This week’s cover story, “Black and Blue,” by Joel Warner, examines the incident and aftermath of Alex Landau’s bloody run-in with the Denver police in January 2009. Landau, now 21, is a student at the Community College of Denver and, like many college students, loves writing and listening to music…
Early on in jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson’s career, he listened to a lot of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. While Terrasson says he doesn’t listen to the three pianists as much as he did two decades ago when he was starting out, he’s taken what they’ve given him…
Darwin Deez (due at Larimer Lounge tonight) came to the attention of wider and wider audiences relatively early in the band’s career with the release of its singles “Constellations” and “Radar Detector.” The videos for both songs revealed a band both eccentric, quirky and capable of writing the kind of…
There are few things that bring us joy quite like finding a new act to get all excited about. It’s kind of like finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while. We’re enjoying that feeling right now listening to “Still Falls Apart,”…
Elisabeth Maurus, who performs under the moniker Lissie, plays tonight at the Bluebird. She had to cancel a show here in October because her voice gave out, but she’s eager to return to Colorado. She spent a couple undergraduate years at CSU in Fort Collins. We spoke with her right…
After last week’s Poptimystic in which we questioned the value of Next Big Sound’s new Billboard charts, company co-founder Alex White got in touch to clarify some things. Our complaint with the more compelling of the two charts, the NBS25, was that it never features the same artists twice, and…
Soulja Boy is struggling. His latest album, The DeAndre Way, posted anemic sales figures, and he’s only still making news by picking painfully stupid fights way out of his weight class. Many people in the world have always hated him, and for them, watching the man flail around in 2011,…
As reported yesterday, several people headed out on Jam Cruise were busted for trying to bring drugs on board the ship. Like this is a surprise. Jam bands and mind-expanding drugs go together like…like…look, if I have to explain this, you just ain’t gonna get it, man. So we got…
Misogyny, as a concept and as a behavior, is a major issue in hip-hop. Women are frequently marginalized and suffer extreme sexist treatment. As I began to examine the pronounced gender bias in the hip-hop community for this week’s feature, I interviewed a wide range of ladies to get their…
Billboard recently debuted a pair of new charts compiled by Boulder-based company Next Big Sound, the subject of a recent Westword feature. The charts, called the Social 50 and the Next Big Sound 25, track bands’ online presence, whether it’s Facebook “likes” or Last.fm plays. Music industry bigwigs think this…
Billboard magazine published its first music chart ever on January 4, 1936 — 75 years ago today. It was called The Hit Parade, and it was one of the first music charts of any kind. The first number-one in Billboard history? Joe Venuti, father of the jazz violin, performing “Stop,…
Teen dream Justin Bieber is arguably the biggest pop star in the country and Simon Cowell isn’t doing American Idol. A lot’s changed since last year in the world of pop. Institutions fell, ideas were challenged, and the Black Eyed Peas didn’t have the number one song in the country…
From their humble yet impressive beginnings throwing parties in the basement of Wally Behnfield’s house for a couple hundred folks to putting on shows at Cervantes drawing around 800 people, the members of Mile High Sound Movement have worked hard to create something unique and artistic and are making a…
In the course of writing this week’s feature (“O Scum All Ye Faithful”), I spoke with Five Iron Frenzy singer and Scum co-founder Reese Roper. Roper was an icon for ’90s Christian punk rock, writing songs with a lyrical sophistication that referenced literature and world history. His songs were, at…
With two weeks left in the year, Billboard has posted it’s 2010 year-end charts. The top single of 2010? Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.” Wouldn’t necessarily have been our guess, but fair enough — seems like one of a handful of 2010’s defining singles. The album race, however, has more shocking (and…
YTCracker rolls with a crew and movement known as “nerdcore,” the epicenter of all things sophisticated and geeky. The rapper — aka Bryce Case, who pronounces his name as “whitey cracker” — and his contemporaries, guys like MC Lars, MC Frontalot, MC Chris and Dual Core, aren’t your average pocket-protector…
Since its inception in 1993, Low (due at the Larimer Lounge this Saturday, December 18) from Duluth, Minnesota, has created a body of work characterized by a fragile intensity. Although often lumped in under the banner of “slowcore” with a group of bands of similar sonic leanings, like Red House…
Chicago house heavyweight and acid-jazz/downtempo darling Mark Farina has already made two trips to Denver this year — but for his third, a set at the Gothic Theatre this Friday night, he’s promoting the release of the seventh Mushroom Jazz album, just as laid-back and groovy as the previous six,…
Since we’re in the process of compiling picks for our annual Moovers and Shakers issue next week, we thought we’d put together a link guide of everything we’ve reviewed this year. Even though it shouldn’t be at this point, it’s always a bit staggering to reflect upon just how many…
In the decade since the Bad Plus has been together, the adventurous jazz trio has included cover songs on each of its recordings. Bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson and drummer David King have deconstructed and reimagined cuts by everyone from the Pixies and Nirvana to Bowie and Blondie…
The last time we heard from will.i.am and friends, they were breaking every singles record known to man. In case you’ve purged your brain of the memory: In 2009, they had the number one song in the country from April 18 through October 17. “Boom Boom Pow” took roughly the…
Known to early local hip-hop heads as Shag One and, more recently, Strange Powers, Josh Powers doesn’t fit into the mold of a typical hip-hop cat. He embraces his individuality and honors his own unique global view of music and ideology through his creative endeavors — from more traditional hip-hop…
