Music

Any jazz pianist with the courage to record solo deserves our respect. Sans bassist and drummer, he stands naked, as vulnerable as a stand-up comic or a wire-walker who’s thrown aside his net. If the soloist also happens to be an elegant classicist who combines the dazzle of Chick Corea…

Taking blues, reggae, country and avant-garde down a back alley of alternate guitar tunings might seem a fool’s errand to most folks, on par with Zig-Zag rolling papers sponsoring a NASCAR event. Yet for Neil Haverstick, who’s spent the last fifteen years trying to subvert the Western Hemisphere’s over-reliance on…

Sacrifice’s second full-length, Slangin’ Keyz, is a potent dose of gritty rap that profiles the struggles of fatherless children and incarcerated scarfaces. A Montbello native also known as Shawn Brown, Sacrifice pushes pure lyrical dope on tracks like “Mo Jail & No Bail,” in which he describes the tribulations of…

In almost every filmic biography of a successful recording artist — from Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter to Richie Valens in La Bamba – there’s a pivotal scene in which the protagonist first hears his or her song on the radio and knows, in that instant, that life has…

So many daring jazz musicians who hit the scene in the late ’60s wound up pissing away their talent throughout the following decades — either yapping at the heels of trends like fusion and “lite jazz” or regressing to some bland, archaic rehash of bebop. Not Dave Holland. After making…

Melissa London lists the ability to cast siren spells among her talents as the frontwoman of Project 12:01, an electronically enhanced combo that she co-founded with keyboardist Noel Johannes. And just one listen to her voice, whether live or recorded, supports that claim. Situated somewhere on the dark side of…

The Polyphonic Spree is goofily earnest. Its members love life, and they love to sing about the sun. But they have a difficult time fitting on a stage together. A 24-member choral symphonic pop band whose on-stage couture is more Baptist church choir than rock star, the Spree resembles a…

There are a lot of things you want to ask the members of a band called Thank God for Astronauts. What they think of the Space Shuttle blowing up. How they feel about the recent disturbing trend in full sentences as band names. Whether or not they even believe in…

In every musical movement, there are innovators — the acts that introduce stylistic breakthroughs — and there are popularizers, who co-opt the new genre’s freshest elements, homogenize them and feed them back to the public in an accessible, easy-to-digest form. As a result of this process, popularizers often outsell the…

It’s hard not to giggle a little bit at the end of “Ay Distress,” the opening track from the Baptist Generals’ No Silver/No Gold. After a perfectly haunting performance of the slow, spare tune, someone’s cell phone rings in the garage-studio. With the spell broken and a perfect take of…

Elegant though not pretentious, inviting but not desperate, this beguiling pair of discs from Jessica Williams and Bruce Barth make for fine listening. While offering multiple-track releases of mostly piano-driven fare might constitute a potentially disastrous goal from a financial point of view, both Barth and Williams carry their respective…

Much of the music was forgettable. But Pearl Jam’s appearance at the Pepsi Center on April Fool’s Day — particularly the on-stage antics and anti-war comments of lead singer/guitar hobbyist Eddie Vedder — reverberated through the land in Dixie Chicks-ian fashion, making headline fodder not just of the show, but…

Born into a griot family of oral historians and master musicians, Moussa Kanoute hails from Senegal; in the small nation at the western-most tip of Africa’s smiling coast, the average annual income of five hundred U.S. dollars certainly buys more peanuts than ivory. As his grandfather’s apprentice, Kanoute learned the…

As the frontman for Dang Head, Boulder recluse Jamie Smith pens songs of heartbreak, devastation and occasional joy, crafting punk-informed rural music that’s as suitable for the back porch as for the garage. He calls it “noise folk” — a nifty term that shortens the distance between modest creature comforts…

In some respects, Ministry’s Al Jourgensen has mellowed. For instance, he says he’s no longer helping his friendly neighborhood heroin dealer keep up with his Hummer payments. “It’s been over eleven months now since I’ve had anything,” he says. “I’m very proud and very clean.” From a creative standpoint, however,…

Adriana Aguilar doesn’t remember what happened on May 25, 2002, but doctors, family members, cops, insurance agents and friends have told her it went something like this: Derrick Daisey, her friend, was driving his Jetta along Monaco Boulevard near Evans when he suffered an epileptic seizure — his first –…

Countdown 8 p.m. EST, Monday, March 17 In the lobby of the Radisson Deauville, on the eve of the Winter Music Conference, the music stops when President Buzzkill addresses the world. The face of George Bush replaces the Dirty Vegas video on the big-screen TVs in the center of the…

Blending jazz, bluegrass, funk and even a little worldbeat, Matt Flinner — mandolin virtuoso and former Leftover Salmon tour guest — and company take dawg-style music (think David Grisman Quintet) to the next level. The ensemble, which appears at Quixote’s True Blue on Friday, April 4, is composed of Flinner,…

A sexless, suicidal, anti-carnivorous existence is cause for celebration, at least according to Moses Montalvo. A member of the Denver band May Riots, Montalvo has gathered a tribe of morose-music-loving locals to pay homage to the wrist-carving mope rock of the Smiths and Joy Division. The event, dubbed I Wear…