January 2012
58 posts
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Queering the Charts
(originally published 3/24/11)
A string of suicides by young adults in the last few years has pushed anti-bullying and gay bashing campaigns into the mainstream.
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Obama has led the charge. On March 10, MTV announced at the White House Conference on Bullying Prevention that it plans to air a TV-movie based on the story of Abraham Biggs, a 19-year-old student with bipolar disorder who...
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Session Man
(originally published 2/23/11) Next month, San Francisco’s Backstage Books plans to release … And On Piano … Nicky Hopkins , author Julian Dawson’s biography of the late British pianist who died on Sept. 6, 1994, of complications from an intestinal surgery related to his Crohn’s Disease. Hopkins would have turned 67 tomorrow. Dawson, a respected British singer-songwriter, has worked with some...
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Mo’ Better Blues
(originally published 12/15/2011) There’s more to the story of Jaimoe, the drummer formerly known as Jai Johanny Johanson (or “Johnie,” as his parents called him), than his long-standing affiliation with the Allman Brothers Band.
Years before his fateful run-in with guitarist Duane Allman in 1969, the Mississippi native backed legendary Stax duo Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Patti LaBelle and...
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The Peak Experience
(originally published 12/7/2011) In Portsmouth, N.H., on the first night of his fall solo tour, Phish bassist Mike Gordon found himself at the center of musical dialogue between drummer Todd Isler and percussionist Craig Myers.[[MORE]]
“I realized I was equidistant between the drums and percussion,” said Gordon, who spoke to the Advocate by phone from his home near Burlington, Vt. “All of a...
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Interview: Duncan Sheik
(originally published 12/8/11)
Recently, Duncan Sheik’s life came close to unraveling. In June, on the day his latest album, Covers ’80s, was released, Sheik entered a treatment center for alcohol abuse. He’s written extensively about the experience on his website: “Duncan here, offering you belated apologies for the cancellation of my June tour. The truth is I didn’t do it because I realized I...
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Robot Stomp
(originally published 12/8/11) If you’ve just gotten around to absorbing H-p1, the latest mind-expanding record by New York space-rock trio White Hills for the Thrill Jockey imprint, brace yourself: in March, they’ll release Frying on this Rock, a five-song LP recorded with Martin Bisi, a No Wave-era engineer who’s worked with Bill Laswell, Brian Eno, John Zorn, Sonic Youth and Herbie Hancock (he...
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CD of the Week: Oneohtrix Point Never, 'Replica'
(originally published 11/30/11) There’s loopy, ambient minimalism aplenty in Brooklyn-based experimental musician Daniel Lopatin’s latest offering, but there are also surprising nugs of humor, like the beginning of “Nassau,” where an insignificant, fifth-pitched vocal sample gets twisted into a motive, surrounded by burbling rhythms and passable piano doodles. Lopatin’s modus...
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Concert Review: Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band...
(originally published 11/27/11) Two hours was all Bob Seger, the silver-haired Harley set’s messiah of Motor City blooz-rock stomp, needed to cram together 17 songs and a duo of two-song encores (let’s get that part over with: “Against the Wind”/“Hollywood Nights” and “Night Moves”/“Rock and Roll Never Forgets”). Do the math: that’s a little under six minutes per song, factoring in transitions...
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Concert Review: Guns N' Roses at Comcast Theatre...
(originally published 11/20/11)
Singer Axl Rose, a future first-ballot Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, led a talented, large group of musicians calling itself Guns N’ Roses though a lengthy, career-spanning parade of hits, covers and solos on Saturday night at Hartford’s Comcast Theatre. G N’ R is one of the few bands that scores points just for making it to the gig. Their appeal stretches across...
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Concert Review: Katy Perry at the XL Center in...
(originally published 11/16/11) Two-screening — watching television while simultaneously Tweeting or posting on Facebook with a smart-phone — is common practice at concerts these days, and why not? We two-screen while driving, reading newspapers, bathing children, cooking, shopping for food, doing homework. At shows, it’s frowned upon only in the stuffiest and hushed of circumstances, like at...
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Interview: Dizzy Reed of Guns N' Roses
(originally published 11/15/11) Guns N’ Roses is coming to Hartford on Nov. 19, and that means (if they do their jobs adequately) unhealthy doses of arena-rock, rumors about Axl Rose and smashed televisions, lighters, traffic, Chinese Democracy tracks, cheap beer, pills, joints, dudes and ladies in rock tees (and little else), and for some, according to keyboard player Dizzy Reed, phone calls to...
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Interview: Jason Bonham's Led Zeppelin Experience
(originally published 11/1/11)
Drummer Jason Bonham, son of the late Led Zeppelin legend John Bonham, filled in for his dad with the three remaining Zeppelin members (at 2007 reunion tribute for Ahmet Ertegun). He’s also done session work and live gigs for other serious players, including Paul Rodgers, Slash, Foreigner and Joe Bonamossa, and rocked out over the years with...
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Interview: Marco Benevento
(originally published 10/13/11) On his third full-length studio album, Between the Needles and Nightfall, tracked in three days by engineer Bryce Goggin and then looped, cut, manipulated and poured over for weeks, Brooklyn-based pianist Marco Benevento ran a baby grand through guitar pick-ups, amplifiers and a bunch of stompboxes, the kind you’d see onstage at a guitarist’s feet. It’s a strange...
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Interview: Andrew McMahon of Jack's Mannequin
(originally published 10/3/11) Tonight at 7 p.m., Jack’s Mannequin, the Orange County, Calif. band founded by Andrew McMahon in 2004 as a side project from his regular gig in Something Corporate, is releasing 11 short films on their YouTube channel to coincide with a sold-out theater event in New York.
Tomorrow, People and Things, the band’s third full-length record (and second for Sire...
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Interview: Taylor Hanson
(originally published 9/30/11) You might not immediately think of Hanson as an indie rock band, but Isaac, Zac and Taylor, the brothers from Oklahoma we first got to know back in 1996, have been handling their own careers for about a decade. “It feels like I’m an entrepreneur,” says Taylor by phone from a tour stop in Tempe, Arizona. “It feels risky at times and it requires some level of...
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Concert Review: The Album Leaf at the Wadsworth...
(originally published 9/27/11) You can’t blame people for not being able to swing a Monday night show. That said, the 50-or-so audience members who turned out to hear The Album Leaf last night at the Wadsworth were treated to a hypnotic, mostly instrumental set. The four-piece band brewed up complex instrumental textures using violin, trumpet, Rhodes patches and other analog synth sounds, and...
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Interview: Dark Dark Dark
(originally published 9/23/11) Early morning interviews can be a drag. Just ask Marshall LaCount, who plays banjo and clarinet and sings for Minneapolis band Dark Dark Dark. LaCount was kind enough to speak with the Advocate on Thursday at 10 a.m. by phone from Columbus, Ohio, where the band had just played a show the night before at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. I...
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CD of the Week: Luke Temple, 'Don't Act Like You...
(originally published 9/15/11) There’s indie rock that’s chordy and intricate, and there’s some that’s more simple and folksy. Don’t Act Like You Don’t Care, Manchester, Mass. singer-songwriter Luke Temple’s 3rd album, has both, darting between late ’70s Little River Band soft rock, doo-wop cum Nashville nostalgia, and a few Dylan/Band singalongs....
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Animals Take Control
(originally published 9/9/11) It’s probably a good idea to catch Philly’s Reading Rainbow (Rob Garcia, vocals and guitar, Sarah Everton, drums and vocals, and Al Creedon, guitar) at the Elm City Popfest at BAR in New Haven on Sept. 14 or the following night at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton.
Their latest record, Prism Eyes, released on Hozac in 2010, offers 11 tracks of...
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Gather the Herd
(originally published 9/2/11) If you’re not that familiar with Donna the Buffalo, ask the Herd, a huge bunch of music lovers dedicated to the band. They don’t just go to shows; The Herd’s got its own fundraising organization, Side to Side Charities, which has raised piles of money for food banks, women’s shelters and other charitable causes. “There are still some...
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The Man with Two Brains
(originally published 8/23/11) Talking to Howard Levy is like talking to one of your buddies. A buddy who happens to be the best diatonic harmonica player on the planet.
In 45 minutes, Levy tells me what it’s like to reunite with his Flecktone bandmates, why he left the group back in the early ‘90s, and about collaborating on tunes for the reunion album, Rocket Science, which shot up the...
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Interview: John Jorgenson
(originally published 8/19/11) When John Jorgenson, a laid-back, soft-spoken Californian who lives in Nashville, picks up a guitar, he can chicken pick, string together long, staccato Gypsy Jazz lines or rack up chorus after face-melting chorus of rock and blues licks like few other people on the planet. What comes out of the instrument, as Jorgenson told the Advocate last week when he was in...
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Son House
(originally published 8/16/11) When you first hear David Wax Museum’s new album, Everything Is Saved, or when you see them play live for the first time, everything about the band — from their earthy repertoire to their tendency to jump right in and mix with the crowd — draws you forward, like good indie rock without a trace of cliquishness. Take the chorus of “Yes, Maria, Yes,” for...
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Go Big or Go Home
(originally published 7/21/11) In 2010, after several trying years of juggling successful careers and a growing family, guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer Susan Tedeschi, shelved their respective solo groups and began assembling what would become the Tedeschi Trucks Band.
It’s a stupefying collective of veteran musicians: bassist Oteil Burbridge, his brother Kofi Burbridge on flute and...
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Tapes ’n Tapes
(originally published 7/20/11) It’s May 13, a good two months out from the kickoff of this year’s Gathering of the Vibes, at around 11 a.m. I’m on hold, waiting for Ken Hays, head Vibesman, to come to the phone, and the call-waiting music, naturally, is from a live Grateful Dead show, probably from the late ‘80s. I can’t quite make out the song, but I can tell Bob Weir’s singing something about...
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Electric Cambodia
(originally published 6/2/11) A decade ago, Dengue Fever guitarist Zac Holtzman, fresh off a 10-year stint with the San Francisco band Dieselhed who recorded two LPs for Bong Load Records in 1999 and 2000, started a new band, a Cambodian-American rock hybrid inspired by cassettes he had of popular Khmer musicians. During theVietnam War, Holtzman says by phone from his home in Echo Park, Calif.,...
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F-clef All-Stars
(originally published 1/2/11) The alt-classical Portland Cello Project (PCP, for short) has some pretty rabid fans, and not because they’re doped up on angel dust. Leader Douglas Jenkins has been known to create up to twenty new scores for each show, so you never know what you’ll get, from covers of Britney Spears, Zeppelin, and ABBA to De Falla and Handel. The Advocate briefly spoke with...
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Afrobeat Explosion
(originally published 12/29/10) Not too long ago, a band would have to do something really crazy — or perhaps terrible — to get noticed by both Relix Magazine, the default resource for jam-band news and criticism, and the indie-rock oriented, now more mainstream, SPIN. Still, it’s no small feat that Brooklyn-based Rubblebucket managed to get high-fives from both pubs. SPIN called RB “one of the...
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Behind the Sun
(originally published 11/17/11) Sunwatcher, saxophonist Jeff Lederer’s first recording as a bandleader, feels like a career retrospective. The spirit of Lederer’s musical hero, the late avant-garde saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler, hangs over the recording, from the expansive opening track “Albert’s Sun” to the cover image, a re-creation of a 1969 photo of Ayler in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park....
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Night Thoughts
(originally published 9/13/11) There aren’t many records that sound like Synastry, a collaboration between vocalist Jen Shyu and bassist Mark Dresser out now on Pi Recordings. The duo plays tonight at 8 p.m. as part of the Uncertainty Music Series at New Haven’s The Big Room. At times, the music strangely sounds both challenging and comfortable, and it’s often disorienting. Grooves come and go,...
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Resounding Themes
(originally published 6/16/11) Nine years after graduating from Wesleyan University, 30-year-old vibraphonist Chris Dingman has become one of jazz’s young leading lights. He’s studied and played extensively with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. He’s a critically acclaimed sideman who has turned heads for his work with saxophonist Steve Lehman, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and...
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Absolutely Free
(originally published 6/3/11) When it comes to improvisation, “free” is a thorny word. In the context of avant-garde jazz, pioneered in the 1960s by Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra and others, it means free-form group improvisation: individuals with highly personal styles, conversing in a musical language unconstrained by predetermined chord...
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Steampunk Jazz
(originally published 4/22/11) In jazz, virtually any player of a certain skill level can jam with anyone else. There’s always common ground — the blues, for example, or any one of the hundreds of well-worn standards, or just pick a key, mode and rhythm and let loose. You could say, on some level, that this built-in swap meet of equally talented players hampers the development of...
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The Roaring Night
(originally published 10/6/11) Locking in some recent phone time with Jace Lasek, the Regina, Saskatchewan-born guitarist and visionary who, along with his wife, bassist and singer Olga Goreas, founded the psych-rock band the Besnard Lakes in 2003, was difficult. For the 16th year in a row, he was on a long vacation. At Besnard Lake.
Yeah, it’s a real place, located in North-Central...
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Fabulous Muscles
(originally published 9/2/11) On September 6, Xiu Xiu released a 7-inch with an original song — “Daphny,” the story of a friend who was raped while in police custody told in dramatic stop-start fashion — and a cover of Rhianna’s “Only Girl (In the World),” a dissonant string quartet/loopy-lesbian dance groove. The image released with the single, over a white...
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Veins of God
(originally published 9/16/11) Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the 26-year-old guitarist and singer of the black metal band Liturgy, who performs at Daniel Street in Milford on Sept. 22, became a polarizing figure in the metal world when an essay he wrote for an academic conference hit the Internet a couple of years ago.
“The time has come for a decisive break with the European tradition and the...
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Ooh La La
(originally published 9/23/11) With the exception of two early-October Vermont benefit shows, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals’ upcoming UConn appearance is the final stop on what seems like an endless, Bob Dylan-esque touring schedule. The band’s been on the road without much break at least as far back as June. You have to wonder how much Potter and company have left in the tank. ...
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Interview: Howard Fishman
(originally published 10/11/11) Singer-songwriter Howard Fishman, who’s bringing a five-piece band to Black-eyed Sally’s in Hartford this Friday, always seems to have five projects going at once. Currently, there’s the Basement Tapes Project, a review of the music Bob Dylan and The Band famously recorded at Big Pink in Woodstock, N.Y. in 1967, which Fishman based on Greil Marcus’ 2001 book...
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Feel Like a Stranger
(originally published 7/21/11) Even as the 16-year anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s passing approaches this August, it’s still a pretty good time to be a Deadhead. You’ve got the Dead Archive folks churning out new, spiffed-up re-releases every time you find yourself with some spare scratch; the Europe ‘72 tour box set (60+ discs for $450!) sold out its initial 7,200-copy run (they’re printing...
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The New Q
(originally published 6/22/11) In March of 2011, Terry Adams, keyboardist and founding member of the venerable NRBQ, dropped a bombshell on his fans. In a 1200-word letter on the band’s website, Adams led with the good news: “I’m extremely happy to announce,” he wrote, “that, with the release of our new CD next week, my Quartet will be resuming the name NRBQ. After three years of playing...
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Even to Win is to Fail
(originally published 5/3/11) Melancholy runs like a strong current through Glenn Jones’ fingerstyle instrumentals, but there’s also a streak of blissful optimism. On the prelude of “Anchor Chain Blues,” the first track of Even to Win is to Fail, a limited-release EP Thrill Jockey Records put out in observance of Record Store Day, a B-flat rings out on the lowest of Jones’ 12 strings, as he...
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Retro Format
(originally published 11/6/10) On an afternoon in Los Angeles, China Forbes, multilingual chanteuse of Portland, Oregon’s “little orchestra” Pink Martini, relaxes in a hotel. She’s interrupted momentarily from our phone conversation when her dog discovers dessert remnants leftover from the events of the prior evening. “Last night, Rufus Wainwright and [pianist] Thomas Lauderdale did a...
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Interview: Al Jarreau
(originally published 11/11/11) Vocalist Al Jarreau is a lot of things to a lot of people. Jazz and soul-savvy boomers know his early stuff, when, working by day as a San Francisco rehabilitation counselor in the ‘60s, Jarreau moonlighted as a strict, hep-cat jazzer in a trio with pianist George Duke (of Cannonball Adderley and Frank Zappa fame) before forging ahead into the world of pop and...
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Playing With Stones
(originally published 10/31/11) Electronics and plugged-in textures play central roles in Samdhi, a project alto-saxophonist and composer Rudresh Mahanthappa began working on in 2007 with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship. But when it comes to using electronics effectively in a live setting, Mahanthappa says he’s little more than a dabbler. “I’m having to remember to launch particular bits of...
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CD of the Week: Miles Davis 'Live in Europe 1967'
(originally published 10/5/11) Columbia/Legacy’s new 3-CD/DVD package captures Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet — Davis (trumpet), Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) —- at the pinnacle of its telepathic, free-bop powers, over five stops on George Wein’s 1967 “Newport Jazz Festival in Europe” tour. Each of...
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Brilliant Corners
(originally published 7/29/11) Perhaps it’s built into the fabric of jazz that we listen for — and even expect to hear — quantum leaps from time to time, steps that mark distant degrees of separation from what’s already known and anticipated. When you listen to Vijay Iyer’s “Epistrophy” on his 2010 album Solo, for example, it’s nearly as far removed from Thelonious...
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Interview: Trey Songz
(originally published 12/22/10) A couple of weeks ago, I requested a phone interview with Trey Songz, who was in town for Jingle Jam 2010 with Usher and Miguel. It didn’t happen in time to run a preview, but his management offered the opportunity to talk to on the day of the concert. Everything fell into place and there I was, chatting with a guy who’s sold enough CDs to shingle the XL Center’s...
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The Third Man
(originally published 5/17/11) There are any number of interesting things to talk about in pianist Ran Blake’s music, but there’s one passage in particular that caught my ear while I was listening to his new CD, Grey December: Live in Rome, released last week on Tompkins Square Records. The album, his 36th, is the first live release in his six decades as a recording artist. About...
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Blue Moses
(originally published 5/10/11) Randy Weston is the kind of artist you have to dig for. His music is real insider stuff, the sort you’d grab from a record store bin because the cover looked cool or because someone much hipper than you dropped his name. Thanks to YouTube, you can view Weston’s performance at trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s memorial service at Harlem’s...
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Catholic Jazz?
(originally published 1/17/10) Bassist Father Stan Fortuna, one-half of the Scola Tristano Duo with guitarist Peter Prisco, studied with Lennie Tristano a year before the jazz icon’s death in 1978. “First and foremost, Lennie wanted you to swing,” he remembers. “And number two, Lennie wanted every note, like, right in there.” Tristano’s legacy needs a bit of reviving. He was the...
