T Bone Burnett will premiere The Speaking Clock Revue – a multi-artist concert extravaganza – on October 16, 2010 at the Wang Center in Boston and October 20, 2010 at the Beacon Theater in New York City.

Both evenings of the Revue will feature performances by Elton John & Leon Russell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello, Gregg Allman, Ralph Stanley, Jeff Bridges, Punch Brothers, Karen Elson, and newcomers The Secret Sisters. In addition, Neko Case and Jim James from My Morning Jacket will join the lineup in Boston and New York respectively.

The concerts will be presented in a revue format with a house band consisting of the players featured on numerous Burnett-produced recordings.

This edition of The Speaking Clock Revue is presented with Participant Media in conjunction with the release of the documentary film Waiting For “Superman”, from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud), which follows a handful of promising students through a U.S. public school system and offers hope by exploring innovative approaches by education reformers who refuse to leave their students behind. All net proceeds from these shows will be donated to The Participant Foundation to support music and arts education programming in public schools.

In conceiving The Speaking Clock Revue, Burnett aims to bring to the live stage a musical event that conveys the excitement he and his fellow musicians experience when creating music in the recording studio. “The privacy and the intimacy of the studio afford artists the freedom to create, but something thrilling happens in getting away from the machines and into the live communication of real time storytelling in the larger community. The first tour I went on, my first job in show business, was on The Rolling Thunder Revue, and I've come back to that type of collaborative and extraordinarily rewarding experience from time to time. We are looking forward with great anticipation to getting The Speaking Clock Revue up and running this fall and continuing it in the years to come,” he said.

Burnett has recently collaborated with nearly all of the performers on The Speaking Clock Revue. "The Union," from Elton John and Leon Russell was produced by Burnett and will be released October 17, 2010 on Decca Records.

Back to Headlines