Louis Armstrong Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 1923-1934 (Columbia/Legacy) Now here’s a guy plenty of contemporary listeners have misinterpreted. The current generation thinks of Armstrong mainly as the grinning, big-eyed, lovable sort whose gravelly crooning of sentimental ditties such as “What a Wonderful World” fills boomers with…
Bootsy Collins and His New Rubber Band, Saturday, October 29, at the Ogden Theatre, with Dread Zeppelin, is back, baby–but he never really went away. A star-eyed superman who brought his otherworldly personality and mastery of the space-bass to the JBs, Parliament/Funkadelic and his own wonderful solo work, Collins hasn’t…
“Sometimes I think that we’re just an alternative band,” says Doug Martsch, the voice and guitar behind Boise, Idaho’s Built to Spill. “We’re more than that, but I can see other people automatically pigeonholing us.” Martsch needn’t worry: Built to Spill isn’t so easily categorized. Unlike many alternative (whatever that…
Several years ago, Cary Morin–a soft-spoken father of three who’s also the songwriter, guitarist and vocalist for the Fort Collins-based trio the Atoll–traded substance and alcohol use for a trip down self-discovery lane. Now this 32-year-old Crow Indian hopes his band, which combines reggae, rock and worldbeat, can exert a…
Musicians whose bands have undergone personnel changes could learn a few lessons from Corrosion of Conformity vocalist/guitarist Pepper Keenan. When asked about the departure of former COC lead singer Karl Agell, Keenan doesn’t fall back on polite euphemisms such as “We had creative differences,” or “It was an amicable decision,”…
Cornetist Ruby Braff knows exactly how to describe himself. “I’m a performer,” he asserts. “I’m not like some other musicians. Back when I was very young and just beginning to play, the musicians all felt wonderful until the people started coming in. Then they’d say, `They’re coming!’ with such contempt–like,…
Spell Mississippi (Island) For those of you who think Westword can’t be objective about this Denver-based band, let’s start with a few negatives about Spell’s major-label debut. First of all, the title leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not all that funny (“Spell Mississippi”–get it?), and it implies that…
“We all grew up on bad heavy metal,” says Ron Heathman, guitarist for the hardcore pranksters the Supersuckers. “Then we discovered `cool’ music and started playing that. But we still have a little bit of the heavy-metal influence in us, too.” No kidding. While most punk acts have a metallic…
“I think Charles Manson had a lot of positive things to say and could have been a real cultural leader,” says Mr. Manson, the singer and conceptualist behind the shock-rock/industrial band dubbed Marilyn Manson. “But what he did wasn’t popular with the masses, and so he went to jail. He…
In the press materials that accompanied the 1992 EP Broken, Nine Inch Nails’s Trent Reznor wrote, “Nine Inch Nails is still not a real band with real people playing real instruments.” Today, drummer Chris Vrenna insists that’s all changed. Sort of. “We’re much more of a band now than we…
In an age when rock and roll strikes some observers as increasingly passe, the members of Denver’s Boss 302 still believe it’s worthy of praise. Lead singer Rich Groskopf takes every available opportunity to call rock “the premier music genre.” Later, when Groskopf and the other Bosses (guitarists Garrett Brittenham…
R.E.M. Monster (Warner Bros.) Anyone who assumed, after perusing the ink already spilled over this, that Monster would sound like a less accessible version of Metal Machine Music can be forgiven for being somewhat underwhelmed by the reputed noisiness of the twelve ditties contained herein. “Star 69,” five numbers into…
These days, heavy guitars and macabre imagery seem as closely associated as chocolate and peanut butter. The horror-obsessed riff-slingers in Cannibal Corpse, Slayer and Genitorturers have transformed certain sections of the world’s record bins into pus-soaked morgues, thanks to their sordid tales of decapitation, dismemberment and disembowelments. The problem is…
Inside the Bluebird Theater on Thursday evening, October 6, not everything was quite ready to go. A by-invitation-only audience–consisting mainly of music-biz scenesters, suit-wearing politicos and just plain folks from the Capitol Hill area–was admiring the building as a combo led by Ron Miles blasted out challenging jazz riffs. But…
Dave Shirley, the rapper, keyboardist, percussionist, full-time humorist and co-frontman for Denver’s Red Yak, offers a succinct review of his group’s early work. “We sucked forever,” he says. While Shirley and his fellow Yaks (bassist Darren Lawless, guitarist Bob LaBarge, drummer Aarek Moore and singer Kirk Anderson) rightly feel that…
Either/Orchestra, Saturday, October 15, at the Bluebird Theater, is the odd, eccentric, precocious (but dearly loved) brainchild of composer/ saxophonist Russ Gershon. And a hardy youngster it is, for the Boston-based ten-piece jazz ensemble is now celebrating its ninth year of life. This longevity is quite an achievement: Aside from…
Sinead O’Connor Universal Mother (Chrysalis) This album is so incredibly bad that it’s actually something of an achievement. O’Connor is a performer known for wearing her heart on her sleeve, but on Universal Mother, her heart’s everywhere–and a frighteningly self-pitying organ it is. Hardly a song goes by without her…
The career of the Psychedelic Furs followed a predictable pattern: two striking albums, two okay albums, two tremendously dull albums, breakup. What’s surprising is that Richard Butler, the Furs’ ex-leader now fronting a combo called Love Spit Love, agrees with this characterization. “By the time we got to the Midnight…
Boulder poet Benjamin Porter Lewis isn’t your average mountain-town java-joint junkie. If his streetwise delivery and frizzy near-dreads don’t make that point abundantly clear, his sublimely untutored rants against political injustice and racial prejudice tend to do so in a hurry. For example, a piece titled “Censorship” opens with the…
Storyville, Friday, October 7, at the Boulder Theater, is a Texas quintet that offers a fresh take on the music of the Lone Star state by coupling its blues base with passionate punk and soul influences. The band, which borrowed its name from New Orleans’s fabled and glamorous red-light district,…
Improvisational wizard Bill Frisell is known worldwide for his ethereal, thinking-man’s work on the guitar, which he transforms into a stringed soulmate to wind instruments. The breathy, electrified tone that he produces with the help of volume pedals and other technological tools is simply splendid, as is his unplugged playing…
Liz Phair Whip-Smart (Matador) Rock-critic types have treated the release of Whip-Smart with reverence suggestive of the second coming, which in some ways is appropriate–like Exile in Guyville, Phair’s slobbered-over debut, this sophomore offering doesn’t skimp on the orgasms. Unfortunately, I suspect that this songwriter’s focus on the various uses…
