LOS ANGELES – Like music venues around the world, the Paramount ballroom has been forced to endure months of limited work, reduced revenue and a forced transition to the digital world – no easy task for the venerable Boyle Heights venue, which is nearly 100 years old and has a legacy of supporting underdog artists.

Live-streaming is one option, but the expense is prohibitive, said Vicky Cabildo, the ballroom’s booker and production manager. Determining a price for the tickets is another issue faced by venues across the U.S.

“Aside from the location, you still need sound people, you still need to clean,” Cabildo said. “We have to pay the bands; you can’t ask people who aren’t working right now to do stuff for free, it’s just not fair. It’s also like how do we charge for these things? Not everyone is Katy Perry or Pearl Jam.”

Politico looks at how the presidency of Donald Trump has damaged the Republican Party's fortunes in Arizona:

The Trump era did more damage to the Republican Party in Arizona than almost anywhere else. Over the past two years, Republicans lost both Senate seats. In November, the state flipped Democratic in a presidential race for the first time since 1996. The GOP state party chair is currently at war with the governor.

President Donald Trump’s fingerprints are on all of it, yet the state party will likely pass a resolution next week to officially “support & thank” the president. It’ll also vote on measures to censure three prominent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently beholden to Trump: Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, the wife of the late senator.

The adulation is an expression of GOP grassroots loyalty to Trump, but it’s also a portrait of a party that’s run aground in service to him. His defeat has triggered attempts to adopt an even harder pro-Trump line, raising questions about the party’s ability to compete in an increasingly diverse state that’s edging leftward.

“The craziness from the state Republican Party … it’s pretty embarrassing,” said Kirk Adams, a former Republican state House speaker and former chief of staff to Ducey. “We have been fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories and stolen election rhetoric and, really, QAnon theories from the state Republican Party since before the election, but certainly after.”

He said, “What’s … consequential is the effect the state Republican Party is having on the Republican brand in the state of Arizona.”

The fallout has been swift. Several thousand Arizona Republicans have abandoned the party since the U.S. Capitol riot that Trump helped to incite, with the majority of the defectors re-registering without a designated party, according to state elections officials. Business leaders are publicly recoiling from the GOP after party officials thrust Arizona into the center of Trump’s failed effort to overturn the election results, further dividing an already fractured party.

“Let us be clear: we find the weeks of disinformation and outright lies to reverse a fair and free election from the head of the Arizona Republican Party and some elected officials to be reprehensible,” read a full-page ad in The Arizona Republic this week from Greater Phoenix Leadership, a group of CEOs. “The political party organization and these elected officials, which some of us have supported in the past, have again embarrassed Arizona on a national stage.”

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, Libertarian-leaning Reason mag suggests the Arizona GOP has become "a Trump cult":

With 5,400 new cases reported today, the number of Arizona’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases topped 679,000 as of Monday, Jan 18, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Pima County, which reported 681 new cases today, now has 90,765 of the state’s 679,282 confirmed cases.

A total of 11,265 Arizonans have died after contracting COVID-19, including 1,422 deaths in Pima County, according to the Jan. 18 report.

The number of hospitalized COVID cases statewide dropped slightly in recent days but still remains far above the peak levels of the summer’s first wave. ADHS reported that as of Jan. 17, 4,752 COVID patients were hospitalized in the state. The summer peak of 3,517 hospitalized COVID patients was set on July 13; that number hit a subsequent low of 468 on Sept. 27, or less than a tenth of the current count.

A total of 1,844 people visited emergency rooms on Jan. 17 with COVID symptoms, down from the record high of 2,341 set on Tuesday, Dec. 29. That number had previously peaked at 2,008 on July 7; it hit a subsequent low of 653 on Sept. 28.

A total of 1,097 COVID-19 patients were in intensive care unit beds on Jan. 17. The summer’s record number of patients in ICU beds was 970, set on July 13. The subsequent low was 114 on Sept. 22.

WASHINGTON – The Arizona Capitol is surrounded by two rows of chain-link fence and police presence has been increased, as authorities brace for possible violence in response to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

The preparations come amid reports that the FBI has warned of possible armed protests at all 50 state capitals, on the heels of the violent mob that breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying the election of Biden. Five people died in that attack, including a Capitol Police officer.

The FBI Phoenix office said Thursday that it “has not received any specific and substantiated threat to the Arizona state capitol or other government buildings,” but that it is working with state and local authorities to track security concerns.

Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bart Graves said in an email that the fences were installed around the Capitol complex “out of an abundance of caution” on Jan. 7, the day after the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Protesters also surrounded the state Capitol for hours the same day the U.S. Capitol was stormed, with some of the crowd in Arizona armed, according to news reports.

DJ Jahmar is one of the busiest DJs in town, and it will take more than a pandemic to stop him. When he’s not working with the non-profit Deejays Against Hunger, he’s filling local clubs with authentic, rhythmic reggae. But even during COVID downtime, Jahmar is keeping active with livestreams and recording new music. Jahmar’s latest album, Zona Riddim, features collaborations with a wide range of vocalists and clean club instrumentals.

“I started working on the Zona Riddim album in March 2020 right when COVID hit because all of my DJ residences were banned due to city ordinances,” Jahmar said. “I still wanted the world to hear my music, so I decided I was going to release an album.”

Zona Riddim features a variety of guests across its eight tracks, all of which work off a similar instrumental in the Jamaican tradition. And it’s a tradition familiar to Jahmar, who has worked as a DJ for more than a decade, learning from his father Papa Ranger, a longtime KXCI reggae DJ and owner of the now-shuttered Twelve Tribes Reggae Shop. 

“In Jamaica we do reggae albums different, we do Riddim albums,” Jahmar said. “A Riddim is a compilation of artists on the same beat/instrumental but with different songs.”

Jahmar’s warm, energetic beats are a versatile template for the guest singers, working beneath autotuned rap and cleanly sung vocals. The album features both international and local reggae figures, including Josh David Barrett from the Wailers, Safaree from Love & Hip Hop, Denzel White, Los Rakas and Bobby Hustle.

These collaborations add to Jahmar’s goal for the album: to represent Jamaican culture and reggae music on the West Coast, and to keep people moving to his music no matter the circumstance.

Zona Riddim is available on music streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and more. For more information, visit foundation-media.ffm.to/zonariddim

In his sports column in Explorer and Marana News, longtime TW columnist Tom Danehy pays tribute to the late Rich Alday, who coached baseball at Pima Community College and softball at Ironwood Hills High School. An excerpt:

It is said that a good coach can coach anything. The story is told of Vince Lombardi, fresh out of college, being asked to coach a high-school basketball team. After admitting that he had never even seen a basketball game before, Lombardi studied a basketball rule book and then proceeded to coach the team to the State championship game.

After coaching baseball for 40 years, Alday pulled a late-in-life switch and became the softball coach at Ironwood Ridge High School. All he did there was go 107-33 in four years, guiding the Nighthawks to Class 5A State championships in 2014 and 2016.

Alday, 71, had been battling cancer. He and his wife, Norma, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last July. In 1995, the couple lost their beloved son, Ambrose, to cancer at the age of 16. Rich is a Tucson legend. He knew everyone and everyone knew him. He will be missed.

Read the whole thing here.

French/Tucson singer Marianne Dissard has released the latest in her cover series, a complete re-working of Ritchie Valens’ “Come On Let's Go!” with a music video to boot.

Dissard and producer Raphael Mann deconstruct the rock ‘n’ roll classic, upping the sensuality in a way only a French singer like her can. What was originally a sweet, energetic tune has been reinvented with deep drums, wild saxophone and pauses to complete silence to stretch out the romantics.

But of course, the star of the show is Dissard’s vocals in her signature chanteuse style, highlighting the blunt message of the song: “wanting to fuck someone.” However, things are bound to get more complex in a pandemic.

"It's not so much reworking any of the songs, but trying to find the core concept or message of a song and working from there," Dissard said about the series. "That's the trick with covers: You have to find something that's already there and take it to where you as the artist can bring something new and fresh."

The track fits well in her series of “drastic re-imaginings” of classic tracks during pandemic times, and also features Tucsonan Naim Amor on guitar. Dissard’s collections of pandemic re-imaginings are slated to be released as an album in summer 2021. Other covers in the series include Phil Ochs, Bobbie Gentry and Carly Simon.

With more than 11,000 new cases reported today, the number of Arizona’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases topped 658,000 as of Friday, Jan 15, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services.

Pima County, which reported 1,342 new cases today, has seen 87,687 of the state’s 658,186 confirmed cases.

A total of 11,040 Arizonans have died after contracting COVID-19, including 1,393 deaths in Pima County, according to the Jan. 15 report.

The number of hospitalized COVID cases statewide dropped slightly in recent days but still remains far above the peak levels of the summer’s first wave. ADHS reported that as of Jan. 14, 4,866 COVID patients were hospitalized in the state, a slight drop from Wednesday’s 5,055. The summer peak of 3,517 hospitalized COVID patients was set on July 13; that number hit a subsequent low of 468 on Sept. 27, or less than a tenth of the current count.

A total of 2,120 people visited emergency rooms on Jan. 14 with COVID symptoms, down from the record high of 2,341 set on Tuesday, Dec. 29. That number had previously peaked at 2,008 on July 7; it hit a subsequent low of 653 on Sept. 28.

A total of 1,138 COVID-19 patients were in intensive care unit beds on Jan. 14. The summer’s record number of patients in ICU beds was 970, set on July 13. The subsequent low was 114 on Sept. 22.

A website that tracks COVID infections across the globe reports that Arizona continues to have a COVID transmission rate far above the United States as a whole.

The website 91-divoc.com, which uses data from Johns Hopkins University, reports that Arizona is seeing 126.5 infections per 100,000 people on a seven-day average, compared to 72.7 infections per 100,000 for the United States as a whole.

Pima County vaccination appointments fill up in two hours

Registration opened for priority groups in phase 1B of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts yesterday, but according to the Pima County Health Department, all available appointments aimed at the 75+ population at the two Banner-operated vaccination sites and Tucson Medical Center were “accounted for through the registration process,” according to a press release from the health department.

More than 20,000 residents registered for appointments within the first two hours of the registration website’s opening, the release said.

The health department recognized this is “causing frustration” for those still trying to receive appointments through the county’s registration website, but said more appointments will be made available as it receives more allocated vaccine doses from the state.