When Gregg Allman launched his inaugural Laid Back Festival (named after his 1973 solo debut) last year at Nikon at Jones Beach Theater in New York, he hand-picked acts like the Doobie Brothers, Bruce Hornsby & the Noisemakers, Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band and other acts. Allman says his goal for the…
Donovan Leitch, who’s gone by his first name only for more than five decades, wrote and recorded hit songs like “Mellow Yellow” and “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” yet his influence as a songwriter and musician reaches beyond his own music. He inspired David Bowie, Marc Bolan and a number of other…
Donny McCaslin felt a little shy when he first met David Bowie during a rehearsal of the latter’s “Sue (or in a Season of Crime),” which would be released as a limited-edition single and on Bowie’s 2014 compilation album, Nothing Has Changed. The New York-based jazz saxophonist leads his own…
The music industry and how music is disseminated these days is quite different than when Echo & the Bunnymen released significant albums like Porcupine and Ocean Rain in the 1980s. Guitarist Will Sergeant says that everything’s changed; the whole ballpark has changed. That’s why the band, which released its twelfth…
After closing the Monkey Barrel at 1611 Platte Street at the end of April (the building was slated to be demolished) owner Jimmy Nigg planned to move the bar to 4401 Tejon Street in Sunnyside and hoped to have it up and running this summer. But his plans hit a snag…
Nathaniel Rateliff says he’s pretty worn out at this point. He says he’s visited a lot of doctors in the last year and gotten a bunch of intravenous vitamin injections along the way. The longest span of time that he and his band the Night Sweats have had off since…
The Go-Go’s formed in Los Angeles in the midst of the city’s rising punk scene, three years before their debut album, 1981’s Beauty and the Beat, shot to the top of Billboard’s Top 200 on the strength of pop hits like “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.” “When…
Early in Sting and Peter Gabriel’s Pepsi Center show, which was part of their “Rock Paper Scissors” tour, Gabriel told the audience that the set would be “a little like karaoke night in Denver.” Gabriel’s band, dressed in black with red stripes on parts of their clothing, was the red…
One night in June 2002, Bay Area-based drummer Scott Amendola finished recording the tracks for Cry, his second album as a bandleader. He and guitarist Nels Cline (who would join Wilco two years later) sat in the control room afterward. Commenting on the wide variety of material on Cry, Cline…
After a dozen years at 1424 Market Street, Mynt Mojito Lounge is re-opening this Friday, July 15, in much bigger digs a few doors down at 1410 Market Street, the former home of Spill Lounge, which opened in 2003 and recently closed. Since the new Mynt spot, which has an upstairs VIP…
Jazz saxophonist Mark Fox was never really an inside player. Rather, he came in from the far outside, immersed in the music of avant-garde jazz innovators like Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders and David S. Ware before ever checking out Charlie Parker. The album that set Fox down that…
Two years before starting the wildly exuberant keyboard-drum duo Matt and Kim, Matt Johnson met Kim Schifino at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute — and he was instantly intimidated. “I grew up in a small town in Vermont,” Johnson says, “and I’m a little bit younger than Kim is — and here’s…
Since winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1991, saxophonist Joshua Redman has toured the globe, released more than dozen albums under his own name and collaborated with number of jazz luminaries, but Redman says he still feels like a complete beginner. “Every time I learn something, that…
About a year after Split Enz formed in 1972, the band was set to tour its native New Zealand. Tim Finn, who co-fronted the band at the time with Phil Judd, asked his fifteen-year-old brother, Neil, to be the supporting act on the tour. Since Neil was playing mostly covers at…
Colorado will host dozens of music festivals throughout the state over the next four months or so, many tailored to particular genres, whether it be bluegrass, folk, country, EDM or rock. Others run the gamut of styles. We’ve pared it down to ten must-see festivals (listed below in alphabetical order)…
Saxophonist and vocalist Max Wagner, a longtime local jazz fixture, named his latest album Gratitude for good reason. “The main thing I feel about my life in music and my experiences as a musician is just gratitude — just grateful,” he says. “All along, I have been so blessed that I’ve been…
Robyn Hitchcock spent a good chunk of his life in England, including his tenure with the psych-rock band Soft Boys and through his solo career with and without the Egyptians. These days, however, Hitchcock’s living in Nashville, where he’s working on a new album. He’s been living in Nashville since…
Pete Pidgeon was just a toddler he heard Garth Hudson’s organ solo on “Chest Fever” from the Band’s 1968 debut, Music From the Big Pink. When his parents put the record on in their living room and he heard the organ, he says it was the first time he remembers…
Steve Diggle didn’t really intend to be in Buzzcocks, a band that, along with the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Jam and the Damned, formed the nucleus of England’s punk explosion four decades ago. In fact, Diggle might have ended up in a different band altogether. In the summer of…
While Angie Stevens has a long history as a singer-songwriter in Denver, she also teaches people of all ages about singing and crafting songs, and some main principles she drives home to her students are to be honest, vulnerable and authentic, all qualities Stevens steeps her songs and performances in…
Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, a district known historically as a hotbed of the city’s musical entertainment, will host two separate music festivals this weekend: the Five Points Jazz Festival and Project Pabst. The jazz celebration, which started in 2004, is put on by Denver Arts & Venues and features many…
Not long after Tortoise wrapped up its tour for 2009’s Beacon of Ancestorship, the post-rock quintet was commissioned by the its hometown of Chicago to write music inspired by the city’s jazz and improvised music communities. In 2010, Tortoise’s twentieth anniversary, the group performed the piece in Chicago’s Millennium Park…
