When Leon Russell was in the midst of what possibly was the busiest period in his life, he was often referred to by the musicians he worked with as “the master of space and time” for his otherworldly ability to fit into any musical situation.

The Oklahoma pianist, singer, songwriter and producer tapped a wellspring of American roots music forms, from country and gospel to blues and soul, during his assignments as a studio session player in Los Angeles who worked with Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, Frank Sinatra and countless others in the '60s. Later that decade, before launching his solo career, he became the leader of bands assembled by Southern rock musicians Delaney & Bonnie (Bramlett), and English rocker Joe Cocker.

“He was the greatest bandleader of the late-'60s and early-'70s,” longtime admirer Elton John said recently.  “At [George Harrison’s] Concert for Bangladesh, on [Cocker’s] Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, he was the man. He walks into a room of musicians [today], sits down at the piano and he still is the bandleader; he still is the man.”

Where did that musical expertise come from? 

“I started playing in nightclubs when I was about 14 in Oklahoma,” Russell, 68, told me recently during a conversation about his forthcoming album with John, “The Union,” which was produced by T Bone Burnett and is the subject of a profile of John and Russell in Sunday's Arts & Books section. “At that time I made a crystal radio set, and oddly enough, with a crystal radio you can only get one station.

“So after I would get off my job at 1 or 2 in the morning, I’d get home and put on the crystal set with the headphones and just listen,” he said. “The station it got was a blues and gospel station, so I heard a lot of that music. That was a simple twist of fate.”

 
Elvis Costello’s forthcoming album, “National Ransom,” mines a century’s worth of pop music history in both the characters, scenarios and themes in his songs, and in the atmospheric sound that producer  T Bone Burnett has given the record. 

So it makes perfect sense that Costello, a voracious fan of music of all styles, would want to add a vintage touch of some kind in conjunction with the album’s release come Nov. 2.

Vinyl LP version? Everyone’s doing that nowadays, so Costello is going one step beyond: He’s releasing four songs on a pair of 78 rpm discs.

A whimsical announcement about the 78s has been posted on Costello’s website, sounding much like the fancifully stylized introductions he gives his musical guests on the Sundance Channel “Spectacle” show:

“Lupe-O-Tone -- Purveyors of fine flat phonograph records & cylinders since 1913. Our motto is ‘Ego sum satus infremo.’ Lupe-O-Tone present 78 rpm discs in full Lycanthropic Sound. …‘A Slow Dance With Josephine’ b/w ‘You Hung the Moon’ and ‘Jimmie Standing in the Rain’ b/w ‘A Voice in the Dark,’ by the Lupotonians with vocal refrain by Elvis Costello.”

The 78s will be pressed in limited editions of 25 copies, each signed by Costello. No price is mentioned, but the announcement promises more details to come.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Elvis Costello during a 2009 performance at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Neil Young will reunite with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay for a pair of performances as Buffalo Springfield for Young’s annual Bridge School benefit concerts in Northern California, with lineups that also include Pearl Jam, Elton John and Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and several other acts.

The reunion of the influential country-rock band born in 1966 in Los Angeles will feature Young, Stills and Furay as an acoustic trio, given the Bridge School’s history of unplugged performances by all participants. The group's other two original members, bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin, died in 2004 and 2009, respectively.

Could it really be that in this age of pop music, often built on calculation and manipulation, that there’s still a place for bona-fide innocence?

There is, at least in the parallel musical universe that producer T Bone Burnett is creating, one that has recently expanded to include the utterly endearing sibling duo of Laura and Lydia Rogers, a.k.a. the Secret Sisters.

“Our last name isn’t Secret,” elder sister and lead singer Laura said Wednesday night during their charming performance at the Music Box @ Fonda in Hollywood, a show being taped for a PBS special slated to air early next year.

“We’re new to this stage thing,” she told a couple of hundred invited guests, many seated at tables with white tablecloths in the supper-club atmosphere. “Really new; shockingly new. If you knew how new, you wouldn’t be here.”

Yet they were. The Muscle Shoals, Ala., singers having attracted some friends in high places in the last year, Burnett chief among them, for a sound that harks back to an era of family musical acts such as the Everly Brothers, the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Family. Burnett introduced them, occasionally joined the impeccably tasteful band he helped assemble for the show and brought a couple of high-profile pals along for the ride: Jakob Dylan and Elvis Costello.

Texas singer-songwriter Sahara Smith creates Cinemascope-like wide-screen portraits of romantic passion, loneliness and unrequited love in her richly impressive, intensely soulful debut album.

“Blue light breaking on the window glass and cool wind shaking in the long white grass, the ocean speaks the language of the dawn,” she sings in the achingly beautiful opening track, “Thousand Secrets,” which quickly places this 21-year-old in the Emmylou Harris-Alison Krauss camp of country-rock singers of exquisite tastefulness.

“Train Man” is a Chris Isaak spaghetti western-soaked adventure in the search for love on the wrong side of the tracks. In “Are You Lonely,” Smith preemptively tells a would-be lover, “It’s OK if you forget me in the morning/I’ll forget you too.” She’s throwing in the towel after fruitless attempts to find true love when she sings, “Why don’t we treat it like a real thing” in the deliciously eerie “The Real Thing.”

She’s got an eminently empathetic partner in producer Emile Kelman, who’s learned his lessons well studying under T Bone Burnett. Kelman gives her songs plenty of sonic air in which to breathe, supporting her deeply felt takes on matters of the heart with painterly applications of yearning guitar and marrow-deep bass and drums served up by Burnett stalwarts Marc Ribot, Dennis Crouch and Jay Bellerose, respectively.

If Smith and her team err occasionally on the side of self-restraint, it’s hard to argue in an age of pop music in which excess is the rule rather than the exception.   And as any good storyteller knows, myths are better whispered than shouted.

--Randy Lewis

Sahara Smith

“Myth of the Heart”

Playing in Traffic Records

Three and a half stars (out of four)

 
The Hotel Café served up an illuminating session on the power of good songwriting when it's delivered by a resourceful band — and when it’s not — with Tuesday night’s double bill in Hollywood featuring two rising talents: Texas singer-songwriter Sahara Smith and Irish multi-instrumentalist-songwriter Conor O’Brien, a.k.a. Villagers.

Both have new albums demonstrating their passion for literate lyric-writing. Smith,  21, has been honing her craft for nearly a decade despite her youth, and has come under the tutelage of T Bone Burnett, whose associate Emile Kelman has adroitly produced her debut album, “Myth of the Heart,” coming out Aug. 31 and featuring several members of Burnett’s stable of instrumental aces.

Dubliner O’Brien, 27, is a virtual one-man band on “Becoming a Jackal,” the Villagers album that’s just been nominated for the UK’s prestigious Mercury Prize as one of the year’s best by a UK-based act.

Smith brought with her a sharp backing trio of fellow Texans consisting of guitarist-bassist Will Sexton, guitarist Jake Owen and drummer Mike Meadows; when O’Brien took the stage by himself, holding just his acoustic guitar, he offered a  sheepish introduction: “We are Villagers. Actually, I’m Conor from the Villagers. I usually play with a band, but I couldn’t afford to bring them with me.”

 
Elton John has always been passionate about his musical taste, always ready to throw his support behind new acts that capture his imagination, whether it’s the Scissor Sisters or Lady Gaga.

But in recent years he’s also been on a special mission to turn the spotlight on veteran artists who never got the attention he and other pop stars received, a key reason he dreamed up the Sundance Channel music interview and performance series “Spectacle,” and persuaded his friend Elvis Costello to take on the job as host.

That mission is front and center with “The Union,” his forthcoming duet album with fellow piano-pounding rocker Leon Russell, to whom John doffed his cap during the first episode of “Spectacle.”

It couldn’t have been by accident that the Wiltern Theatre’s stage lights were angled Thursday night so that Jakob Dylan’s signature fedora rendered the upper part of his face obscured for much of his homecoming concert.

For much of the supernaturally gripping material on his exceptional new “Women + Country” album deals with the shadowy parts of life, ghosts and vacated homes and hearts.

Those songs served as the anchor for what Dylan described as his first show in Los Angeles proper in eight years, for which he was joined by singers Neko Case and Kelly Hogan and Case’s band, Three Legs. The hometown crowd also got a cameo appearance at the end of the evening by “Women + Country” producer T Bone Burnett, who strapped on an electric guitar and spun out some of his inimitably tremulous lead lines.

The other musicians weren’t so much Dylan’s support staff as equal partners in a bold collaboration that has allowed the 40-year-old singer and songwriter to reach new musical vistas.

The challenge for any artist who creates as organically complete and artistically satisfying a work as “Women + Country” is how to present it live. Assuming he wasn’t inclined to follow his contrarian dad’s lead and just ignore a new album entirely, the two choices were to deliver it in its entirety, as Peter Gabriel just did last week at the Hollywood Bowl with his “Scratch My Back” album, or serve it up in chunks interspersed with other material spanning a career.

Among other attributes of Sam Phillips’ Long Play music and art installation on the Web, the singer-songwriter figured that her eco-friendly subscribers would appreciate the aspect of recording and distributing music digitally, without using up more plastic, paper and energy to create CDs.

“One of the surprises for me in doing this,” Phillips told me at her home recording studio on L.A.’s east side, “is that a lot of people still want something physical. I don’t think even they know exactly what that is, whether it’s a CD or a beach towel or a coffee mug. I was so proud of how green we’re being. It’s interesting that a lot of people are still looking for something they can hold in their hands.”

The yearlong project got off the ground last fall and has attracted about 1,000 subscribers, who pay $52 for 12 months of access to the Long Play site within her main website. She’s putting together five EP collections of three or four songs each. At the end of the year, she’ll release a full album, which she expects will include some of the songs from the EPs and extra songs that didn’t fit onto any of the EPs.

 
Singer and songwriter Sam Phillips performed one of the periodic afternoon showcases Thursday at the Hotel Café in Hollywood, sharing with several dozen invitees a few new songs she’s been working on as part of her yearlong “Long Play” art and music installation project on her website, plus a few gems from her considerable catalog.

She brought along violinist-guitarist-banjoist Eric Gorfain, bassist Jennifer Condos and percussionist extraordinaire Jay Bellerose, all of whom partnered with her imaginatively in this quick run through her distinctive brand of back-alley-cabaret pop.

The compact 30-minute set opened with “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” her song that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss covered on their runaway hit album “Raising Sand.” Typical of her surgically impeccable lyric writing, she ropes in big ideas with a minimum of words, this one about the search for solace when despair beckons:

Secrets are written in the sky
It looks like I’ve lost the love I’ve never found
Though the sound of hope has left me again
I hear music up above

Bellerose approached his vintage patchwork drum kit like a painter dabbing colors sparingly on a canvas, while Condos complemented the low-end rhythms instinctively, and Gorfain spun mournful lines from his Stroh violin (which has a gramophone-like horn coming off the instrument’s sound hole). 

“Was It All In My Head?,” an ode to second-guessing oneself, has been kicking around since 2004 but only recently was given a studio recording and is being offered as a free download on her website. In another new tune, she celebrates the notion that to err truly is human, beckoning to a partner, “Take your mistakes and come with me.”

Not surprisingly, she included “Reflecting Light,” the track from her 2004 album “A Boot and a Shoe” that her ex-husband, T Bone Burnett, included in the sleeper hit film “Crazy Heart.” And she closed with “One Day Late” — with its curiously comforting refrain “help is coming ... one day late” — which she dedicated affectionately to the hapless 2010 Dodgers.

A full profile of Phillips and her “Long Play” project will be coming in Calendar in the days ahead.

--Randy Lewis

Photo: Sam Phillips. Credit: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
 

The music portion of the South by Southwest industry conference and festival officially begins on Wednesday, although that starting date has become blurred in recent years. As SXSW has grown to encompass film and interactive events, the latter has gradually started to steal some of the spotlight away from four days of indie-leaning showcases. 

Tuesday marked one of the most-talked-about music events of the festival, with an appearance for Spotify chief Daniel Ek. Though it was a closing keynote for the interactive events, Spotify's success in Europe has led many an industry observer to put faith in all-encompassing streaming music services as an area for business growth -- if and when labels, publishers and Spotify can sort U.S. licensing agreements.

Ek's appearance meant as much to the music business as it did the tech industry, and many music registrants arrived early. Yet as the day turned to night, there was plenty happening to keep the first music arrivals entertained. The most-in-demand-act (sorry, Motorhead) performing on SXSW Music Eve was Jakob Dylan, as the singer/songwriter debuted his new band with Neko Case and Kelly Hogan, the Three Legs. The seven-piece group was appearing at one of the many corporate-sponsored events that run parallel to SXSW's officially sanctioned showcases.

The demand to get in the PureVolume/Paste Magazine-led event was large, with a slow-moving line that stretched a full block, and even attracted its own check-in point on location-based social networking service Foursquare. All that was needed to gain entry was a RSVP, and it's a safe bet that most guests were there for the free booze rather than the unveiling of Dylan's new slow-burning country-based songs. Early in the set, for instance, my pen and notebook were hijacked by one guest who agreed to return them only after I promised her that I would mention that Dylan had a "cute hat" (fulfilled).

Jeff Bridges, T Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham will make what may be their swan song appearance together in conjunction with the film “Crazy Heart” when they perform one of the movie’s songs at  the 25h anniversary Spirit Awards ceremony on March 5 in Los Angeles.

Rather than singing the much-lauded theme “The Weary Kind,” the best-song Oscar-nominee that Bingham and Burnett wrote, the trio plans to offer up “Fallin’ and Flyin’,” written by the late Texas singer and songwriter Stephen Bruton, who oversaw the film’s music with producer and longtime friend Burnett. Bruton died of cancer shortly after completing work on the music.

Bridges is now gearing up to start filming Joel and Ethan Coen's new version of “True Grit,” and a spokeswoman for the actor said this may be the final public performance connected with his Academy Award-nominated role as down-and-out country singer Bad Blake. He'll discuss that role and others from his long career on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. on film critic Elvis Mitchell’s program “The Treatment” on KCRW-FM (89.9). No music performances are planned for this year’s Oscar ceremony, which takes place March 7.

The Spirit Awards, which recognize achievement in independent film, will take place at the L.A. Live entertainment complex near Staples Center and will be telecast live over the IFC cable channel starting at 8 p.m. Pacific time.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jeff Bridges and T Bone Burnett at a pre-Grammy Awards lunch reception in Los Angeles. Credit: Eddy Hartenstein/Los Angeles Times