Music

Richard Goodsell darts about his English Avenue–area workshop, past the piles of speakers and vacuum tubes he uses to create his boutique guitar amps. (Vince Gill and Big Boi are just a few of his fans.) He grabs a guitar: “Do you want to strap on the other Telecaster?” asks the fifty-two-year-old. “That way we’re both holding an instrument and relating on that level. I’m all about that kind of thing.”

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.”

In 2005, Jessica Lovell, now twenty-three, was nearly through her premed program at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, when she and younger sisters Megan, twenty, and Rebecca, eighteen, played one of their first gigs as a band—to a listening audience of more than 4 million. The show? A Prairie Home Companion’s teen talent contest on NPR, which the Calhoun, Georgia, trio won with their practiced vocal harmonies, wholesome vibe, and blend of acoustic country and bluegrass. As listene

Over the weekend, tens of thousands of revelers descended upon Bouckaert Farm in Chattahoochee Hills just south of Atlanta for a massive electronic dance music festival called TomorrowWorld. It was the debut of a U.S. incarnation of the Belgian festival, Tomorrowland, that’s been going on since 2005 and claims to have sold out its June 2013 event in one second.

On May 4 and 5, Westminster Schools grad and the Masquerade music hall promoter Tim Sweetwood will bring twenty-eight bands—including the Lumineers, Band of Horses, and Drive-By Truckers—to three stages in the Historic Fourth Ward Park for the city’s inaugural Shaky Knees Music Festival.

In a feature dedicated to his 20-year successful run at Eddie's Attic in our current May 2012  issue, Eddie Owen told Atlanta magazine senior editor Tony Rehagen, "I don't think I'll ever leave the attic." According to a post on Owen's Facebook page Monday morning, those plans changed Friday night.

After Decatur CD owner Warren Hudson had sent a dozen customers to Walmart for the new DVD from local country sensations Sugarland because of their exclusive distribution deal with the big-box retailer, he made his disapproval public by penning an open letter to the band. It stated, “By shutting the door on independent record

At one o’clock today, Atlanta city councilman Michael Julian Bond will honor Dante’s Down the Hatch owner Dante Stephensen at city hall with a City of Atlanta proclamation in honor of the restaurateur and jazz promoter’s “contributions to Atlanta’s cultural and business life.” Bond, a regular at the now-shuttered Buckhead nightspot, followed in the footsteps of his civil rights icon father Julian Bond, who was a regular at the original Dante’s Underground Atlanta location in the 1970s. “Dante’s was an Atlanta tradition,” explains Bond. “Locals and tourists alike flocked this unique establishment to experience a taste of the city in a communal fashion. This proclamation is our small gesture to Mr. Stephensen for four decades of service to Atlanta.”