It is one of those just great time slots clubs bestow upon local bands: Sunday, midnight. It’s the end of the weekend and the rooms are desolate, a couple of disinterested pool players and one bored bartender. A few dedicated fans. And most likely, the band’s cut of the door…
Bean, Ben, and Prez. It’s almost a mantra for anyone who loves tenor sax (that is, tenor sax before ‘Trane, Newk, and ‘Nette bent the horn around new dimensions). Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young. The tenor trinity’s impact is so deeply felt it’s almost impossible to trace a player…
Ted Hawkins The Next Hundred Years (DGC) Every so often you hear a performer for the first time and the experience actually changes you. Such epiphanies are usually delivered by someone with an intensely personal vision, one that penetrates directly to your core, cuts you open and crawls inside there…
Elvis Costello sang about it. Not that he’s any expert. But hearing the sloppy guitar tangle, the talkin’-to-God vocal intro, the drum blast, and those words spilled out, a mental image grows: “There’s a girl in this address/There’s always a girl in distress/She’s just a shabby doll…she’s just a shabby…
“If there is a sound that says ‘Chicago Blues’ to the world,” Alligator Record’s founder Bruce Iglauer once said, “it’s the sound of a harmonica blown through a hand-held microphone blasting through an amplifier.” Urban, gritty, roaring like the El over Wabash, blues harp is alive and well in the…
Rock and roll is supposed to sound like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Rock and roll was born to be wild, loud, angry, aggressive, cocky, horny, irrepressibly youthful. Listen to the frenetic gospel piano vamp at the beginning of “Jenny Take a Ride!” It sets the tone, building the…
William S. Burroughs, the godfather of slack, said that Truth lies in the number and the number is 23. He was referring, of course, to a system involving the magic of Chaos (five, or two plus three) and the arcana of ace conspiracy theorist Robert Anton Wilson. But he left…
It must have been odd for middle-age black men like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson to suddenly find themselves revered by a bunch of scraggly, skinny, long-haired white boys with funny accents. Even the second generation of Chicago bluesmen A Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley A found that…
The good news is that Kenny Loggins is not reaping a financial bonanza from Schlock Jock Rock royalties. We know you were worried about that. Loggins, of course, was once the supremely untalented half of the duo Loggins and Messina who went on to find success in the Eighties as…
Transmitting from studios on Lincoln Road since October, the Spanish-language music network MTV Latino now reaches more than two million 12-to-34-year-old viewers in seventeen Latin American countries and another 500,000 in the U.S. Producers at the cable station are realizing that they must deal with a cultural obstacle to their…
After nine months of warehouse hibernation, they’re back in the local spotlight, finishing their first release as a signed South Florida band. It’s day ten at Gled Studios, and while the ink is still drying on their contract, the three original members, one newcomer, and former Saigon Kick drummer Phil…
Steve Ellis doesn’t seem to mind his day job as much as he resents the difficulties of finding the right musicians to work with. He will moan on at length about the trouble he’s had putting together a band and a sound he’s happy with, but you have to drag…
By Bob Weinberg Jazz and blues. Blues and jazz. These bastard sons of the same mother have become so intertwined they’re often taken for one another. Once was a time, not long ago, record sellers and radio charts made no distinction between the two. New Times puts blues and jazz…
Reverend Billy C. Wirtz Pianist Envy (HighTone Records) By Bob Weinberg The cover photo shows the tattooed Rev with his leopardskin-go-to-Hell boots plunking a Shroder-size toy piano while dreaming of a baby grand. Pianist Envy! Get it? (On a label called HighTone, yet.) All that’s just a taster of Wirtz’s…
In this great future you can’t forget your past So dry your tears, I say — Bob Marley This is not a story about Bob Marley. That story’s been done and done and done to death. We know Robert Nesta Marley died on May 11, 1981, in Cedars of Lebanon,…
Listen to the music. It contains every variant of truth and lie. The music carries the capability of generating fantasy, turning it into reality. It can turn reality into fantasy. Music is art. And so by both definition and simple observation, rock and roll made by area residents is art…
In an Argentine restaurant on Coral Way trombone player Juan Pablo Torres and percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo are working their way through a pile of grilled beef and talking tango. A restorative midday breakfast of stuffed large intestine, blood sausage, and cold Heineken stems the drain of the previous night’s descarga:…
Hee, hee! Greetings, my fine fettered friends, and welcome to another foul feast in the Haunt of Fear. This is your shriekchef, your delirium dietician, ready with my bubbling cauldron, filled with my latest reeking recipe. So relax on that marble settee there and I’ll begin by feeding you the…
Melissa likes girls. Now can we please move on? Five years ago Melissa Etheridge told New Times readers that she had no idea what ingredients go into the recipe for rock stardom. That was back in the spring of 1989, on the high heels of her startling first album. She…
“I had a job but I got laid off,” Buddy belted, answering his vocals with a stinging Strat riff. “I had a heart but it got too soft,” the crowd shouted back, filling in the next line of the John Hiatt tune from Buddy Guy’s breakthrough album, Damn Right I’ve…
On a weekday afternoon Churchill’s Hideaway is not crowded. Elbowing the bar are two older men in dress suits, and a younger man in similar garb. There’s a talkative woman, a couple of average looking guys in jeans, and a truck driver who looks like an actor playing the role…
Taj Mahal Dancing the Blues (Private Music) By Bob Weinberg “Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad.” It’s a common misperception. In fact, an old blues album I picked up even has an ad inside the jacket for an antidepressant drug. But if you’re listening right, you won’t…
