May 2013
1 post
William Hooker Interprets a Classic Oscar Micheaux... →
“People study that D.W. Griffith film as one of the best of the period… It’s the epitome of racism, the highest point of racism I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s literally disgusting, completely against everything we know of, and it’s being studied by everybody.”
April 2013
4 posts
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Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth Talks About...
Marrying art-song sensibilities, contemporary pop frameworks and angular, outside grooves, Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors are a musicologist’s dream. Composer David Longstreth’s songs sometimes work within conventional structures; elsewhere they struggle against them. The last two Dirty Projectors albums — 2009’s Bitte Orca and Swing Lo Magellan, from last year — have...
3 tags
Prog-Rock Stalwarts Yes Play a Trio of Classic...
In the spring of 1972, Yes guitarist Steve Howe was recording a guitar solo for “Siberian Khatru” for the upcoming Close to the Edge album. Engineer Eddie Offord mic’ed his amplifier up close, as usual, then asked his assistant to stand in the studio and swing another microphone, plugged into a twenty-foot cord, in circles around his head, creating an improvised Doppler effect...
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The Grimm Generation Celebrates Noir Radio With...
Way back when, the family would congregate around the warm, vacuum-tube glow of the household radio every evening, to soak up scintillating, one-size-fits-all tales of femme fatales, gumshoes and Martian invasions, side-splitting comedic skits and the latest pop hits from Tin Pan Alley.
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Not much has changed, right?
At least not in Windsor, Conn., and not this Saturday, when the...
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Mike Doughty Talks About Selling Songs on Demand
Want to buy a Mike Doughty song, in the key of your choice (the options right now are C, C# and D; perhaps others can be negotiated), with a bridge (that’s extra), performed by Doughty, signed, numbered and delivered (via digital recorder) right to your mailbox? ($810.27, please.)
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Or scrap that: You do want the song — “Dogs/Demons,” which has never appeared on an...
March 2013
3 posts
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The Old-School Hip-Hop of Dr. Westchesterson Goes...
We’ve arguably reached a point where we measure a musician’s global impact by how many views they’ve gotten on YouTube.
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If that’s the case, the career of Western, Mass. hip-hop artist Dr. Westchesterson, who shares a bill with You Scream I Scream and Ladyhips at Arch Street Tavern on March 9, is off to a good start. “413” and “(I’m From)...
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Hitting the Small Screen: Connecticut Designers in...
To the casual, iPhone-toting observer on the street, success in the app-development game means launching the next Angry Birds, the next Words with Friends, the next Fruit Ninja. It’s all about creating that simple, super-addictive, viral app that pays for the 65 or so clunkers you’ve designed along the way, spinning off movie scripts and T-shirt licensing deals in the process.
...
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Composer Hilary Tann Headlines the 13th Annual...
Over the last 12 years, the week-long Women Composers Festival of Hartford has grown into one of the Northeast’s top destinations for hearing new music by living female composers.
[[MORE]]The reputation of the festival, now in its 13th year, has grown to where an internationally recognized artist like Hilary Tann, who succeeds Judith Shatin as this year’s composer-in-residence,...
February 2013
4 posts
3 tags
Ben The Sax Guy Records a New Album, Again
Hartford musician Ben Golder-Novick, also known as Ben the Sax Guy (or Benito the Troubadour, if you aren’t into the whole brevity thing), was hoping to have a new recording out this year. Then he got mugged.[[MORE]]
The Sax Guy, 31, spent months — years, even — teaching himself the ins and outs of laptop recording, and he was close to finishing enough tracks for an album. “The...
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Interview: Matisyahu
As a teenager, Matisyahu — the shape-shifting Chassidic-reggae-hip-hop musician who performs at Hartford’s Bushnell Center on Feb. 17 — freestyled for spare change at Phish shows. A few years ago, he sang Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” to 50,000 people at Bonnaroo. God certainly works in mysterious ways.[[MORE]]
That could serve as a tidy summary to a novel career trajectory. Sometime around...
Interview: Branford Marsalis
In his 52 short years on this planet, what hasn’t saxophonist Branford Marsalis done? Composing Broadway scores and movie soundtracks; recording with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey and his brother Wynton; running the Tonight Show band, when Jay Leno took over from Johnny Carson; jamming with the Grateful Dead (check out the exquisite “Eyes of the World”...
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Sunday Notebook: If Phish Studio Albums Were Led...
This will only make sense if you’re temporarily willing to imagine Phish studio albums being comparable in quality to Led Zeppelin records.
This is not about value or quality. This is about sequence and tone, and to a lesser extent (much lesser) the years each record was released. (1971 and 1996, for example: were they similar years? Were they worlds away in terms of foreign politics, the U.S....
January 2013
14 posts
5 tags
Taylor Ho Bynum Premieres His Prince Project at...
Franz Liszt did it. So did Gustav Mahler, the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Anthony Braxton, Liz Phair, Dirty Projectors, on and on.
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Come to think of it, every important artist steps outside of his or her own head space, at some point, to reimagine another person’s work within the context of their own time period and style. Re-interpretation — through cover songs (the Stones,...
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New Film Follows Foo Fighter Dave Grohl As He...
There’s a lot to love about Dave Grohl: his body of work with Nirvana and Foo Fighters, his old-school rock boosterism, his affable pizza delivery-guy persona.
[[MORE]]Sound City, a new film about a run-down studio in Van Nuys, Calif. where dozens, if not hundreds, of classic albums were recorded in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, gives us yet another. You sense Grohl used every...
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"Steam" Tweets
Thanks to @TheBabysMouth for encouraging me to get my thoughts together on this one.
***
@TheBabysMouth Ready for some “Steam” tweets? Here goes — Maybe 10 of them coming. (Sorry, everyone else.)
[[MORE]](1) The “Steam” jam happens entirely on the dominant (d, V of g; major or minor mode doesn’t really matter here).
(2) No matter what they do, no matter...
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Daphne Lee Martin extends her reach with 'Moxie' →
There are songwriters who’d rather get all of their teeth pulled than talk about their songs.
Daphne Lee Martin, a New London-based singer-songwriter who celebrates the release of her new album, Moxie, with a show at the Oasis Pub this Friday, is not one of those. Martin blogs extensively about her work. (Visit her website, for example, if you’re wondering why an extended sample of...
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#couchtour Mini-Podcast at CT.com →
With Tom Z. We talk about #couchtour and some other stuff.
Click the link above to tune in. Shouldn’t take too long.
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#couchtour: A Growing Number of Artists Are... →
Here’s a link to a long article I wrote on the growing number of #couchtour participants, bands, venues, technology and so on. Thanks to Ryan Montbleau, Bill Carbone, Cortney Harding, John Adamian, Jack Forchette and StageIt for talking to me.
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Birds of a Feather
(originally published 1/7/13)
Phish is a band of overachievers, adept at making what they do seem easy. They’ll jump on trampolines (less often now than in previous years) and add other physical challenges to the already difficult task of playing their instruments well, as though trying to mask the overarching nerdiness of it all. (It’s not cool to just be good.)[[MORE]] There are extensive...
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Right Here
(originally published 12/31/12)
For more than a year, Becky Kessler and Floyd Kellogg have been working on an album together at Casa de Warrenton, a century-old house situated on a half acre in Hartford’s West End, owned by architect Jeff Jahnke. Kessler has only lived in Connecticut for two years, but she’s already well known to Advocate readers, having won this year’s Grand Band Slam award for...
1 tag
High Time
(originally published 12/26/12)
There are countless Grateful Dead tribute acts — great ones, the Dark Star Orchestra, for example — who get it right: Jerry Garcia’s treble-heavy tone and mixolydian meanderings, Phil Lesh’s restless, rootless bass, dual drummers driving the train through Drums » Space, and back. They know the arrangements, and they know how to turn on the...
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Hitting the Fan
(originally published 12/26/12)
Last July, during a busy stretch of gigging, New London’s Suicide Dolls received some promising news.[[MORE]] Joseph Spadaro, founder of the Mystic-based indie label American Laundromat Records, wanted a working Connecticut band to appear on his musical tribute to the ’80s cult-classic film Repo Man. (ALR’s niche is the tribute compilation; previous releases...
6 tags
Jazz, Freely
(originally published 12/18/12)
You might find traces. But the Wilco records produced during Nels Cline’s nine-year tenure — Sky Blue Sky, Wilco (The Album) and The Whole Love — don’t reveal much about what the guitarist does on his own time.[[MORE]] Cline fronts the Nels Cline Singers, a free-jazz trio with drummer Scott Amendola, bassist Trevor Dunn (and no actual singers). He collaborates...
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smooth, not Smooth
(originally published 12/11/12)
The jazz world is roomy, with many corners to explore.[[MORE]]
There’s the academic scene, always looking to progress the game a step or two, wary of retracing steps and just fine with alienating a few listeners, thanks. There’s also smooth jazz, hugely popular with mainstream listeners and best enjoyed during trips to the dentist.
Somewhere in between...
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Interview: Ra Ra Riot
(originally published December 4, 2012)
You have to wonder if the term “2.0,” as it’s used to describe the second version of anything, should have been retired by now. But it probably applies to Ra Ra Riot’s forthcoming album, Beta Love, a cyberpunk-inspired swerve in a new direction.
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The former Syracuse, N.Y.-based band became a four-piece after the departure...
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Interview: Josh Arnoudse of You Won't
(originally published 12/3/12)
Some of the best songs are designed for a few people to hear and even fewer to understand. Skeptic Goodbye, the debut recording from Cambridge, Mass.-based duo You Won’t, is one for the basement dwellers, collectors of musty 4-track demos designed for the consumption of one, maybe two trusted friends, ambiguously labeled to protect their creator’s identity....
November 2012
14 posts
3 tags
New Life
(originally published 11/20/12)
There’s an elemental problem facing anyone who tries to produce electronic pop music: How to create an innovative tapestry of beats and bleeps, but also manage to throw a good song in there.
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Two years ago, Child Actor, a duo formed by cousins Max Heath and Sedgie Ogilvy, stumbled into one solution. Ogilvy, a pianist and singer from Boston, Mass.,...
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A New Generation of Music Fans, Artists and...
(originally published 11/13/12)
Listening to music couldn’t be any easier these days. With an iPhone, a Wi-Fi connection, earbuds and one finger, you can avail yourself of Neil Young’s entire catalog, forgotten works by late Hungarian composer György Ligeti or two dozen new releases every Tuesday.
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Except that a few people want to make things more difficult. For years,...
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Too Many Guitars
(originally published 11/14/12)
Two electric guitars on stage at a classical music concert is usually more than an audience expects to see. By a factor of two.[[MORE]]
Dither, a New York City-based ensemble who’ll perform at Wesleyan’s Crowell Concert Hall on Friday, have four of them.
In rock, the number four is important. Two guitars, bass and drums. Four Beatles. Four members...
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Everybody Wants Them
(originally published 11/13/12)
A common pop-song strategy is to subvert the severity of your lyrics with the lightness (or maybe “lite-ness”) of the music that glides along underneath.[[MORE]]
Rarely is it done so well, however, as on the title track of the Guru’s Go Easy, a new album they’ll celebrate with a release party at the Space in Hamden on Nov. 21. “I had some friends and they had to...
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Interview: Ben Ratliff, New York Times Music...
(originally published 11/5/12)
Ben Ratliff, jazz and pop critic for The New York Times since 1996 and the author of three books of jazz criticism, has the rare ability to write about avant-garde jazz, doom-metal, indie rock, hip-hop, and probably a dozen or so other musical genres with clarity and insight. He reviews hundreds of concerts and new releases a year. And even though Ratliff writes...
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Rocker at the Gate
(originally published 11/5/12)
The thought of performing as a soloist in front of a world-class orchestra would make most long-haired rockers quake in their snakeskin boots.
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Not guitarist Tony Spada. Not one bit.
Spada will be the featured soloist when the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Carolyn Kuan, performs composer Michael Daughtery’s Gee’s Bend, a concerto...
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Straight Outta Provo
(originally published 10/29/12)
A little over a year ago, Eyes Lips Eyes, a quartet from Los Angeles via Provo, Utah, were on the road, sharing a van with tourmates Toy Bombs. One afternoon, after driving all night and sleeping in the van, they pulled up in front of a club in New London, Conn. The doors flung open and out they tumbled, all 10 people. It was cold and damp, far from acceptable,...
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Interview: Scott Murawski of Max Creek
(originally published 10/29/12)
Years before anyone used the word “jamband,” Connecticut’s Max Creek was one of the only acts in the area playing original improvisational rock. This year, the band celebrates the 30th anniversary of Drink the Stars, a live double-LP recorded over several nights at Hartford’s Cell Block 11, way back in 1982. (It will be available soon on iTunes,...
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Interview: Nato Bardeen of the Drowning Men
(originally published 10/25/12)
This time of year, New Englanders can’t imagine life in a place called Oceanside, Calif., about halfway down the coast between Los Angeles and San Diego.
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If you’re curious about the type of sounds they produce on that alien planet, head to the Outer Space in Hamden and hear the Drowning Men, whose members grew up, went to school, played in bands...
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Hands-On
(originally published 10/23/12)
The jazz world is a network of relationships, between musicians, recordings, traditions and eras, an insular universe where name-dropping is shorthand for a sound, not a way to brag about playing experiences or records you’ve studied.
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Pianist Fred Hersch is an important hub, a synapse of sorts, between the old guard at Bradley’s, a famous New York...
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Live From Tokyo
(originally published 10/24/12)
In some alternate universe, where an instrumental post-rock band’s greatness is measured by how many glockenspiel players they have, MONO, with four, reigns supreme.
[[MORE]]Here, of course, that’s not how it works. Still, MONO’s bombast, their frantic guitar strum-and-sustain, their sense of melody, all of which would mean nothing without quiet,...
2 tags
Cars, Dogs, and, Uh, Drugs
(originally published 10/23/12)
The bari-sax and toy-piano-driven “Dog,” a memorable song on You Scream I Scream’s last album, Bug in a Light, pits panting man’s-best-friend (“You better like me ‘cause I’m your best friend/Dog-dog-dog-dog”) against backward-hat frat boy (“You better like me ‘cause I’m your best friend, dog”). Bros and kids, it turns out, can...
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Interview: David Mayfield of the David Mayfield...
(originally published 10/19/12)
Before hooking up with Cadillac Sky, David Mayfield, a native of Kent, Ohio, was a bluegrass prodigy from a family of musicians (his sister is singer Jessica Lea Mayfield). His debut solo album, simply titled The David Mayfield Parade, highlights Mayfield’s soulful voice and ability to write songs you feel like you’ve always known. A new album, recorded in...
2 tags
Serious Business
(originally published 10/15/12)
Ceschi Ramos, 31, has many talents. He can fingerpick gracefully on an acoustic guitar while crooning lyrics of his own making. Or he can spit rapid-fire verses over beats he produced himself or with the help of one of his many musical friends. He’s fronted metal bands — Connecticut’s devastating Dead By Wednesday, for example, whose drummer, Opus, is Ramos’...
October 2012
7 posts
3 tags
Found Objects: Blue Oyster Cult's "The Revenge of...
(originally published 9/21/12)
“The Revenge of Vera Gemini,” by Blue Oyster Cult, is the last song of side A on their 1976 album, Agents of Fortune. It was a good year for BOC. Agents of Fortune contained the hit song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” which almost cracked the top ten, right in the center of side A. I read about “The Revenge of Vera Gemini” and Blue Oyster Cult in...
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Azmari Arrival
(originally 10/1/12)
Fendika, a six-member collective of Ethiopian musicians and dancers, who’ll play at Hartford’s Charter Oak Cultural Center on Oct. 5, produce a full-bodied sound out of few elements.
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Misale Legesse, a young drummer, taps out rhythms on four moderately sized drums assembled on a stand in front of him. Endris Hassen bows a masenqo, a violin-like instrument with a...
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The Distance Between
(originally published 10/1/12)
Musicians often talk about transformational experiences — certain sounds, passages of writing, meetings or conversations, events, the birth of a child — that permanently changed their way of thinking.[[MORE]]
It’s slightly less common to find a musician who wants to help transform a community. That’s the point of drummer/composer/poet William Hooker’s Oct....
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Sticky Fingers
(originally published 9/24/12)
The best part about running on grease, according to members of Quiet Life, is the satisfaction of knowing somebody’s trash has taken you 500 miles down the road.
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“I’ve spent only about $150 in diesel fuel to get across the country,” said singer/guitarist Sean Spellman. “That’s why we can afford to tour without a label. Our fuel costs are so low.”
...
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Rock and Sprawl
(originally published 9/24/12)
The ’70s was the era of the Big Family Band. Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen toured with more than 30 musicians. The Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends (with Eric Clapton), Santana, the Mothers of Invention, George Harrison’s hybrid British-Indian ensembles, Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd: they contained...
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Fitter Happier
(originally published 10/8/12)
There’s already a handy narrative available to guide you through the schizophrenic Moms, the fifth album by Portland, Ore.’s Menomena.
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Shortly after the 2010 release of Mines, the group parted ways with co-founder Brent Knopf in January of 2011. Remaining members Danny Seim and Justin Harris didn’t waste time proving they could carry on without...
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Violent Muse
(originally published 10/8/12)
Outside of certain circles, hardcore music is often not taken seriously. It’s written off as mindless and uniformly aggressive, even though dozens of bands over the last several decades have put out complicated, emotionally charged albums that make such knee-jerk dismissals seem silly.[[MORE]]
But what’s the yardstick of intelligence in heavy music? Is it...
September 2012
8 posts
4 tags
Global Warming
(originally published 9/17/12)
Rupa Marya sings in English, French, Spanish, Hindi and Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican Chiapas state. She could sing in other languages if she wanted to. Marya’s band, Rupa and the April Fishes, similarly play global music: Gypsy swing, punk rock, Bollywood songs, cumbia, reggae and duduk. They are named for the French expression “les poissons...
3 tags
Road Dog Revival
(originally published 8/28/12)
For the better part of a decade, the Zac Brown Band toiled away in relative obscurity, playing bars and clubs, gaining a grassroots following and earning a reputation as a collective of musician’s musicians.
[[MORE]]Years passed. Then, suddenly, when The Foundation, their major-label debut, was released in 2008, everyone — well, country music fans anyway — knew...
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The Grammys, This Ain't
(originally published 9/11/12)
Back in July, Advocate/Weekly readers voted for their favorite Connecticut bands across 16 categories: overall, DJ, new, hip-hop, reggae, blues, jazz, rock, indie rock, cover, punk, metal, singer-songwriter, country, folk/traditional and “other” (say that whole thing three times, fast). We tallied up the votes and called up everyone in the top five to...
