Originally appeared on BBC uk News Online

Singer Robert Plant has set up a bus for blind musicians in Mali as part of a project to keep alive the music and culture of the country’s nomadic Tamashek people. ||Continue reading||

Originally published in Christian Science Monitor
by Stephen Humphries, staff writer

On the Richter scale of rock, Led Zeppelin’s seismic impact measures at least a 10. True, their influence on “Spinal Tap’s” rock spoof scores an 11, but strip away Zeppelin’s ridiculous Stonehenge stage sets and triple-necked guitars and you’re left with an enduring body of music whose sales and legacy have been surpassed only by the Beatles.

It would have been easy, then, for Robert Plant to trade on his former band’s glories since the band’s demise in 1980. Instead, the vocalist has pursued a forward-looking solo career - summarized on a new two-disc retrospective, “‘66 to Timbuktu” (Atlantic) - in which he has striven never to repeat himself. As part of that ethos, he’s also resisted multimillion-dollar offers to reform Led Zep. ||Continue reading||