Art Lande isn’t afraid to take chances when it comes to playing piano. The guy’s a true musical explorer, and some of his most adventurous playing can be found on the two albums he recorded with the like-minded musicians in the Russian Dragon Band. The Boulder-based group takes its moniker…

Since it opened two years ago, Aqua (925 Lincoln Street) has gone through a few transformations — some inspired by the market (see “On Ice,” June 7, 2007, and Second Helping, August 9, 2007), and others by the neighbors, who complained about the booming bass radiating up from the back…

Red Holloway’s storied career had auspicious beginnings. While playing in DuSable High School’s big band in Chicago in the mid-1940s, Holloway and fellow saxophonist Johnny Griffin were sometimes visited by jazz royalty, such as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and others, who would stop by the school and sit in with…

When some bark-eating Boulderites discovered that the Nitro Club (1124 Lawry Lane), a full-on nudie joint, had opened in the alley behind Old Chicago, right off the Pearl Street Mall, they exploded. Plenty of people would like to see Nitro shut down, but I’m not one of them. Hell, I…

The shots that rang out in LoDo last November, killing one and injuring six, had a lasting effect on Hush (1403 Larimer Street), the club a few blocks away where the shooter and his victims had been earlier in the evening. “In my professional opinion, we handled that situation very…

Normally, when a bunch of Crescent City all-stars such as Russell Batiste from the Funky Meters and Papa Mali and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Wild Magnolias get together with the likes of Page McConnell from Phish and Reed Mathis from Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, you can expect one…

George Inai is like “a Model T built by Toyota in a Mexican factory.” At least that’s the closest the singer-songwriter says he has come to describing his unique cross-cultural blend of gothic Americana and Mexican folk music. “I think the Japanese culture tends to take other ideas and pull…

When Split Lip Rayfield played at the Bluebird Theater in September 2006, it was hard to tell that guitarist Kirk Rundstrom had just a few months to live. Despite the fact that the 37-year-old was battling esophageal cancer, he tore through the set with the fervor of a teenager taking…

While living in New York a few years ago, I started keeping track of what I played on the jukebox in the three bars I frequented. I’m not entirely sure what inspired me to first jot down song names in my notebook, but it got to the point where I…

Art Blakey had a knack for finding young jazz talents and grooming them in his Jazz Messengers group. He helped jump-start the careers of Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and alto saxophonist Donald Harrison, who was just 21 years old when Blakey reached out to him. More…

Ingrid Michaelson hasn’t been getting much sleep lately. The singer has been caught up in a whirlwind of activity that all started over a year ago, when her song “Breakable” was used on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The show then placed her endearing tune “The Way I Am,” which…

On a cold Sunday night, five teenagers are hanging out on the sidewalk in front of the club at 1531 Champa Street. Inside, on the stage near the front window, I can see a few guys breaking down their equipment. A dozen or so kids are scattered in front of…

While Reverend Peyton is a big dude with a booming voice, his band really isn’t that big in numbers. There’s the Rev himself, who plays a mean slide on his resonator guitar; his wife, Washboard Breezy, who scrapes the hell out of a washboard; and his younger brother, chugging away…

I hate to say it, but most of what I know about wine I learned from Sideways. I saw the film several times a week when it played in theaters a few years ago. I felt like I was Miles, the mildly pathetic, frustrated writer and wine geek played by…

In his intro to “Constipation Blues,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins talks about how most people record songs about love, heartbreak, loneliness and being broke, while nobody writes songs about real pain. Then, after a few bars of slow blues, Hawkins starts grunting and groaning like he’s trying to shit a shotput…

Years before he was a filmmaker, Vincent Gallo was into music. He joined his first band at age nine, and by sixteen, he’d moved from Buffalo to New York City, where he played in Gray, an art-noise act, with Jean-Michel Basquiat. More than two decades later, he scored his film…

In one of my favorite Charles Bukowski poems, “The Insane Always Loved Me,” he wrote about how the unwanted, cowards and misanthropes would often attach themselves to him. I can relate. I’ve had many a nut sit down next to me at a bar, like the guy who made bird…

In high school, Tyler Gilmore had widely varied tastes. The burgeoning composer was into acts like the Smashing Pumpkins and Aphex Twin, but he was equally fixated on transcribing Miles Davis solos to play on his trumpet. After college, Gilmore attended a series of summer workshops taught by Maria Schneider…

Roy Orbison once sang about falling in love with a Devil Doll. Old Roy’s gone now, but we have a sneaking suspicion that if he was still kicking, he’d flip head over heels for Miss Colleen Duffy, aka Devil Doll, a sultry pinup-girl-gone-bad ingenue who’s graced the covers of countless…

A few weeks ago, a cousin told me about The Pick-Up Artist, this reality show on VH1 where a dude who calls himself “Mystery” and a few of his buddies teach ordinary guys how to pick up girls. Although it’s hard to take anything seriously when it’s coming from a…

I was one of a few hundred people to see Radiohead at the Mercury Cafe in June 1995. To be honest, I don’t remember a damn thing about the actual show; I can only recall brushing up against Thom Yorke, the group’s singer, on the way out of the building…