Thursday, March 24 Most guys discovered by Wynton Marsalis do pretty well for themselves. And Philly-born bassist Christian McBride was on his way up even before he met Marsalis at the age of fourteen: His father, Lee Smith, was a session bassist himself, whose timekeeping kept the Delfonics in the…
To music historians and fans, the late Bob Wills was the “King of Western Swing,” one of America’s greatest music pioneers. To Nick Forster — a Colorado music legend and the founder and host of the e-town radio show — Wills and his Texas Playboys were much more. “He had…
FRI, 3/25 You think you really know a place; then you get an aerial view of it, and your understanding increases tenfold. I’ve always considered myself an expert on Denver, but on a recent flight from Denver International Aiport, the plane took off toward the east and then looped back…
WED, 3/30 Not since Mike Tyson’s psychosis-driven title fights battered the public consciousness a decade ago has the sport of boxing staged such a ruthless assault on society. Between this year’s Academy Award-winning knockout Million Dollar Baby and NBC’s new reality hit, The Contender, the so-called sweet science appears to…
MON, 3/28 “‘Inchworm,’ 1998 — computers, aluminum, software, electronics, motors, 6 feet, autonomously mobile.” “‘I Like To Watch,’ 2000 — steel, aluminum, wood, electronics, motors, 9 x 8 x 8 feet, operating envelope.” Looking over the descriptions of some of Alan Rath’s “Robots” sculptures, it’s hard to tell whether you’re…
THURS, 3/24 Saturday night at my grandma’s house was always Welk night. Once a week, we would dress up in hats and furs and do the polka. That wasn’t as strange as it sounds: From The Lawrence Welk Show’s inception in 1955 through the early ’70s, millions of viewers tuned…
Conversations in Clay. The ceramics exhibit at the Lakewood Cultural Center has been causing a lot of commotion ever since Lakewood City Manager Mike Rock ordered that part of a piece be removed for being “anti-American.” The piece that Rock and members of the Lakewood City Council had a problem…
Always…Patsy Cline. Always Patsy Cline is a light, mildly entertaining evening. You get an efficiently evocative set that’s divided into three parts: a down-home apartment; an old-fashioned country bar, complete with jukebox; and, in the center, the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. There are two skilled singer-performers, one of…
The action can get pretty hot and heavy when LoDo’s bars let out at 2 a.m. But from the cheap seats on the sidelines, watching the crowds pour out of the clubs and pour themselves into cars and cabs — after some last-second attempts to hook up –can be mighty…
Though Stevyn Prothero’s tiny Iron Feather Book & Zine Shop is in danger of losing its space in north Denver, the place’s do-it-yourself attitude lives on to the bitter end. Prothero welcomes any and all wannabe zinesters to use his stuff — Xerox, keyboard, scissors and so on — to…
Capitol Hill encompasses a wide swath of central Denver, so it’s no wonder that the Capitol Hill People’s Fair is the city’s best, and most diverse, festival. From its humble beginnings at Morey Junior High in 1971, when 2,000 people attended, the People’s Fair has exploded into Colorado’s premier arts-and-crafts…
Normally, when you come across a celebrity in Aspen — say, Kevin Costner fashioning a kayak for an In Style magazine photo shoot — it’s funny, but not ha-ha funny. For nearly one week out of every year, though, Aspen is the ha-ha-funniest place in the world. The U.S. Comedy…
The first of its kind in the United States, The Shoot Out Boulder celebrated the art of quick and cheap movie production. Filmmakers were given 24 hours to complete a seven-minute short. Only in-camera editing was allowed — meaning everything had to be shot in sequence — and the footage…
Good food and Cherry Creek North? Two of the most obvious bedfellows in town. It took little stretch of the imagination to combine them into a fail-safe annual festival. The glitzy al fresco celebration spreads over several Saturdays and features a gourmet market and cooking demonstrations by hot chefs from…
September’s inaugural Yell Fest was a wild, chaotic mess. Put on by Comedy Works house comedian Chuck Roy, the night was advertised as a search for “Denver’s biggest asshole.” What the night actually determined was that given limited rules and ample booze, everyone’s an asshole. Roy has since fine-tuned the…
The only thing wrong with Mayor Hickenlooper’s declaration last September naming Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado Denver’s first poet laureate was that it came too late for Delgado to savor it — just two months after he died, at age 73. During his lifetime, Delgado — whose politically charged epic “Stupid America”…
It makes sense that Regis University, a Catholic Jesuit institution, should end up with a statue of the great Irish author James Joyce on one of its campuses. After all, Joyce’s stand-in, Stephen Dedalus, is referred to as a fearful Jesuit in the epic Ulysses. Sculptor Rowan Gillespie forged this…
Stan Kroenke’s Altitude Network took a blow right along with the National Hockey League: Pro hockey’s strike-riddled lost season translates into lost revenue for the new station, which was conceived primarily to broadcast Avalanche hockey, along with play by other Kroenke-owned sports teams. But the Altitude team made a small…
Adam Lerner directs The Lab at Belmar, one of several exciting new spaces that have distinguished the urban shopping center as a creative hub as well as a shopping destination; in its first year, Belmar has hosted everything from filmmaking workshops to gallery exhibitions and cutting-edge public art. The Lab’s…
By day, Maria Cole heads up the expansion of the Denver Art Museum for Davis Partnership Architects. By night, she heads up Architectural Laboratory|Denver, a non-profit group that brings together architects and artists to discuss theories of design, free from the constructs and constraints of day-to-day reality. But Cole doesn’t…
The Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver’s effort to build a new home began last year, when Mark Falcone and Ellen Bruss donated a tract of land at 15th and Delgany streets. A series of presentations by six architectural firms from around the world — all vying to build a new structure…
You never know what progressive cause you’ll find on www.denverevolution.org. Sometimes it’s a notice for a biodiesel meeting; sometimes it’s a radical-film night. Tony Shawcross and the rest of the collective ensure that the good people of Denver are never without something to do — and that the city’s underground…
