I'VE BEEN GETTING a lot of random "hey have you heard of these guys..?" lately and wanted to pass along a couple of cool new finds. Both fronted by very talented female guitar vocalists. Both Grammy award winning bands...

Hiatus Kaiyote is a band out of Melbourne, Australia and your guess is as good as mine what genre they fall under. I saw one google listing as "multidimensional polyrhythmic gangster shit" but jazz fusion could also cover it. Classified by style or not, they are very tight and very cool. Check out By Fire...

Many of you have probably already heard the Alabama Shakes; but my world being kind of small lately, they were new to me. Woooooow -- what a voice!! Brittany Howard is a force to be reckoned with. Hailing from Athens, Alabama they all met in the local area and slowly gathered steam. I love how their Wikipedia listing described their formative period...

"...during this time the band members held other day jobs: Howard as a fry cook and then a postal worker, Johnson at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, Cockrell at an animal clinic, and Fogg painting houses. For much of their early years, the Shakes performed shows on weekends at "sports bars and country dives."

Check out Hold On...

Years ago I was cutting across the central plaza in Lahaina when I heard this 2-part Hawaiian harmony of Linda Ronstadt's Still the One. I bought the CD on the spot and have been a huge fan ever since. It was the Ka'au Crater Boys and if you ever want to hear incredible lead Ukulele guitar playing look these guys up (they have since split up).  Later I was trying to learn another song on that CD, You Don't Write, but could only find one version of it on you-tube that wasn't working. As I read through the comments, some guy said he thought his roommate in college was writing a song just like this one and sure enough it was true -- it was John Cruz's version. (Funny enough a woman chimed in on that same comment to say that she had been his ex-girlfriend and it wasn't true that she never wrote! haha).

Sooooooo as these things go...down the rabbit hole I went looking for music by John Cruz aaaaaaaaand I ran across this treasure trove of Hawaiian music called the "HI Sessions". A local Hawaiian radio station has been recording the best and treasured artists on the Islands for several years now and the result is an astounding array of Hawaiian style and artistry. Check out the whole catalog but I'll list several of my favorites below starting with John Cruz . He comes to Ventura once in awhile so if you likey go hear him live...

• Hurricane (John Cruz)
• Make Me Say (Kimie)
• One Foot on Sand (Justin Young)
• Penniless (Mike Love)
• Valerie (Ashley Lilinoe)