Nick Cave may be one of the more disciplined songwriters in the business (he usually spends six days a week working in his office), but he’s been especially prolific over the past four years, finding time to pen the remarkable two-disc Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus set, score two films with…
I caught the poker bug on a trip to Vegas a few years back. And when I got back to Denver, I played a ton of Texas Hold ‘Em games on my laptop, watched eleven-time World Series of Poker winner Phil Hellmuth on ESPN, and even checked out a few…
In 1965, after attending college in Seattle, a 22-year-old Larry Coryell headed to New York. He stopped in Denver first, though, where he heard the organ trio was all the rage. As he made his away around Five Points jazz clubs asking to sit in, he met drummer Buddy Miles…
I’m pretty good at naming a tune within a few seconds, but sometimes I don’t have the slightest clue what the hell is playing, especially if it’s hip-hop, R&B or techno. Over the past few months, I’ve come to rely on my iPhone and its Shazam application to identify songs…
Over the past decade, Kevin Larson has created quite a following through his annual Victorian Fetish Ball and White Rose Gala parties. And over the past year, he’s been hearing a lot from some of those followers, thirty-somethings who said they wished there was a place where they could hang…
Texas in June is great. There’s a certain romance to it. By August, though, the romance is gone, and everyone starts getting edgy. A few summers ago in the studio, the heat really started getting to Centro-Matic frontman Will Johnson, inspiring him to write faster, louder and rawer material. “We…
When he was just sixteen, flautist Orlando “Maraca” Valle joined Irakere, a supergroup founded by Chucho Valdés that has featured some of Cuba’s finest musicians over the past three decades. After six years of playing flute and keyboards and arranging for the group, Valle began his solo career and has…
When I first started getting into jazz almost two decades ago, I listened repeatedly to Chet. It’s a gorgeous Chet Baker album comprising mostly ballads, ideal for a late-night seduction. At the same time, I was frequenting a jazz club in Santa Barbara that featured Nate Birkey, a trumpeter heavily…
In 2006, soul legend Al Green met with Roots drummer Amir “?uestlove” Thompson and famed hip-hop and R&B producer James Poyser at New York’s Electric Ladyland Studio to talk about collaborating on an album. But instead of talking, they ended up writing eight songs in one night. “We just wanted…
“You’re not wearing your hat tonight,” the bartender says to the guy who just walked in with a gal and sat next to me. “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here without your hat on.” And this guy doesn’t even need a hat — he has a full head…
During his three-decade tenure at Los Angeles radio station KROQ, legendary DJ Rodney Bingenheimer has helped break a slew of bands, everyone from the B-52s and Duran Duran to Social Distortion and the Ramones. Over the past month, he’s been spinning cuts from Cramp Your Style, the new album by…
Jazz drummer Jeremy Jones grew up in Denver, but for the past five years he’s lived in Seattle, where he plays in a number of bands, including his trio, the Teaching, and another outfit called the Xtet. On the last group’s latest album, Awakening to Life, Jones shows off his…
The closest I ever came to doing hard time was half an hour in a holding cell in Denver police headquarters after I was busted for shoplifting rubbers at the age of thirteen. If I hadn’t gotten busted — at Skaggs Drug Store (now Rite-Aid), where they sat me in…
Before forming their band Kosmos, brothers Ben and Tim Tonak grew up listening to Pearl Jam and could play nearly every song in the group’s catalogue. Since then, the guys have gravitated to Radiohead and Jimmy Eat World, which instilled the act with “a garage-band sensibility with arena-rock accessibility.” As…
I’ve gotten used to walking into places and getting that look from regulars. You know, the “Who the fuck are you and what the hell are you doing in our bar?” look. It used to make me a bit nervous, since it felt like I was walking into a party…
A Git Some show is a visceral, high-voltage experience. The act is a bundle of frenetic energy on stage, as dangerous as it is magical. The band’s new album, Cosmic Rock, deftly captures the vitality of the group’s live show. We caught up with the guys at the downtown warehouse…
The last time Republic Tigers singer and multi-instrumentalist Kenn Jankowski was in Denver, he destroyed his guitar and punched his effects pedals after finding out that his wife had been cheating on him. It was late 2005, and Jankowski was in town with his previous band, the Golden Republic, which…
It doesn’t take a genius to make a Mind Eraser. The drink’s usually just equal parts Kahlúa, vodka and tonic or soda water. But there’s something about the combination, or maybe just drinking it down through a straw, that can be downright hazardous. A long time ago, I was at…
By the time Kenny Garrett was eighteen, his alto-sax chops were already good enough to earn him a spot in the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which was then led by Ellington’s son, Mercer. Nearly a decade later, Garrett recorded with Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey and Donald Byrd, and performed…
Any guy would probably love sitting between two girls in a bar — until they got into the dreaded cock talk, that is. A few years ago, I was sandwiched between two gals who’d been friends for fifteen years. The evening started off pretty tame, with the usual trivial chitchat,…
A cousin in Louisiana once shot a cow with an AK-47. Legend has it that he and some friends hoisted the dead cow pumped full of bullets into the back of a pickup and drove it over to my uncle’s house, which used to be a church. They somehow dragged…
While preparing for John Coltrane’s 1957 landmark album Blue Train, trombonist Curtis Fuller says he had only three hours to learn the tunes before the band started recording at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. Fuller, who was 22 at the time, said he teased Coltrane about learning the…
