On his fifth album as leader, recorded roughly one year ago, Denver trumpeter Ron Miles returns to a classic trio approach for the first time since his 1987 debut, Distance for Safety. The trio — and its subtle, patient beauty — might surprise some listeners more familiar with Miles’s cosmopolitan…
By this point, to expect an Oasis album not to sound like a discourse on the history of British rock is like expecting Britney Spears not to bare her midriff onstage. The band is a sometimes cartoonish composite of its predecessors — not so much a British Invasion as an…
Somewhere along the line, most jazz musicians who were interested in actually earning a living at their craft realized that free jazz was better for dispersing crowds than drawing them, and moved on to explore less divisive variations on the form. Yet a few fiscally irresponsible stragglers have stayed true…
Orchestrated easy-listening pop is, by definition, supposed to be unambitious, soothing and relaxing — or so many of us have been lazy enough to believe. But the hell with that: The High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan composes as if he’s campaigning for his own chapter in Elevator Music, author Joseph Lanza’s…
Dan Castellaneta is the driving force behind the band Two Lips, but it’s a sure bet that whatever renown he gains from his music won’t eclipse the attention he gets from his day job: Castellaneta is the voice of Homer Simpson. A talented impressionist, he also channels Grandpa Simpson, Krusty…
A friend of mine has this habit. She’s normally a very well-composed, even reserved person who hails from a finer area of Boston, likes to talk about art and uses words like fabulous without any pretext of irony. Yet she’s got more than a little distant Irish blood running through…
Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise, with John McEuen and Jimmy Ibbotson, Sunday, March 19, as part of an E-Town taping at the Boulder Theater, has maintained a somewhat more than normal level of interest in the past few years, based as much on the mythology of the band’s formation as on…
The Bug Theater has always maintained an eclectic national profile, but on Thursday, March 23, it will concentrate on a disparate bill of excellent local acts, including Ratiocination, Some Gumption, Mystery Children and Judith Priest. It’s a sensibility, not a sound, that ties these groups together, as all four focus…
Battle of the Bands, Thursday nights at the Buffalo Rose in Golden, provides local bands and musicians a chance to compete for top honors in a performance setting. The weekly event is part open-mike night, part rehearsal, part vaudeville cabaret. At its most heated, it’s a musical variation on American…
Patty Larkin is sitting in a hotel room in Grand Junction. It’s cold there, she says, but not any colder than it gets on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where she lives and, when she can, records in her home studio. The hotel of the moment is pretty typical of those she’s…
The Creative Music Works Orchestra took its name from the small, nonprofit presenter of concerts and educational workshops that sponsors it, Creative Music Works. But the appellation could not be more appropriate. By presenting relatively obscure songs that have been meticulously dissected and then reassembled in imaginative ways, saxophonist Dr…
Luna The Days of Our Nights (Jericho) Someone in ad land saw the commercial viability of Luna’s Dean Wareham, at least in his previous incarnation as the frontman for Galaxie 500: Late last year, the band joined Curtis Mayfield as a soundtrack provider for a national car commercial. Meanwhile, middle…
Neko Case & Her Boyfriends Furnace Room Lullaby (Bloodshot) Maybe it’s a by-product of “artistic growth.” Maybe it’s just that some young women aren’t satisfied with only singin’ hard country music. Whatever the cause, Neko Case — whose The Virginian was arguably the ultimate female country recording of 1998 –…
Kid Loco Kid Loco Presents Jesus Life for Children Under 12 Inches (Atlantic) Trip-hop never quite caught on in the U.S., in large part because of its subtlety; the boom-bap of hardcore rap provides immediate gratification, while the sonics associated with its more psychedelic cousin take time to blow minds…
Tommy Womack Stubborn (Sideburn Records) On Stubborn, Tommy Womack’s fine followup to his remarkable 1998 debut, Positively Na Na, every last thrilling lick and inflection is wholly received. “She Likes to Talk,” for instance, sounds like Keith Richards singing the best Paul Westerberg song in a decade; elsewhere, folk and…
Fine Line Pictures is getting ready for next month’s West Coast premiere of The Filth and the Fury, a documentary on the career of the Sex Pistols. Yet for anyone who’s likely to give a spit, the story is already familiar. The band’s rise — and the oh-so-loving affair between…
For those about to rock, look no further than to the Murder City Devils, with American Steel and the Down-N-Outs Friday, March 10, at the 15th St. Tavern. Now that Mötley Cre, Metallica and the other dope, guns and fucking bands of the ’80s seem about as threatening as Scott…
Colorado Springs’ Lost Creek, Sunday, March 12, at Swallow Hill, answers the call to lead this month’s monthly jam sponsored by the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society. A traditionally composed five-piece bluegrass outfit that includes Jeff Back on mandolin and Mickey Stinnett on dobro, the Lost ones perform both strictly defined…
Delta blues legend Robert Johnson gained his guitar licks — or so the story goes — by cutting a deal with the Devil. The arrangement brought him skills and a mythical rep that will live for generations, but at a costly price: chops from hell for an afterlife in hell…
David Crosby wasn’t on-camera during the pre-Grammy Awards program aired February 23 on both VH1 and CBS; along with mates Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young, he was headlining at Denver’s Pepsi Center that evening. But he was an unmistakable presence on the show thanks to the shticking of…
Dannell McNeil is a rapper, singer and soon-to-be music mogul with ambitions as stratospheric as Don King’s hair. As the point person for his own record label and production company, W&D Productions/Risk Entertainment, McNeil has set some lofty goals, and he pulls no punches when naming them. “I want to…
The calendar says that Gaucho, the last album of original material by Steely Dan, came out just over twenty years ago, but Two Against Nature suggests that it’s really been about ten minutes. The same musical miscalculations that made the outfit’s 1979 faux swan song so sonically vapid are very…
