When most Americans think of acoustic blues, they hear the moaning and groaning, my-baby-left-me-and-I’m-down sounds of the Mississippi Delta. John Jackson, however, plays Piedmont blues, a decidedly different breed that’s distinguished from its Deep South counterpart by the same trait that marks Jackson’s personality. Piedmont blues, the 77-year-old Jackson notes…
The first time Pam Puente, the front-woman/vocalist/guitarist of Denver’s Double-Barrelled Slingshots, had the pleasure of meeting her future bassist, Amy Davis, there was more than a little tension in the room. Their predisposition toward one another was antagonistic. Had the introduction snowballed into a full-fledged tussle, few in the room…
For years, decades, ages, epochs, music journalists have been writing articles declaring that Rock Is Dead — but it ain’t, my friends. The underground rock scene, in particular, hawks up good stuff on practically a daily basis, and less adventurous stuff is still selling in sizable numbers: Of America’s ten…
Boy George gave up a good thing back in the mid-’80s when he left his new-wave reggae outfit Culture Club and its unit-moving profit potential. Drugs, egomania and personal conflicts have claimed casualties among many of pop music’s best contributors, and Mr. O’Dowd was no exception. But the dandy of…
Last Sunday night, the weather outside was frightful — but so was much of the discourse inside the Soiled Dove, at a Colorado Music Association meeting where more than 150 people had shown up to discuss the City of Denver’s recently implemented ban on under-21 music fans at small- and…
Ahhhhh, bossa nova. It’s back, you know, although — like the best art — it never really went away. Created in Brazil in the 1950s, bossa nova’s marriage of jazz and samba remains irresistible. One of its masters, pianist João Donato, a contemporary of bossa nova founders Antonio Carlos Jobim…
The Bowed Piano Ensemble is best observed from a sky-cam. The group consists of ten musicians who are affiliated with Colorado College in Colorado Springs; they’re under the command of Stephen Scott, an instructor at the school who’s internationally renowned not only for his intriguing modern-classical compositions but also for…
A couple of telling facts about Shipping News: Fact one: The band — whose approach to what we still persist in calling “rock music” is at once notably intellectual and appealingly emotional — is named for one of the most stunningly written novels of the past decade, 1993’s The Shipping…
Jim Dalton can tell that his band, the Railbenders, are growing more popular with each show they play. It’s as clear as the hats on the heads of the fans who show up, in greater numbers each time, to hear them. “A lot of people have come up to me…
From Swallow Hill to Schenectady, open-stage jam sessions tend to bring out the kid in even the most aging artists. So imagine what might happen if a good portion of the participants at a particular venue actually were too young to know Bessie Smith from the Smithereens. That’s precisely the…
New Orleans’s seedy Bourbon Street is infested day and night with barfing frat boys, bug-eyed tourists from Keokuk and nimble-fingered pickpockets. Ironically, it is also home to some of the most disgraceful music ever to sully the name of traditional jazz. Right there in the birthplace of the art –…
This two-CD set finds the 51-year-old Boss in better form than any voice coach could ever have predicted. Sure, neither he nor saxman Clarence Clemons is nailing quite as many of the high hard ones as they once did. But the fact that they’re still hitting any of them is…
The third and best Hamster Theatre release finds melody-muckers Dave Willey and Jon Stubbs once again traipsing on the fun-wheel of suspended disbelief. From the opening strains of “Vermillion Hue Over Lake Lausanne” (an homage to the Swiss ensemble Nimal), the fuzzy Front Range rodents bake their brains on a…
All too often, current jazz artists take the easy way out, tossing off variations on the tried and true for an ever-shrinking audience rather than experimenting with new approaches. But that’s not to say the tried and true has entirely lost its charm. Trad jazz — the term used to…
And so it was written, and so it came to pass. Last Sunday night marked the official start of the city’s policy change regarding mixed-age crowds at area clubs and music halls that serve alcohol and that boast a capacity rating of 2,000 persons or fewer. And although a spirit…
Dance music is seeping into every nook and cranny of contemporary life, soundtracking everything from network dramas and NFL touchdowns to ads for the latest Japanese import. It’s hard to remember a time when phase delays, synth washes and drum beds were not a part of the media landscape, but…
Jive, Friday, April 20, and Saturday, April 21, at the Fox Theatre, with DJ Ivy and the All Mighty Senators, has had a hell of a run since founding members Dave Henry and Lance Smith first started getting together for guitar jams two years ago. Later this month, the band…
The Smut Peddlers have chosen an odd place to call home. New York City, formerly the sin capitol of the world, has been virtually transformed into a porn-free zone thanks to a woefully energetic mayor. For a group that traffics in the very trash the city has so swiftly swept…
Don Paul knows that audiences at the Trail Dust Steak House will not tolerate “bullshit.” So whenever he and his mates in the Clayton Paul Band take the stage at their favorite venue, they make some minor changes to their repertoire. They might, for example, play a modified version of…
Let’s face it — the tuba isn’t exactly a sexy instrument. When one thinks tuba, some of the images generated are polka, old men (especially old men wearing black knee-high socks and bad plaid shorts) and flabby, elongated cheeks. Just how the New York-based trio Drums & Tuba produces such…
Uwe Schmidt (one of Germany’s quirkiest electronic musicians, with over two dozen alter egos to his name, including Atom Heart, Lassigue Bendhaus and Lisa Carbon) masquerades as South American composer /dancer Señor Coconut on this release — the remastered precursor to 1999’s El Baile Alemán. For that album, Schmidt reconfigured…
Scotsman Nick Currie’s decision to record under the name Momus, defined in one friendly Webster’s as “the Greek god of blame and mockery,” was an appropriate one. His career has been filled with oddball moments, such as those that followed “Michelin Man,” a song from 1991’s Hippopotamomus that contained a…
