Steel Guitar

The steel guitar is a thing of diverse beauty. The lap steel and the pedal steel can be roused to make primal howls or massaged to create subtle yawns. Whether they are part of Hawaiian music, gospel's sacred steel movement or country-western song, steel guitars can rage and murmur with delicious sliding sustain. Rock's best may get physical with their axes - pulling guitars' necks as if throttling the poor dears. But there is nothing like watching seated steel players tense their thumbs in anguish.

Julian "Winnie" Winston, 64, an industrial-design teacher at the University of the Arts, folk musician, author, and leading homeopath, died June 12 of prostate cancer at home in Wellington, New Zealand. "Winnie Winston . . . was an important figure in the folk-music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He played banjo and pedal steel guitar. . . . He recorded with Steve Goodman, David Bromberg, Rosalie Sorrels and David Grisman, and made records under his own name," radio host Terry Gross said Thursday on her show, Fresh Air. Raised in Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Winston was the son of art teachers.

SEAL WITH DRUMMER BRIAN BLADE, 8 p.m. Thursday, June 10, Mann Center for the Performing Arts, 52nd Street and Parkside Avenue. Tickets: $35-$45. Info: 215-336-2000. Drummer Brian Blade exemplifies the kind of young musician jazz is seeing more of these days, one equally at home playing rock, R&B, pop or jazz without any second thoughts. When confronted in the past, a jazz musician playing R&B or pop may have sounded apologetic, mumbling something like, "I'm only doing it for the money" or "My record company thought it was a good idea.

Country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons spoke often of fashioning a new kind of music, a "cosmic American music" that wedded trippy '60s rock with the twangy torch songs of vintage, tear-in-your-beer country. Parsons died before realizing that vision, but bands such as Beachwood Sparks are proof that the torch has been passed. The Sparks' two albums - an eponymously titled debut and the just-out Once We Were Trees - are drowsy, sun-dappled collections of jangling, 12-string guitar arpeggios and starry-eyed harmonies shot through with Voxx organ psychedelia and spacy honky-tonk orchestration.

On Monday at the Trocadero, the response of the sold-out, all-ages crowd to Bright Eyes and leader Conor Oberst felt ceremonial. Each song - the quivering "One Foot," the rumbling "A New Arrangement" - was greeted with a quietness usually reserved for whispered secrets. Bright Eyes' brand of aggressive though romantic imagery verges on being over the top. But as a lyricist and singer, Oberst avoids too much sentimentality, and ends up as cutting as early Dylan. At the Troc, he was flowery yet incisive, sounding like Robert Smith without the ironic ire, and remaining reserved as he bore down through the tribal drums and carnival organs of "The Calendar Hung Itself.

Kathy Mattea gets categorized as a country singer, but her husky, vibrato- less voice has more in common with those of British folk-soul women such as Sandy Denny, June Tabor and Linda Thompson than twangy Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. It's a satisfying voice, especially when Mattea slips into her resonant lower range, and everything she sang Thursday night at the Valley Forge Music Fair sparkled with unaffected purity. Save for a weakness for treacly showstoppers (the geriatric romance "Where've You Been" and her pastoral take on the ditsy "From a Distance")

If King Sunny Ade's Nigerian juju is all about polyrhythm and partying and proverbs, he handled his business at the Theatre of Living Arts Wednesday night. But the approach Ade and his big band took revealed a few deeper things about the Nigerian style that this Yoruba chieftain typifies. Sure, the percussion, especially the dundun drums, crackled, and the three-guitar array, with its swirling, conversational style, drew attention to the conflicting streams inside the music.

NOEL GALLAGHER has finally spread his post-Oasis wings and delivered a debut album with a band of his building, "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds," (Sour Mash/Mercury). Gallagher gives us a comfortably acceptable sound, but something perhaps a little too close to his higher flying days with the hit-making Oasis. The thread of sonic continuity is undeniable and it appears there's nothing new under the Gallagher family umbrella of creativity here. Things start off nice enough with "Everybody's on the Run" and "Dream On," the latter built around a sturdy, marching cadence of drum and guitar strums.

Conor Oberst began growing up in public when he was 14 years old and established himself as a songwriting wunderkind with the band Commander Venus. And even when he was a boy, Oberst was a serious man. That's still true of the word slinger from Omaha, Neb., now 31, whose band Bright Eyes headlined a bill that also included M. Ward and Dawes at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Fairmount Park on Friday. Bright Eyes' nearly 21/2-hour, not-so-well-paced, career-spanning set reached back to 2000's Fevers and Mirrors for "The Calendar Hung Itself" and "Something Vague," but was rooted in The People's Key , the songwriter's first album under the Bright Eyes rubric since 2007.

Breath and spirit are one, according to many traditional belief systems. Marlies Yearby's Movin' Spirits Dance Theater makes this connection plain. During her company's Friday performance at the Painted Bride (the last in its Sistah Diva Soothsayer festival of black women artists), the dancers' audible breaths directed their movements in a way that was fresh and, yes, inspiring. In-breaths pulled heads and shoulders back; long expirations folded two dancers together; and vocalized breaths often provided a rhythmic accompaniment.

After 17 years in the music business, Craig Finn thought he'd try doing things like a pro. That's not to say the Hold Steady front man is some kind of amateur. Over the course of five albums, leading up to 2010's Heaven Is Whenever, the Hold Steady have wooed both critics and audiences with Finn's Beat-poet lyrics and the band's fist-pumping anthems. But after the lackluster response to Heaven 's glossier sheen, Finn felt it was time to step away from his familiar Hold Steady collaborators and try his hand at the industrial grind of the songwriter-for-hire.

NOEL GALLAGHER has finally spread his post-Oasis wings and delivered a debut album with a band of his building, "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds," (Sour Mash/Mercury). Gallagher gives us a comfortably acceptable sound, but something perhaps a little too close to his higher flying days with the hit-making Oasis. The thread of sonic continuity is undeniable and it appears there's nothing new under the Gallagher family umbrella of creativity here. Things start off nice enough with "Everybody's on the Run" and "Dream On," the latter built around a sturdy, marching cadence of drum and guitar strums.

Conor Oberst began growing up in public when he was 14 years old and established himself as a songwriting wunderkind with the band Commander Venus. And even when he was a boy, Oberst was a serious man. That's still true of the word slinger from Omaha, Neb., now 31, whose band Bright Eyes headlined a bill that also included M. Ward and Dawes at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Fairmount Park on Friday. Bright Eyes' nearly 21/2-hour, not-so-well-paced, career-spanning set reached back to 2000's Fevers and Mirrors for "The Calendar Hung Itself" and "Something Vague," but was rooted in The People's Key , the songwriter's first album under the Bright Eyes rubric since 2007.

MewithoutYou: Bracing and all embracing Philadelphia-spawned band combines nerdy vocals and catchy/experimental indie rock 'n' folk production (with occasional flourishes of trumpet, tuba, organ, mandolin, etc.) in the service of spiritually minded story songs drawing from Jewish, Muslim and Christian imagery. Their goal - to "open wide my door" of perception and faith. Convincing even for daydream believers. Kindred emocore spirits Murder By Death and Buried Beds share the night.

The steel guitar is a thing of diverse beauty. The lap steel and the pedal steel can be roused to make primal howls or massaged to create subtle yawns. Whether they are part of Hawaiian music, gospel's sacred steel movement or country-western song, steel guitars can rage and murmur with delicious sliding sustain. Rock's best may get physical with their axes - pulling guitars' necks as if throttling the poor dears. But there is nothing like watching seated steel players tense their thumbs in anguish.

Not to get all cosmic or anything, but there was something magically mysterious going on at Penn's Landing Friday night during the lengthy encore that capped My Morning Jacket's grandly ambitious two-hour, 45-minute set at the Festival Pier. The weather had held up for the last night of the Pier's summer concert series. But as bearded band leader Jim James sat down with a Frisbee-shaped keyboard to trigger the slinky electronic pulse of "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 2," rain started to fall.

Julian "Winnie" Winston, 64, an industrial-design teacher at the University of the Arts, folk musician, author, and leading homeopath, died June 12 of prostate cancer at home in Wellington, New Zealand. "Winnie Winston . . . was an important figure in the folk-music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. He played banjo and pedal steel guitar. . . . He recorded with Steve Goodman, David Bromberg, Rosalie Sorrels and David Grisman, and made records under his own name," radio host Terry Gross said Thursday on her show, Fresh Air. Raised in Yonkers, N.Y., Mr. Winston was the son of art teachers.

If not for the Vietnam War, Ron Wayne Atwood might never have become a country singer. Atwood, born and raised in Delaware County, was drafted into the Army in 1966, and was stationed in North Carolina when he fell for country music. He left the service in 1968 with the guitar he had purchased as a soldier to help him launch a musical career. "I like the stories, the honesty of country music," Atwood said. "So many people put a stereotype on country music. They think it's only songs about 'He lost his wife, lost his dog, and the car broke down.

"Country has come to town!" Toby Keith proclaimed to a jam-packed Tweeter Center crowd Saturday night. Ironically, this came after the set began with an extended (and pretty amusing) video sequence, flash pots and sparklers flared, and the singer emerged through billowing clouds of dry ice onto a futuristic-looking set and delivered a thundering rock number backed by his 10-man band and three female singers. In other words, this "country" show had all the trappings of a well-oiled pop extravaganza.

On Monday at the Trocadero, the response of the sold-out, all-ages crowd to Bright Eyes and leader Conor Oberst felt ceremonial. Each song - the quivering "One Foot," the rumbling "A New Arrangement" - was greeted with a quietness usually reserved for whispered secrets. Bright Eyes' brand of aggressive though romantic imagery verges on being over the top. But as a lyricist and singer, Oberst avoids too much sentimentality, and ends up as cutting as early Dylan. At the Troc, he was flowery yet incisive, sounding like Robert Smith without the ironic ire, and remaining reserved as he bore down through the tribal drums and carnival organs of "The Calendar Hung Itself.