Music

Last summer, before an inch of film was ever shot on the set in Mississippi, the actor who played Jackie Robinson in 42 met up with the director of The Help in Atlanta, they rented a car and road tripped it together to Augusta. Getting the most minute details of James Brown’s life right was a top priority for Get on Up director Tate Taylor and actor Chadwick Boseman, who plays The Godfather of Soul in the new biopic opening in theaters today. With the tsunami of lawsuits and arguments that swirled after the soul pioneer’s 2006 Christmas Day death in Atlanta, it probably didn’t hurt to have the support of the Brown estate either.

When iconic Atlanta rockers The Swimming Pool Q’s reconvene for a gig at Smith’s Olde Bar this Saturday night, they’ll not only be celebrating their 35th anniversary as a band but also the long-awaited release of their two major label A&M Records releases on CD for the first time. The albums, 1984’s The Swimming Pool Q’s and its more sonically sophisticated follow-up, 1986’s Blue Tomorrow, advanced the band’s musical mission to a national audience after dazzling locals with its 1981 DB Records debut, The Deep End. The two A&M releases slicked up the band’s sound and pushed singer Anne Richmond Boston further into the forefront as Q’s founder Jeff Calder flexed his writing skills, creating complex women for Boston to inhabit. Calder’s equally colorful Southern politicians and deranged religious crackpots also populated the new releases, often enhanced with expert melodic guitars helmed by Bob Elsey and J.E. Garnett’s slinky bass lines. The Q's drummer Billy Burton, meanwhile, often multi-tasked behind the scenes, putting his filmmaking skills to work, shooting short films of the band set to music (some of these shorts were unearthed for Auto Zoom, a companion DVD included in the A&M reissues deluxe set).

When pianist Herbie Hancock gazed out over Piedmont Park on Memorial Day in 2007, there was barely a patch of grass unoccupied by picnic blankets or folding chairs. It was closing night of the three-day Atlanta Jazz Festival, and 100,000 people packed the park to celebrate the free event’s thirtieth anniversary. A year later, a relatively meager crowd wedged into Downtown’s Woodruff Park for just two days of concerts. The event had to be relocated due to drought, costing the festival thousands in lost sponsorship dollars. Organizers staged a “no-frills festival,” relying mostly on $120,000 in residual funds, says Camille Russell Love, director of the Office of Cultural Affairs. “I basically told my staff, we’re going to create a festival that we can afford to create,” she says. “We’ll use local artists, but we won’t lose the momentum of the festival.”

When Ashanti Floyd, twenty-six, was a fifth grader in Tallahassee, his classmates laughed at him for playing the violin. With Tupac Shakur cranking out multiplatinum records, there were few young African American violinists, let alone ones traveling to Europe for classical music competitions. But by high school, Floyd’s gym performances inspired such bedlam that the principal had to shut down student assemblies.

It's not all that difficult to locate budding Atlanta pop princess Eryn Woods in the lunch hour crowd at Panera Bread in Buckhead. For starters, she's the only customer in the joint with a crimson mohawk, nose ring and a purple bow resting atop her head with matching fingernail polish.

G-CAPP founder Jane Fonda's cinematic career will be encased in concrete this Spring as the two-time Oscar winner is honored at the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood. The Atlanta-based cable channel tells Atlanta magazine, Fonda will be recognized in a public ceremony when the 75-year-old activist-actress sticks her hands and feet in wet cement in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre (since Fonda is starring in yoga DVDs for seniors these days, this likely won't be a problem).