#couchtour

(originally published 5/21/12)

It’s not even June. But already this calendar year we’ve lost a gut-wrenching list of people who’ve impacted the music world: impresarios Don Cornelius and Dick Clark, R&B legends Johnny Otis and Etta James, the incomparable Band singer and drummer Levon Helm, bluegrass banjo pioneer Earl Scruggs, amp builder Jim Marshall, Memphis Horns saxophonist Andrew Love, pop icons Whitney Houston and Davy Jones, Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, Stax bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, disco queen Donna Summer, classical art-song master Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, on and on. And, earlier this week, Robin Gibb, who’d been battling cancer for some time.

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(originally published 5/22/12)

It’s the spooky solo instrument in every ’50s sci-fi movie orchestra. It’s the trippy, skyward warble in theBeach Boys’1966 hit “Good Vibrations.” In Clara Rockmore’s (1911-1998) virtuosic hands, it was like a human voice with an inhuman, five-octave range, her two hands — one controlling pitch, the other volume — moving about like twin vocal folds stretched over a mysterious, robotic larynx.

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(originally published 3/9/11)

Shaugn O’Donnell, Associate Professor of Music at The City College and Graduate Center in New York (CUNY), has mad theory chops.

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(originally published in Hartford Magazine, 4/12)

That old line about the circus life getting in your blood? All true, says ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson.

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(originally published in Harford Magazine, 3/12)

One morning last March, 19-year-old guitar phenom and Ashford, Conn. resident Desiree’ Bassett was relaxing at home, tucked away in the state’s Quiet Corner, listening to Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel.” The phone rang, and Daniel Bassett, Desiree’s father and manager, answered: It was Greg Phillinganes, a keyboardist who’s played with Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin and dozens of other pop stars. Now the musical director for Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson The Immortal World Tour, Phillinganes had seen Bassett’s YouTube performance videos and was calling to ask her to join his touring band.

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(originally published 5/14/12)

A Wood Brothers show can veer off into a number of different, closely related musical territories. It’s one part intimate, singer-songwriter showcase, with Oliver Wood’s well-crafted compositions and whiskey-honed voice front and center and rich harmonies all over the place. It’s another part jam-band rock, with stinging solo bursts from Oliver’s guitar, and especially with the contributions of bassist Chris Wood, who made his name in the music business with groove-jazz trio Medeski, Martin and Wood. And it’s a third part straight-up, chug-along blues-rock, with Oliver’s distorted slide guitar slicing through the mix. The whole package cuts along the grains of several complementary traditions of American roots music — blues, soul, gospel, folk. It depends what you’re listening for.

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(originally published 5/9/12)

Some people know what beer pong is all about, while others do not.

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(originally published 1/17/12)

Back in the early ’80s, New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon, Mötorhead and the pre-Pyromania Def Leppard battled over metal-mag cover space with softer, glossier stateside bands, who proudly wore pop sensibilities (and heaps of lucrative crossover potential) on deliberately ripped sleeves. 

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(originally published 1/6/12)

A lazy, soul-funk version of “Come On In My Kitchen” kicks off 100 Years of Robert Johnson, the new album by the Big Head Blues Club, an offshoot of the Colorado-based band Big Head Todd and the Monsters that adds, oh, just a few musicians you may have heard of: B.B. King, Ruthie Foster, Cedric Burnside, Honeyboy Edwards, Charlie Musselwhite, Lightnin’ Malcolm and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s former guitarist who passed away in December. 

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(originally published 1/23/12)

Afro-Cuban music enjoys an evolutionary advantage over the rest of the jazz world. Like other points on the spectrum, it changes and grows over time, gaining in harmonic and formal complexity as it expands to incorporate a wide range of contemporary American jazz and popular music influences. Periodically, it weathers sea changes and submits to a back-to-basics overhaul. No matter how cerebral it gets, however, Afro-Cuban music never seems to break its ties to the body.

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(originally published 1/23/12)

Having a couple of monster hits early in your career can certainly pigeonhole you as a recording artist. But it can also pay for a lot of future evil.

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(originally published 1/31/12)

Here in the Western world, composers tend to write stuff down. It’s how you feel confident your brilliant musical ideas will stay true to your original conception after you’re dead and buried. Or if somebody programs one of your pieces in Oshkosh and you can’t be there, it keeps those necessary evils of the profession (performers) from mucking things up too badly. It also frames your work as the product of a single creative force, not a messy, flowery groupthink.

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(originally published 1/31/12)

If you throw a rock into a crowd of people (and I’m not suggesting you do this), what are the chances you’ll hit a musician (probably from Brooklyn) with a loop pedal, a healthy appreciation for quasi-African rhythms and a stack of vinyl by American minimalist composers (or maybe Scriabin) under one arm? Higher than usual, I’d say. It’s so saturated that, at this point, I wouldn’t blame the most intrepid indie rock devotee for heading off in the other direction, into a padded, echo-free room of some kind with a copy of the first Boston LP, and not sticking around to see who they hit.

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(originally published 2/5/12)

Early in his career, Dutch musician Jozef van Wissem switched over to the lute after years of playing classical guitar. He decided he would shake things up a bit, however, to make the standard repertoire — French, German, Italian, English and Spanish pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries — a little more personal by writing the pieces down on paper, backwards, and playing them that way.

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(originally published 2/13/12)

Longstanding musical partnerships are a lot like ordinary friendships. Over time, as you become familiar with a buddy’s speech patterns, thought processes, personal history and upbringing, moral code, sense of humor, even his or her annoying tics (all of which, if you’ve managed to stay friends for a while, most likely fall into line with your own), you develop an easygoing shorthand. You relax and trust each other. Otherwise, why hang out anymore?

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(originally published 2/13/12)

If you grew up in the ’80s and had hip older siblings, chances are you had LPs or cassettes of Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall, the classic quartet of post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd albums, floating around your house. When you made your way through those, you may have toyed with owning a few others, like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Atom Heart Mother, Ummagumma, Obscured by Clouds, Meddle and The Final Cut, the dour end to an epoch-making run.

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(originally published 2/17/12)

Cowboy Junkies — Toronto-based siblings Margo, Michael and Peter Timmins and Alan Anton — have been known to knock out considerable amounts of material in relatively short periods of time. Since 1986, they’ve released at least one studio or live album every two years or so, and they recorded their multi-platinum selling breakthrough, 1988’s The Trinity Sessions (with its terrific cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”), in a mere 14 hours, hovering around a single microphone.

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(originally published 2/20/12)

Northampton’s own Winterpills released their fifth and most ambitious album, All My Lovely Goners, earlier this month. (It’s now streaming on their website.) Songwriter Philip Price spoke with the Advocate by phone about what the group wanted to achieve with the record, why they are releasing in on vinyl and their plans to tour behind the record at places like next month’s South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. This Saturday, they’ll host a CD release party at a hometown venue, the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, with guests Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion. 

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(originally published 2/28/12)

If you ask Springfield, Mass. native Taj Mahal about what inspired him to become a restless musical explorer, he won’t mince words.

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(originally published 3/5/12)

People think it’s easy to slam together 20 minutes of music that holds up under scrutiny. Build slowly from a soft beginning, jam this part together with that one, add an organ solo here, change keys, go to a different time signature, stitch in a guitar solo and a big climactic ending. It’ll work.

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(originally published 3/6/12)

There’s a passage at the end of “Auto-Tune the News #4,” one of the Gregory Brothers’ slightly less popular videos (it’s been viewed roughly 750k times, compared with 30 million views of their “Double Rainbow Song”), when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is arguing with Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., over regulating Jacuzzis.

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(originally published 3/16/12)

One of the best jazz re-issues from last year was Columbia/Legacy’s Live in Europe 1967, a 3-CD/DVD package that captured Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet — Davis, tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams — at the height of their free-bop chemistry over five stops on a European tour.

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(originally published 3/12/12)

There’s nothing ambiguous about the three E major chords that open “Mean To Me,” the opening track of Ben Kweller’s new album Go Fly A Kite, the first to be released on his own Noise Company Records.

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(originally published 3/16/12)

In the early 1990s, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones burst upon the contemporary jazz world like a mobile attack unit from Mars.

Bassist Victor Wooten reinvented his instrument while doing back flips and tossing it around his neck. His brother, drummer Roy “Future Man” Wooten tapped his fingers on a handheld, multi-colored percussion triggering device known as a “drumitar,” summoning little-known polyrhythms and timbres. Howard Levy played piano and harmonica, sometimes separately, sometimes together. Levy rewrote the harmonica rulebook, squeezing chromatic notes out of a diatonic harmonica using overdraws and overblows. 

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(originally published 3/27/12)

Indie-rock royalty. Slacker-generation supergroup. Post-whatever whatever.

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(originally published 4/2/12)

Bands develop unique ways of approaching new projects. A lyrical theme could present itself and end up running the show, or a tweak in instrumentation or production concept will emerge to unite a group of disparate songs. Often bands just collect what they have lying around.

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(originally published 4/5/12)

So much of contemporary jazz has to do with balancing invention and reinvention, figuring out what remains relevant and generative about trends from the last fifty years while developing new systems that, if they don’t necessarily push the genre forward, at least provide fertile ground for fresh exploration.

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(originally published 4/13/12)

Every spring, I listen to the Grateful Dead with fresh ears, not to the exclusion of everything else, but close to it. (I’m not alone in this. How many people in the Northeast associate the Dead’s music with thaw, both literal and spiritual?) 

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(originally published 4/30/12)

For a relatively young jazz musician, tenor saxman Noah Preminger is as seasoned as it gets. As a leader and sideman, the 25-year-old Canton, Conn. native has gigged with some of the biggest names in New York, people like Dave Holland, Fred Hersch, Dave Douglas, Victor Lewis, John and Bucky Pizzarelli, Billy Drummond, Dave Liebman and others. He has two critically acclaimed albums under his belt, the most recent of which, 2011’s Before the Rain, was hailed as one last year’s best releases. The sky’s the limit in terms of where he goes from here. 

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(originally published 4/16/12)

Bassist and vocalist Greg Lake, a founding member of two seminal progressive rock groups, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, performs at the Ridgefield Playhouse on April 21, sharing songs and stories about his time in both bands. He spoke with the Advocate from a tour stop in Montreal. 

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(originally published 4/25/12)

Cake is Generation X’s Cheap Trick. Everyone likes them, finds their music to be funny, ironic, danceable and perhaps not very deep, and few profess to be fanatical. They float above generic boundaries; if you’re narrow-minded, you can maintain your primary musical identity (metalhead, polka boy, indie rocker, etc.), and still like Cake. A dynamic live act, they make excellent, punchy records, and no one snickers when they cover semi-sacred ground, like Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” or the “Sesame Street” song “Mahna Mahna,” just like Cheap Trick performing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety makes you think, Yeah, that seems reasonable. And, like the quartet from Rockford, Ill., almost nobody will go out on a limb and say Cake’s music is exceptionally complex, a notion that’s patently false.

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John Corigliano, 74, is one of America’s most celebrated living composers. His Symphony No. 2 won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, which goes nicely with his Oscar for Best Original Score for the 1999 film The Red Violin and three Grammy Awards. As the Hartt School’s 2012 “Unclaimed Property” composer in residence, several of Corigliano’s works, including Mr. Tambourine Man, a chamber piece that sets Bob Dylan’s poetry to original music, his mammoth First Symphony, and Circus Maximus (which is just as grand as its name), will be performed by Hartt students and faculty between May 2-5. Corigliano spoke with the Advocate from his home in New York about his residency, why he reworked Dylan and the state of contemporary music.

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