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…
Like all good French boys, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo like to take things slowly, allowing time to savor the finer things in life. It’s been eight years since the Parisian duo adopted the Daft Punk brand in order to tinker with the then-underground club sounds booming across the…
In the two weeks since Denver announced that it was revoking its split-premises permit for local cabarets — a ten-year-old policy that allowed patrons under 21 years of age to be in the same building as those of legal drinking age while alcohol was served — small modules of music…
Abstract Tribe Unique, Friday, April 12, at the Boulder Theater, slowly crept into the public’s awareness in 1995, when it joined the select roster of Grand Royal Records, the Beastie Boys’ nearly mythic imprint. Since then, the crew has dropped three albums on Battle Axe Records and continues to hone…
MindGOflip, Thursday, April 12, at Trilogy, probably could not have found a more appropriate name for its second CD: bounce bounce sound, which celebrates its release at this Boulder show, is a digital document of the band’s boisterous, bop-along pop music. In two years, MindGOflip has found an audience that…
These days, AC/DC’s immaturity is starting to look awfully mature — and not just in years. The band’s membership may have shifted over the years (although not lately — vocalist Brian Johnson is the new guy, with just 21 years of experience), but its sound remains much the same as…
