Eats and Beats

Guitarist Nels Cline is best known for his work with the band Wilco. But one of his free-form side projects, the Radical Empathy Trio, couldn’t be more different and focuses on pure improvisation.

Music can tap hidden wellsprings in the mind and help listeners solve problems that once seemed insurmountable. That’s the idea behind a unique collaboration called Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project. It mixes original music by composer Laura Kaminsky with the science of climate change. The Fry String Quartet brings the performance to Northern Arizona University tonight. In KNAU’s latest installment of Eats and Beats, stories about food and music, Melissa Sevigny spoke with a scientist and a violinist about how the project was born.

Blues is at the very core of the music made by famed rockers Gov’t Mule. For the first time they’ve recorded an entire album of traditional blues songs. In the latest installment of KNAU’s Eats and Beats, frontman Warren Haynes talks about the band’s bluesy exploration ahead of their show in Flagstaff this weekend.

One in six people in Coconino County experienced food insecurity before the pandemic. Job loss, inflation, and the nationwide shortage of baby formula have all made things worse for families struggling to make ends meet. A group of students at Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy decided to address the problem…. in a practical and artistic way. In KNAU’s latest installment of Eats & Beats, stories about food and music, Melissa Sevigny reports on a class project to install a Little Free Pantry.

Last week, Raven Chacon became the first Indigenous composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. The musician and educator grew up in Chinle on the Navajo Nation and was recognized for a piece called “Voiceless Mass.” He composed it specifically to be played on a pipe organ housed in a church in Milwaukee and premiered the work during Thanksgiving weekend last year. The music has an unsettling quality that, as Chacon says, reflects marginalized communities that served as the inspiration for the piece. In this installment of KNAU’s series Eats and Beats, he talks about “Voiceless Mass” and how it could serve as a touchstone for the under-heard and overlooked.

The acclaimed Americana band Son Volt is on tour in support of their 10th studio album, "Electro Melodier." For bandleader Jay Farrar, the pandemic was the backdrop for the songs and the social justice movements of 2020 served as a primary inspiration. Much of the album rambles through the American experience with lyrics ripped straight from the headlines.

This Saturday marks the second annual installment of the Dream Concert. It’s a star-studded online performance benefitting the Native American Scholarship…

The band Leftover Salmon is often credited with inventing the genre of jamgrass – a melding of up-tempo roots music combined with improvised, often…

Like many musicians, Dom Flemons was nervous about returning to the stage after more than a year away from performing. Though he spent the shutdown…

Three decades ago the Verde Valley School established its Native American Scholarship fund. For many years, the annual fundraiser for the scholarship was…