Having been characterized as a “jam band” for so many years, Lotus took a different approach with its latest album and delved into the world of hip-hop. Calling on a specific group of MCs and styles, the band dropped a great collaborative album that showed the instrumental talents that have…
Attention serious sax players: Mark your calendars for Saturday, March 8. You won’t want to miss Everything Sax. The folks from Jazz@Jack’s have organized a free day-long saxophone event of clinics, discussions, career opportunities and more. A number of noted professors, including John Gunther, Art Bouton and Peter Sommer, will…
John Denver had a hit with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert’s song “I Guess He’d Rather Be in Colorado.” The tune was actually inspired by banjo master Dick Weissman, who’s back in Denver after a decade living in Oregon. He produced Danoff and Nivert’s album Reincarnation and a number of…
Over the next few weeks, we will be following Project Aspect (Jay Jaramillo) and Unlimited Gravity (Ronnie Weberg) as they tour around the country on their first national tour. The pair have grown together collectively in the scene as the Mile High Sound Movement. The two will crisscross the country…
Back with another fresh batch of homegrown hip-hop. This week we’ve got new releases from Musa Bailey, who takes listeners on a musical ride through the West with How to Survive When You’re Dead, plus new cuts from Trev Rich, Kid Vegas and newcomer Cool Ray. Continue on to see…
As members of Vetiver, Daniel Hindman and Sarah Versprille explored the gauzy textures of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac (occasionally recalling the hazy mysticism of the Peter Green era, too). As Pure Bathing Culture, the duo fast-forwards the Mac dial to Tango in the Night o’clock. No, really: “Pendulum,” which opens their…
Denver Disco resident DJ Falcon Punch — or Avery Henderson, as he’s known to folks back home in Minnesota — recently moved to Boulder from Los Angeles. After graduating from Occidental College, where he majored in sociology and minored in music, he took a job at an ad agency in…
Rocket From the Crypt (due Saturday, February 1, at the Summit Music Hall) formed in 1989 after the split of Pitchfork, an act that featured John Reis, who was also a member of influential noise rock/experimental punk band Drive Like Jehu at the time. Rocket’s playful spirit and its sound…
Prefuse 73 (due this Wednesday, January 29, at Cervantes’ Masterpiece Ballroom) is the alias of Guillermo Herren. Having learned the nuts and bolts of hip-hop production as an employee at a studio in the ’90s, Herren created the sort of left-field electronic music that didn’t fit in with that style…
Over the next few weeks, we will be following Project Aspect (Jay Jaramillo) and Unlimited Gravity (Ronnie Weberg) as they tour around the country on their first national tour. The pair have grown together collectively in the scene as the Mile High Sound Movement. The two will crisscross the country…
Although Steve Crenshaw has spent more than a decade as lead guitarist with the Groove Hawgs (which features Lewis and Floorwax, from 103.5/The Fox) and he’s shared stages with B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Delbert McClinton, he’s been a fixture on the scene since the early ’90s. In recent years,…
Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All (screenings are set for Friday, January 24 through Sunday, January 26 at 7th Circle Music Collective) is the documentary film about the beloved, pioneering pop punk band and its associated project All. Starting in the late ’70s with drummer Bill Stevenson, Descendents took the energy…
Eyehategod (due Sunday, January 26, at the Bluebird Theater) formed in New Orleans in 1988. The influential band combined its influences from the world of the blues, Black Sabbath and hardcore punk into a unique alchemy that lent itself well to dipping into the dark side of the psyche and…
As Bisco Inferno looms ahead of us this weekend, we had a chance to speak with Disco Biscuits bassist Marc Brownstein about what it takes to make a happy life and a happy band. Full of enthusiasm and positivity. Brownstein shed a new light on the future of the Biscuits…
There is the best of this, the best of that, and then you have the metaliest metal bands forged by lyrical blacksmiths deep down in the mines of heavy metal. The metaliest, you know, metal. Not as in the genre-est of metal, but the bands that sing of metal the…
Legions of angry parents were already up in arms when gangster rap arrived on the scene. After the 1985 PMRC Senate hearings helped institute “Parental Advisory” stickers, albums by Ice-T and N.W.A. were among the first to be branded. Since then, rap as a musical form has continued to take…
Andy Rourke (due at Lipgloss this Friday, January 24, at Beauty Bar) came to the attention of the world as the gifted bass player of the Smiths. Alongside drummer Mike Joyce, Rourke, with his eclectic and creative style, provided a subtle but unmistakable backbone to Johnny Marr’s inspired jangle and…
Musa Bailey has been a fixture in the Colorado music community for over a decade, from releasing music to promoting shows to his success with Cold Crush. For his latest release, How to Survive When You’re Dead, the followup to My Robot Girlfriend, he embraced his Colorado roots by making…
When Esme Patterson was learning to play Townes Van Zandt’s song “Loretta,” she says she started singing the words and got angry. “I started thinking about how one-sided and subjective a lot of ‘love songs’ are, and how a lot of women immortalized in songs might tell a different side…
Since the start of the new year, we’ve been filling our four blogs — Show and Tell, Backbeat, Cafe Society and the Latest Word — with a Colorado bucket list of the 100 things to do before you kick it. Here is the complete 2014 Backbeat bucket list. See also:…
John Doe (due this weekend at Lion’s Lair) is most well-known for his tenure in the influential punk/roots rock band X. That band was known not just for a fiery intensity as a live act but also for its combination of primal rock and roll and thought-provoking lyrics, which had…
What are the hundred things everyone should do in Colorado before they die? We posed this question to our writers and editors, and over the next week, we’ll be rolling out the answers across our blogs. Check back on tomorrow for the full list — and in the meantime, feel…
