January 2012
58 posts
5 tags
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...
