Sanity isn’t a prerequisite when it comes to making good music. Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson are only two of many performers who’ve created intriguing songs in spite of — or perhaps because of — minds that don’t operate in ways most of us regard as normal. In that sense,…
Ryan Policky is one of the very few Denverites who didn’t spend last Sunday watching football. He was too busy getting ready for a gig at the Church. Policky’s band, Pure Drama, which performs only a couple of times a year, recently added two members, bassist David Ferguson and drummer…
Bad Brains — rechristened in the late ’90s as Soul Brains to reflect a more positive vibe — has long been one of the most innovative bands to rock the planet. Influencing everyone from the Beastie Boys to Mos Def, the band burst out of the D.C. punk scene in…
This is a good year for Colorado tenor saxophonist and composer Fred Hess — and for jazz fans who appreciate harmonically adventurous cutting-edge music, impeccably played. Hess is releasing two new CDs on the Tapestry label this month — one recorded during a piano-less quartet date in Rochester, New York,…
Here’s a music-journalism secret: Interviewing performers in their second language can be more enlightening than quizzing them in their first. Why? Folks familiar with English, say, are generally adept at using the idiom to skirt subjects, spin responses or appear frank without truly unwrapping their souls in the slightest. In…
I like to find a way to pull the audience into the creative process, whether they want to go or not,” says Dr. Gregory T.S. Walker, chuckling slyly. A six-and-a-half-foot-tall violinist/composer who won’t hesitate to drench folks in the orchestra seats with a water cannon in order to include them…
Rhode Island was founded as a dumping ground for criminals, no-goods, drunks and lunatics exiled from tony enclaves like Boston and New York. Like everything else, its musical legacy has been difficult to define. What the heck is Rhode Island music, anyway? The Blackstone Valley Sinners hope to include “country”…
The folks at Owned & Operated, the Fort Collins label founded in 1997 by members of the punk band All, say their Upland subsidiary specializes in “roots rock.” But this description fits the latest recording by Grandpa’s Ghost — based in teensy Pocahontas, Illinois — like the glove into which…
Marble Orchard contains many of the elements that make up some of Denver’s finest minor-chord melancholy roots-rock bands: the warbling vocals, the haunting odes and a sincerity of delivery. Who knew that the Queen City of the Plains would inspire so many dark, chamber-style, country-flavored acts? Unfortunately, this band’s traditional…
Denver-based tenor saxophonist Keith Oxman has recorded four previous CDs for Tom Burns’s plucky, perennially underfunded Capri label, based in Bailey. But Brain Storm, Oxman’s first release in three years, signals perhaps the biggest leap forward for a player, composer and teacher (he directs East High School’s student big band)…
Sporting titles such as “Purity in Pornography,” “Waiting for the Hearse,” and “My Gorgeous Façade,” Omnivoyeur resurrects ’80s synth-driven goth for a subculture that seems refreshingly indifferent to the notion that the style may never rise from the ashes. Vocalist Joe Pazo’s tongue is too busy stimulating other body parts…
Although the patient isn’t comatose, its condition isn’t particularly stable, either. At a state-of-the-union-style meeting on Sunday, January 19, Colorado Music Association president Tommy Nahulu and the five other members of COMA’s board of directors took the stage at the Soiled Dove to respond to questions and criticism and defend…
Def Jux Records now delivers what Rawkus did in the late ’90s: daring, experimental, raw hip-hop. Anchored by label founder El-P’s futuristic vision of symphonic paranoia, Def Jux has introduced rap audiences to an impressive crew of East Coast-based artists, including Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox. Four-time Boston Music Awards…
Joseph Brenna and his fans have much to celebrate on Saturday, January 25, when the guitarist performs at Nederland’s Acoustic Cafe. The most obvious is the release of Inventing Time, an instrumental recording he co-wrote and produced with Rob Gordon, founder of the Boulder-based indie label What Are Records?. At…
Cody ChesnuTT is an anomaly, but he shouldn’t be: He plays rock and roll and can righteously wail on a guitar, one of many such artists to arise since black musicians essentially invented the genre more than fifty years ago. Yet when the Atlanta-bred, Los Angeles-based ChesnuTT steps on stage…
Looking into the glazed eyes of Herman “Preacherman” Wynter, you can sense a life marked by both joy and hardship. In a lilting patois that is both simple, direct and inflected with rural wisdom, he relates tales of his early years, when he lived among ten brothers and sisters in…
The hiatus is over. The world is safe for trampoline hijinks and glow-stick wars. The mighty Phish, once burned out and rudderless, has returned. And what’s a rejuvenated jam band to do but jam hard for a winding, bending 78 minutes? The twelve expansive songs on Round Room, the group’s…
The late Julian “Cannonball” Adderley’s near-legendary album Radio Nights, recorded live at New York’s old Half Note in 1967 and 1968 for radio broadcast, has long been hoarded by vinyl collectors. Now producer Joel Dorn has transferred this gem to CD on his new Hyena label. The nightclub mikes are…
Careers in music are seldom predictable, but Ethan Buckler’s has been weirder than most. He first kicked up dust among underground types in the late ’80s as a member of Slint, a Louisville, Kentucky, art-noise outfit whose influence continues to linger. The band broke up around ten years ago, but…
Common has grown from a boy to a man since the release of Can I Borrow a Dollar?, his 1992 debut issued under the name Common Sense. This evolution has been reflected heavily in his music. Still fresh off the success of 2000’s Like Water for Chocolate, he returns with…
The well-acclaimed Chi-town collective Liquid Soul boasts multiple cap feathers, such as jamming at Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade, kicking out the groove at Dennis Rodman’s birthday party and hosting vocalist Simone, daughter of longtime jazz/soul crooner Nina Simone, on its last Grammy nominated effort, Here’s the Deal. The musically eclectic…
Like Don Quixote, brothers Jay and Phil Bianchi are trying to create their own world. As the brains behind Quixote’s True Blue, Sancho’s Broken Arrow and Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey, they’ve succeeded in making Denver a destination city for touring jam bands — in the process threatening San Francisco’s title as…
