If you talk to Wally Collins about Boulder’s New Wizard Oil Combination, the musical aggregation he formed more than a quarter-century ago, make sure you get your lingo straight. “It’s not a band,” he says a bit testily. “We’re a group or a choir, but we’re not a band. ‘Band’…
One of the reasons bass legend Paul Warburton knows so much about the fabric of his music is that he’s actually made music with it. Fabric, that is. “Before I started playing bass, when I was fourteen, I’d lay on my bed, which was covered with one of those old…
If you’ve been to an avant-garde jazz show in Denver during the past decade, you’ve probably seen Alex Lemski, the president and driving force behind Denver’s Creative Music Works, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Tall, gangly and intense, with a scraggly beard and a pate partially covered by…
Ivo Perelman + “Cama de Terra” (Homestead) Oranj Symphonette Plays Mancini (Gramavision) The phrase “forward into the past” is such an obvious (and amusing) contradiction that the comedy troupe Firesign Theatre used it as the title of a Seventies-era compilation album. Yet the notion, jokey though it may seem, is…
Most Nineties celebrities understand that baring their souls comes with the territory. Your average personality mag is brimming with profiles of famous people who disclose their deepest, darkest secrets as casually as they cash their royalty checks–and the few who don’t are viewed with suspicion. For example, Eddie Vedder’s reticence…
Various Artists Deep in the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music From the Wild East (Ellipsis Arts) Various Artists Tibet: The Heart of Dharma (Ellipsis Arts) Hukwe Zawose Chibite (Real World/Caroline) “World music” is one of the most chauvinistic terms imaginable, if for no other reason than its implication that anything…
For Robert Woolfolk II–aka Dap, one of the pair of performers behind the impressive Denver-based rap group nGomA–musical eclecticism runs in the family. His father, the Reverend Robert Woolfolk Sr., is the spiritual leader of Five Points’ Agape Christian Church and an acknowledged leader of Denver’s religious community. (The Reverend…
The topic of the June 13, 1996, edition of this column was a change in the membership of 16 Horsepower, a terrific Denver band whose major-label debut–the A&M release Sackcloth ‘n’ Ashes–had hit stores just a few months earlier. Keven Soll, who’d been playing bass with cohorts David Eugene Edwards…
Denver musician Eric Bard’s goals are humble. “Basically, what I’m after,” he says candidly, “is a cheap laugh.” The means by which Bard achieves his ends are certainly novel: He uses drums and a saxophone, often played at the same time, to complement his wry brand of beat poetry. This…
And now it’s time for a startling revelation: It’s not easy to find innocence in rock and roll. I know–I recently thought I’d located this rarest of commodities right here in the Queen City of the West, only to discover that just beneath its surface lurked emotions, passions and conflicts…
Maranda Gaylord, the grande dame of the Commerce City Rollers, has never wanted for moxie. Barely one year after she first strapped on a bass, she tried out for Denver’s ’57 Lesbian in the hopes of filling the slot vacated by Spell’s Chanin Floyd. Her audition, she admits frankly, was…
Curtis Mayfield New World Order (Warner Bros.) Mayfield, who was paralyzed from the neck down in an onstage accident, discovered a year or so ago that he could sing as long as his body was in a reclining position. But doing so remains an exhausting struggle for him–and the sheer…
Last week, I compiled my list of favorite national releases from the past year (“The Prize Patrol,” December 26). This week, peruse my alphabetical roster of 1996’s best Colorado releases: ten fine recordings by a variety of local artists whose work rivals (and, in many cases, surpasses) the efforts of…
What follows is a list of the best albums of 1996. Sort of. Each December this decade, I’ve sat down to compile a roster of the finest recordings that came my way during the preceding eleven months. But because of the sheer volume of material I’ve heard–and because I try…
It’s not that the members of Furious George and the Monster Groove are lazy. Anyone who’s seen a club gig by the combo (lead singer James Elias, bassist Luke Davis, drummer Scott Bruggeman, guitarist Jimmy Boardman, trombonists Abraham Martinez and Brian Mohr, trumpeter Tony Marino and saxophonist Brian Schilling) knows…
Various Artists Evita: The Complete Motion Picture Music Soundtrack (Warner Bros.) According to the tabloid press, Evita is the most anticipated new film of 1996–although the people who seem most eager to see this musical biography of the late Argentinian Eva Peron are those who assume it will be more…
It’s time for Feedback’s year-end clearance. All items must go. The closings of (america) and the Tivoli Brewery Restaurant–both located in the Tivoli complex, which serves as a student center for the Auraria campus–are embroiled in a mystery that doesn’t seem likely to be cleared up anytime soon. Rosemary Fetter,…
“Country music is like Spam,” claims disc jockey Rich Beall. “A lot of people don’t want to admit to it, but they sure do like it.” He pauses before adding, “Some people just don’t want to come out of the closet and say, ‘I like classic country.'” While Beall doesn’t…
“I’ve always hated the radio,” announces Ed Ruscha, leader of the Maids of Gravity, in a sunny, what-me-worry? voice. “Except for, like–well, I listen to oldies and stuff. But hit radio? So much of it is terrible. Basically I’m like, ‘Fuck, I can’t listen to that shit.'” Given Ruscha’s casually…
When veteran alto saxophonist Hank Crawford and Hammond B-3 wizard Jimmy McGriff formed a quartet in 1986, their record company, Milestone, documented the union with the release of Soul Survivors, a high-energy platter filled with R&B, blues and lots of the sort of soulful jazz with which they’ve long been…
Those local reviews just keep coming. Available on Denver’s Fahrenheit Records is Mirror Image, from Images, a four-piece that operates in the contemporary-jazz arena. That means that Bob Rebholz and his sidemen concentrate on soothing sounds that no one will confuse with the work of Ornette Coleman. The disc includes…
When it came time to categorize the more than thirty holiday releases I’ve received this year for our annual seasonal-CD roundup, I made an odd discovery: The discs fell into more different brackets than ever before. In general, this proved to be a good thing. But as usual, many of…
