records’ upcoming Black Music Month celebration.

Davis’ electrifying performance at Jazz à Vienne includes two songs that were written by Prince, with whom he had a mutual admiration and friendship. The collection features liner notes by music historian, journalist, and producer Ashley Kahn, along with art designed by Bruno Tilley. 

By 1991, the world’s most celebrated trumpeter could look back on five decades of musical evolution – his own and that of the world around him. Davis had found ways to marry jazz with classical ideas, then later R&B, rock, and funk, to produce hybrid offspring that shaped the course of popular music and had come to define his legend. In 1985, he’d left Columbia after 30 years to sign to Warner Bros. Records (now Warner Records), a label riding high with best-selling artists like Madonna, Van Halen, and Prince.

Miles Davis’s lifelong love for France is well-documented, and in July 1991, he became a Knight of its Legion of Honour. Davis accepted the award from French culture minister Jack Lang, who described him as: “The Picasso of Jazz.” A few days before, he played the exhilarating concert captured on MERCI MILES! at Jazz à Vienne with the Miles Davis Group.

Source: https://www.milesdavis.com/albums/merci-miles-live-at-vienne/

Source: https://www.milesdavis.com

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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In this interview Maggie focuses on "The Many Faces of Women's Liberation" starting in the early 1960's.  Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener
Now available in paperback. 

A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties

Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of “Asian American” as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women’s movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture.

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors’ storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis’s awardwinning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose.

Jon Wiener is a longtime Contributing Editor at the Nation and host and producer of Start Making Sense, the magazine’s weekly podcast. He is an Emeritus Professor of US history at UC Irvine, and his books include Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files and How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America. He lives in Los Angeles.

Source: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3752-set-the-night-on-fire

Source: https://jonwiener.com

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Alice Coltrane’s ashram album Kirtan: Turiya Sings gets first release.

Michelle Coltrane joins Maggie to discuss her Mother's latest release from Impulse! Records Kirtan: Turiya Sings . After releasing the wondrous Transfiguration in 1978, documenting a live concert with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Reggie Workman, Alice Coltrane retreated from public life to serve as swamini in an ashram she founded in Agoura Hills, California. Though she resurfaced briefly at John Coltrane tribute concerts during the 1990s and released a final album, Translinear Light, in 2004, it was widely thought she had abandoned music for over two decades.

However, during that time, she was playing alone and with others for Sunday "kirtans" (services), and she occasionally recorded devotional chants for her followers. In 2017, Luaka Bop released The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda; its music was compiled from four privately pressed (and professionally recorded) cassettes. The first of these was 1982's Turiya Sings, and marked the first recording of her singing voice, accompanied by organ, strings, synths, and in places, minimal sound effects. Commercially unavailable, it has been streaming on YouTube for years. Kirtan: Turiya Sings, issued by Impulse!, presents that album in a startling new context. This rare mix -- unheard even by Ravi Coltrane until he was producing Translinear Light -- presents Alice's prayerful rendition of nine traditional Hindu chants called "bhajans," offered with only her Wurlitzer organ in support.

Source: https://www.allmusic.com/album/kirtan-turiya-sings-mw0003535709

Source: https://www.alicecoltrane.com

Source: http://www.impulserecords.com/artists

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Shepard Fairey is an American graphic artist and social activist who is part of the Street Art movement along with other artists including Banksy and Mr.Brainwash. Fairey blurs the boundary between traditional and commercial art through type and image, communicating his brand of social critique via prints, murals, stickers, and posters in public spaces. “Art is not always meant to be decorative or soothing, in fact, it can create uncomfortable conversations and stimulate uncomfortable emotions,” he stated. Born on February 15, 1970 in Charleston, South Carolina, Fairey graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 where he earned his Bachelor of Arts in illustration.
In 1989 Fairey created the André the Giant Has a Posse sticker campaign, featuring a stylized image of the wrestler André the Giant. This project  was the foundation for his seminal Obey series, which helped to push Fairey into the public spotlight. The artist is perhaps best known for his Hope (2008) campaign, which portrays a portrait of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, in red, white, and blue. In 2017, the artist created a series of three posters— featuring portraits of culturally diverse women, again using a red, white, and blue color scheme—in response to the xenophobic rhetoric of President-elect Donald Trump. Fairey currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His works are included in the collections of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In 2019 Maggie visited Shepard's Studio Number One in Los Angeles and they talked about his earliest influences, musically and artistically and why it's important for artists to "Get Up, Stand Up"

Source: http://www.artnet.com/artists/shepard-fairey/

Source: https://obeygiant.com

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Rock Profiles adapted for podcast.

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Maggie LePique speaks with filmmaker, writer, photographer Frank Lisciandro who edited the beautiful new book and New York Times Bestseller, The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics

The definitive anthology of Jim Morrison's writings with rare photographs and numerous handwritten excerpts of unpublished and published poetry and lyrics from his 28 privately held notebooks.

Created in collaboration with Jim Morrison’s estate and inspired by a posthumously discovered list entitled “Plan for Book,” The Collected Works of Jim Morrison is an almost 600-page anthology of the writings of the late poet and iconic Doors’ front man. This landmark publication is the definitive opus of Morrison’s creative output—and the book he intended to publish. Throughout, a compelling mix of 160 visual components accompanies the text: excerpts from his 28 privately held notebooks—all written in his own hand and published here for the first time—as well as an array of personal images and commentary on the work by Morrison himself. 

Source: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-collected-works-of-jim-morrison-jim-morrison?variant=32313506529314

This episode is from a recent archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 
Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo.  She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Hop aboard the Peace Train in this picture book adaptation of Cat Stevens’s legendary anthem of unity and harmony in time for the song’s 50th anniversary! With illustrations by New York Times bestselling illustrator Peter H. Reynolds.

“Now I've been happy lately

Thinking about the good things to come

And I believe it could be

Something good has begun

Oh, I've been smiling lately

Dreaming about the world as one

And I believe it could be

Someday it's going to come”

Readers are invited to hop on the PEACE TRAIN and join its growing group of passengers who are all ready to unite the world in peace and harmony.

Featuring the timeless lyrics of Cat Stevens’s legendary song and illustrations by New York Times bestselling artist Peter H. Reynolds, this hopeful picture book inspires tolerance and love for people of all cultures and identities.

Source: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/peace-train-cat-stevens?variant=33051664416802

Peter's website: https://www.peterhreynolds.com

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 
Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo.  She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Jackson Browne on his first release in nearly 6 years, Downhill From Everywhere.
Release date July 23, 2021.

Nearly five decades since his debut LP, the songs on Jackson Browne’s new album Downhill From Everywhere sustain the soulful intimacy of his first release, combined with a power and wisdom gained from a life pursuing positive change. 

Label: Inside Recordings 

Produced by Jackson Browne
Recorded and Mixed by Kevin Smith

Source: https://www.jacksonbrowne.com/discography/downhill-from-everywhere/

JB Store: https://shop.jacksonbrowne.com/collections/albums?page=2

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994. 

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Ahmet Zappa speaks on the re-release of his father Frank Zappa's "The Roxy Performances" recordings.

On February 2, 2018, Zappa Records/UMe released The Roxy Performances, a definitive seven-CD box set that collects all four public shows from December 9-10, 1973, and the December 8th film shoot/soundcheck, each presented in their entirety for the first time, along with bonus content featuring rarities from a rehearsal, unreleased tracks and highlights from the Bolic Studios recording session. This complete collection, totaling nearly eight hours, documents the Roxy shows as they happened and presents brand new 2016 mixes by Craig Parker Adams from new 96K 24 Bit transfers of the multi-track masters.

Source: https://www.zappa.com/news/frank-zappas-legendary-1973-roxy-performances-captured-definitive-seven-cd-boxed-set

This episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Rock Profiles adapted for podcast. 

Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.  

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