pt at large

Jimmy Heath: Still Bopping at 82

Jimmy Heath Quartet
Scullers Jazz Club
September 20, 2009
(This review was completed on an airplane to France, mis-filed in LaptopLand, now belatedly published)
Second set

It is quite possible that Jimmy Heath and his brother Tootie have been playing jazz more years than you’ve been alive. Good jazz. On their own or with some of the giants of the twentieth century.

To applause of the full house at the second set at Scullers Jazz Club, here saunter two guys in their late twenties/early thirties, one very spry octogenarian and his 74 year old brother. This is the quartet Jimmy Heath’s been on tour with lately. If you’ve paid any kind of attention to jazz in the past half dozen decades, you know the Heath name.

Jimmy announces he’ll open with a piece from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon suite. “It used to be the theme song of a smoking advertisement. Smoking went out of style but this song is still a happening thing,” he deadpans. Well, it’s happening in a way that you recognize for the first few bars then Jimmy takes his well-worn sax and explores trails into the musical canyon that most musicians couldn’t find with a compass.

The man still loves his music and the business of making it. Big smile as he steps back after his solo to enjoy what the others in the quartet have to say. The brown sport coat he wears fits a little loosely as clothes tend to do as our frames retreat as our age advances. Tootie, in the corner right behind his older brother, sits regally at his drum set as if it were a throne. He sports a red bow tie, white shirt and dark suit - a fashion statement you won’t miss from the back row of Scullers, where I happened to be sitting.

Jeb Patton, whom Jimmy gleefully calls “General” Patton, at keyboard sets expectations for rest of the night high with a wildly imaginative solo and opens the door for standup bass player Corcoran Holt to let it out. By the time what Grofé originally wrote has been genetically altered and returned to its original shape, you figure you’re in for a night of traditional jazz with a distinctively hard bop edge to it. And you get it.

Sometimes Jimmy announces his choice of music, sometimes he doesn’t, which accounts for the sparse documentation below.

The young Turks are on piano and bass. Piano player Patton’s been with Jimmy since he graduated with master’s degree from Queen’s College in Brooklyn, where Jimmy taught music before he retired and took Patton with him on tour. Holt, another protégé, came along later. Jimmy Heath clearly relishes sharing the stage with these two ‘youngsters,’ mindful they’re a living trust that will carry his musical soul well into the twenty first century.

A Billy Strayhorn number is Exhibit A for why Heath was so impressed with Patton. He plays the lovely ballad with light flourishes up and down the keyboard that often stop on a dime and float into keening emotional passages. A whiff of Bill Evans in a melancholy mood, perhaps, but this is all Patton’s signature.  Patton plays with this with elegant, moody restraint.

Heath announces the next song as “Everything Happens To Me,”  Corcoran Holt’s time to shine. Holt bows the ballad with supple tone with Tootie rustling the brushes in accompaniment. Starkly beautiful.

OK, satisfied that we know the quartet can knock mellow out of the park, it’s time for more bop. ’Invitation” jolts the club with up-tempo speedball solos all around. Tootie is tatting expressively. “Invitation” is taken for a wild ride and left at the curb to catch its breath.

Time to slow down again. Jimmy picks up his soprano sax and floats a lovely ballad, Tootie playing just underneath him. Jimmy switches to tenor and the quartet swings with a classic solo swapping finish

Next it’s Tootie Time - a solo with mallets and brushes that percuss muffled thunder off every touchable surface on the man’s drum kit. Halfway through, he gets an idea, holsters the mallets and finds more places to make the drum set talk by using his big hands and fists. By the time “General” Patton gets his solo, it turns into a boogie and stride piano, bass player Holt fingers up and down the neck of his standup bass with nimble speed. Quite a jaunt.

Jimmy announces the last number as “Soul Eyes,” a mid-tempo Mal Waldren composition that goes down real easy. What also goes down so well is watching a legend at work. Jimmy, and Tootie for that matter, have stood on stages all over the world, Jimmy’s 1948 band in Philadelphia included John Coltrane and Benny Golson. He’s played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, Art Farmer, and Milt Jackson.

There he is, looking out at the audience over his gold rimmed glasses to see who’s listening out there just beyond the lights of Scullers small stage.  Judging by the twinkle in his eye and the way he listens to Patton, Holt, and his brother, smiling when he hears a new wrinkle in a solo, you’d swear he was just starting out on his career.

 Photo from Jimmy Heath's web site

April Hall: Late Better Than Never

April Hall
June 16, 2009
Arsenal Center For The Arts
321 Arsenal Street, Watertown, MA  02472
2009 Summer Pops Series First Concert
Tickets $15 Adults, $10 Children, Free Parking

April Hall put some serious energy into the concert at around 8:30 PM, which was unfortunate since the set began forty five minutes earlier. Hall and her trio were the opening concert for the Arsenal Center for the Arts 2009 Summer Pops Series.

The hour-long set featured many songs on Hall's recent album "Fun Out Of Life," the emphasis on ballads, with a handful of upbeat songs for balance. Ms. Hall sang the songs but didn’t seem to feel them. And when you’re singing songs like “How Deep Is The Ocean,” if you don’t feel them, they don’t fly.

Her chops tonight didn’t square with the reputation of this Berkelee graduate who has appeared on stage with the likes of Al Jarreau, Rosemary Clooney, Dinah Shore, and Livingston Taylor.

Lovely ballads were frequently marred by what seemed to be Hall’s skidding off pitch. It happened so often I began to wonder whether she purposely chooses to stretch her pitch as a signature style.

The audience in the partly filled Charles Mosesian Theater was appreciative enough. Perhaps I was missing something. One thing I didn’t miss was the enormous talent of her trio.

Marshall Wood, on upright bass, Les Harris, Jr. on percussion, and Ben Cook on Kursweil Roland electric piano, found the mood of each song with every solo they played - applause ringing from the audience, school-age kids to retirées, after each.

Then came the Count Basie/Jimmy Rushing song “I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be Wrong Always.” Ms. Hall switched from cruise control to charge. The song shot right across the footlights and landed like a howitzer in the middle of the audience.  There had been hints of Hall’s gospel and blues background here and there during the concert. Where had  Miss Hall been hiding this all night?

Hall returned with a one song encore, “Please Send Me Someone To Love,” in which she and the trio jammed home. She had finally arrived.

Set List

“My Baby Just Cares For Me” Ballad
“The Face I Love” Samba tribute to Astrud Gilberto, Hall adding creditable scatting at end
“I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry” Ballad
“The Best Thing For You Would Be Me”  Peppy uptempo song
“Crazy In Love” Ballad
“Maybe I’m Right And Maybe I’m Wrong” Uptempo
“How Deep Is The Ocean” Ballad
“You’ve Changed” Ballad
“I May Be Wrong But I Won’t Be Wrong Always” Swing tempo, lively, with feeling
“Please Send Me Someone To Love” energetic finale

Next concert: Harlem Quartet, June 24, Summer Pops concerts begin at 7:30 PM

Top photo: April Hall web site
Bottom: pt at large

The White Owls: Blues With Bite

The White Owls
Toad
Live Music 7 Nights a Week, Never a cover!
1912 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02140

With a name like “The White Owls” you might expect this band to be playing oldies in the recreation room of senior citizen centers. Nope.

Last night they played their bi-weekly gig at Toad, the mighty, mini, bandbox of a saloon in Porter Square, Cambridge, MA.

There was Dennis Brennan, singing his heart out with the “stormy, husky, brawling, city of big shoulders” Chicago style that Carl Sandburg would have loved. Brennan's catalog of blues songs is prodigious. His all-out style can pin your ears back.

Brennan’s crew tonight, Steve Sadler (laptop steel), Milt Friedman  (guitar), Dean Cassel (bass), and Andy Plaisted (drums), are no pretenders. They are intense.

Brennan sets up most songs with a growl and riff of his harmonica, lights into the lyrics, and nods at Sadler, who gives the song the sonic treatment of a jet melodically breaking the sound barrier. Friedman captures Sadler’s licks and bends them into his own. Cassel’s steady bass lines and Plaisted’s precise percussion wrap like a vise around Brennan’s slinky, sexy, or rollicking blues.

In the hands of singers and players who feel it, blues has no expiration date. The group of five college-aged girls perched on barstools and Gen Xers, Yers, and who knows what-ers are as plugged into this band as the sizeable group of Boomers scattered about. A few of the Boomer Fems standing in back are grooving as unselfconsciously - and provocatively - as they might have before receiving their AARP memberships in the mail.

The White Owls rip through a bluesy Willie Dixon song, a slow tempo "Blues With A Feeling" by Little Walter, and a growling version of "Don’t Lie To Me," which Sadler, the Alpha Dog of Laptop Steel Artists, plays like a freight train fueled by grits.

Brennan’s quite a sight, sort of a less craggy Keith Richard face, a porkpie hat cocked atop an explosion of curly brown hair. The music comes from some steaming pit in his guts. No stage posturing or engagement with the crowd on this night. Just fabulous covers of traditional blues, sung like he meant it and felt it. No way his sidemen can do anything but bring their own A game to the party - and they do.

Brennan’s been playing around Boston since 1992.  His Dennis Brennan Band plays roots and indie rock, much written by Brennan, at The Lizard Lounge on Wednesday nights. Different style and musicality but the same intensity. His most recent album, “Engagement,” studio and live tracks, met with critical acclaim. He’s already a local legend. He deserves more.

If you’ve never heard him before, check out the Toad calendar for the White Owls next show.  It’s a great way to get your first dose of Brennan washed down with a heaping platter of Blues.

Partial Set list - First Set
 (Dennis didn’t introduce any songs. I could only figure out three of seven !)

I Love The Life I Live by Willie Dixon
Blues With A Feeling by Little Walter (Marion Walter Jacobs)
Don’t Lie To Me by Chris Bell, Alex Chilton

Photo courtesy of Brennan's website

Long Tall Marcia Ball

 Marcia Ball
First set, Thursday April 2, 2009
Scullers Jazz Club
DoubleTree Guest Suites Boston
400 Soldiers Field Rd Allston, MA 02134 - (617) 783-0090

Fact: give her a little upright piano and Marcia Ball could do a great concert in a freight car. She’s more at home in a dance hall packed with sweaty dancers, but she nearly tore the roof off Scullers Jazz Club last night where the full house had to settle for bobbing and wiggling in their chairs, which they did during every minute of her 75 minute first set.

There aren’t many performers who can so totally pack the joy of New Orleans in a suitcase and thrill music lovers when she springs it open somewhere else. Marcia Ball flipped it upside down and shook out the zestiest zydeco, swamp blues, Louisiana blues and boogie woogie that have been heard up North since the last time she visited.

The headliner’s band usually warms up the crowd for a few minutes before bringing on the big gun. Not Marcia. Thirty seconds after her tightly wound four-piece band lit into her opening number, her bass player stepped up to the mike and shouted, “Please welcome Long, Tall, Marcia Ball!” Out saunters a lanky six-footer, already an icon of New Orleans music history.

By the second song, a boogie woogie “I Got My Red Beans Cookin’,” with Marcia banging on the keys, bass, saxophone and guitar dialing it up, they'd all stomped on the accelerator. Ball has three speeds: boogie, overdrive, and slow burning blues. She doesn’t mail the shows in. She walks into your kitchen and sings her heart out. No matter how good her CDs are, there ain’t nothing that can compare to hearing "Her Tallness" live.

The tires smoked as Ball slammed on the brakes to vamp, “Just Kiss Me, Baby, (that’s all you have to do, you don’t have to love me, just treat me nice and kind…)". By the time the smoky guitar solo was finished, you’d have given anything to have your honey pressed against you like a second skin on the dance floor…or anywhere else.

The band was locked and loaded. They’ve played with Marcia for years. When sax player Thad Scott or guitarist Andrew Nafziger tear off on a solo you realize that the power of their talent is ignited by the heat of the spark plug sitting cross-legged on the piano bench in the middle of the stage. No matter how good these musicians are, Marcia’s the engine that runs this show.

The boogie woogie and zydeco arrangements, including an oh-so- Dr.-John-New Orleans “It’s Watermelon Time,” had short fuses that exploded into joyous rollicking. The slow bluesy songs, like “Falling Back In Love With You,” are just the opposite. The fuse burns real slow as Marcia works it way up to a lathery climax you can feel coming a mile away. It's a wonder the slender legs under Ball’s electric keyboard didn’t collapse under the joyful pounding she gave it during the evening.

Ball rocked through upbeat songs like “Peace and Love Barbeque”, the title track from her recently released CD of the same name, and “Do It Wrong Till You Get It Right,” advice worth taking, especially when exhorted to do so by an incarnation of Jerry Lee Lewis, then unleashed “Falling Back In Love With You,” a gem of a gospel-tinged ballad whose chord changes would have been right at home lofting down from the choir of a church south of the Mason Dixon line.

During a momentary - and rare - lull in which Ball collected her breath, someone in the audience shouted, “Do you take requests?” 

“Well, yeasss…” said she with a grin. A quick dozen titles rat-a- tat- tatted from the audience.

“Let’s go with the audibles,“ the four- time grammy nominee said cheerfully to the band. Ball’s recorded 11 albums since 1983. Many of the crowd knew them all. “You’ll have to come back to the 10 o’clock show!” she joked - with pleasure - as the title frenzy continued.

Well. The boogie woogie “Sing It One More Time Like That Before You Go,” with Thad Scott’s blazing solo, had enough heat to push up the all the crocuses in slow arriving New England spring. 

Another down-home song, “Mama’s Cookin’,” had us imagining catfish in the pan and gumbo in the pot. The sassy “If You Don’t Believe Im Goin’ You Can Count The Days I'm Gone,” had middle-aged patrons grabbing napkins and waving them to the beat as if they were a chair-bound second line following one of New Orleans’s brass band parades.

This was a tutorial in how to pace a show. Ball and band kept shuffling the tempos, length of songs and genres.  “Louisiana 1927” is classic Randy Newman song with simple lyrics, lovely chord changes, and the narrative power of a sledge hammer. The song’s bittersweet lyrics allude to the 1927 flood that left hundreds of thousands of Louisianans and Mississippians homeless and bereft.  Thad Scott’s sax solo started as funeral dirge and ended up as primal wail of dislocation and grief. Poignant. And short-lived.

The set was high-balling to a close. “Mobile,” an upbeat boogie with a touch of Blues came next. Marcia’s little four piece band was barreling home. There was only one speed left - overdrive - and Marcia speed shifted into the finale, “The Right Tool For The Job.”

The silver strands of her black bob haircut were sticking to her dripping brow. Sax, guitar, drums, and bass each fired off sustained solos and there in the center of the stage was Marcia Ball pounding the daylights out of the piano. I swear I thought she’d sit on the keys a la Jerry Lee Lewis by the time she two-fisted her last riffs.

The crowd was on its feet. Hell, it had been on its feet well before she finished. Long Tall Marcia Ball’s talent, energy, and spirit is a tonic.  A healthy dose of Marcia Ball, the recipient of the Blues Music Award's “Piano Player Of The Year” in  2005, 2006 and 2007, was a good prescription for the times we live in.

PLAYLIST
Rockin’ Is My Business, rockin' is what we do
I Got My Red Beans Cookin’
Just Kiss Me Baby
It’s Watermelon Time
Peace, Love, and Barbeque
Party Town
Falling Back In Love With You
Sing It One More Time Like That Before You Go
Mama’s Cookin’
If You Don’t Believe Im Leaving, You Can Count The Days I'm Gone
Louisiana 1927
Mobile
The Right Tool For The Job

BAND
Thad Scott, Saxophone
Andrew Napziger, Guitar
Corey Keller, Drums
Don Bennett, Bass

Photography (top) Copyright © 2002 Bob Sekinger

Bottom photo courtesy Scullers web site

Martin Grosswendt: Finger pickin' slide guitar specialist

Singers like Martin Grosswendt are rare birds these days. They carry forward the traditions of the "roots version" of The American Songbook. A Grosswendt concert is likely to be filled with difficult-to-master finger picking and slide guitar techniques that went hand in hand with Blues, Country, and Cajun music that percolated from Tennessee to Texas in the early twentieth century - and was sung by colorful, sometimes charismatic characters who roamed from rural lanes to urban juke joints.

Grosswendt has an archival memory and channels the voices of scores of singers who laid down the musical traditions that modern singers still emulate.

=====================================================================================

Talk about heavenly music. Martin Grosswendt’s performance at the Notlob Music Concert last Saturday night was a little miracle performed on a stage whose Sunday incarnation is as an altar at the Clarendon Hill Presbyterian Church on Powder House Boulevard in Somerville, MA.

Here’s this big guy in a well worn baseball cap, a flannel shirt and jeans sitting on a folding chair in the middle of an unadorned stage and delivering the cleanest finger picking blues you’ll ever hear around here. And when he got down to Louisiana music -mama, look out!

Part of the draw was to listen to him choose from the vast repertoire of roots music he’s been fascinated by for about thirty years. He’s a student of this stuff. He knows the pedigrees of the songs and the life stories of the men who sang them. I’ll bet he could tell a pretty good cultural history of the first half of 20th century America by patching together the hundreds of songs he knows.

He singing voice has a naturalness that fits the songs' emotional cores, with inflections and tone that makes the music so uniquely American. He’s not interested in imitating the voices of the original singers but he sure can play like them, which he did with the six and twelve string guitars that stood in stands on either side of him - and the fiddle that languished in its case till near the end of his one hour set.

Between the vaulted ceiling and the anemic speaker system, occasionally the lyrics and often the singer’s patter between songs were undecipherable… a monumental obstacle to this reviewer straining to hear the background Grosswendt gave before most songs, stories that will go untold here. A blessed exception was the sound emanating from a gooseneck mike aimed right at the sound box Grosswendt’s well-worn guitar.

American roots music spans Blues, Country, Bluegrass, Gospel, Cajun, Zydeco, Tejano, and American Indian. Grosswendt’s selections tonight covered  blues and country from Tennessee to Texas and the Cajun music of southwest Louisiana.

He started the show with “Payday,” a Mississippi John Hurt song from the 1920s and followed that with Josh White’s late 1930s version of “Good Gal.” By this time, the audience sitting in the handsomely curved pews realized they were in for a set of extraordinary musicianship.

You may have heard of Taj Mahal, Dave Van Ronk, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, NRBQ and Sam and Dave. Well, good ‘ol Martin has been an opening act for all of them.

Grosswendt’s cover of “Savannah Mama” by Blind Willie McTell featured another of his talents: slide guitar. Watching a musician coax waves of sound by sliding a metal tube over a ring or little finger and gliding it up and down the frets of a guitar is a window into the past. African American artists like Blind Willie McTell in the early 1920s were among the first to popularize the technique. That slide technique ranges from stompin’ to steamy. Martin can play ‘em both. Gorgeously.

One of Grosswendt's songs was a Blind Blake song called “Police Dog Blues.”  It was a treat to watch Grosswendt's big fingers flutter around the strings and produce that precise finger style blues picking that prompted David Bromberg to say, "Martin Grosswendt is one of the best fingerpickers I ever heard play..."

Grosswendt played “The Good Times Are Killing Me,” an elegant twelve string bottleneck (slide guitar) original, an elegaic instrumental he composed upon hearing of the death of musician friend Jim Ringer and has since dedicated to roots/blues musicians who’ve gone to the great juke joint in the sky. The bottleneck style is a natural fit in a roadhouse but this tune felt right at home in a church.

Grosswendt finished his set with two songs he said were ‘the kind of music you’ll hear in southwest Louisiana, places like Crowley, Opelousas, and Eunice, Louisiana.” His foot stomped the time as he fiddled songs made famous by Cajun masters Dan and Ed Poullard and Andrew Carriere.  I wish I could tell you the names of those songs but I can tell you they had the piquant flavor of a po’boy sandwich with red sauce. If given an invitation, I’d have jumped up to dance a Cajun Two Step right down the aisle.

Many of the songs he played are on his CD "Call and Response," which seems to be available only at his concerts. No website, no email, no marketing, but plenty of talent.

Grosswendt is a member of The Magnolia Cajun Band, a favorite of Cajun and Zydeco dancers all over New England. You might not be able to hear Grosswendt’s virtuosity amongst Magnolia's two fiddles, guitar, washboard, accordion, bass, and drums but you'll damn well hear the vitality he adds to the group's monthly gigs at the German Club in Pawtucket, RI.

If you ever go down there to dance and listen, you can ask him about that CD.

Fat Tuesday with Henri Smith

Fat Tuesday, Slim Crowd, Big Music

A great wave of New Orleans music washed over the cavernous dance floor of the Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge last night. People all over the land celebrate Mardi Gras. Hundreds of dancers should have been bobbing in a Fat Tuesday Frenzy. Inexplicably, the band nearly outnumbered the fans in the audience.

The show got a little promotion from a Boston Globe Calendar announcement and Henri Smith’s live interview with WGBH’s Eric Jackson the week before the concert but, mama, what a crying shame the first set was so poorly attended.

Photo above: Castenell, Heath, Smith (click to enlarge)

Vocalist Henri Smith is the genuine article. He’s served as emcee of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the grand daddy of all music festivals, performed there with the Kermit Ruffins Band, and hosted a popular radio show on New Orleans radio WWOZ.

Looking out at a peanut sized crowd from a stage filled with seasoned musicians was nothing compared to Smith watching his home float away in the fury of an entity named Katrina. His band, New Orleans Friends and Flavours, exploded out of the gate. The front line played as if the joint was jammed with beaded bedecked revelers.

The hell with New Englanders if they didn’t have the sense to show up for an authentic Mardi Gras night. Smith and Company cooked up a gumbo of Funk, Rhythm & Blues, Calypso, Caribbean, Cajun, and Swing as rich as any Fat Tuesday party down in the Quarter.

Smith’s band of saxophone, trombone, electric piano, congas, percussion, standup bass, lead guitar, and harmonica made joyful noise with the kind of Afro-Caribbean rhythms so unique to New Orleans. Trombone player and Chief Energizer Danny Heath led the band with swooping solos and playful shimmies and shakes. Amadee Castenell, Jr. was a force of nature on the tenor sax and flute. Mentored by New Orleans legend Alan Toussaint, Castenell’s riveting solos drove the band to kick it into overdrive.

Smith appeared onstage after the band loosened up with two classic Dixie numbers. Henri Smith knew how to spread the love on the stage. Waving the traditional rag over his head in ‘second line’ tradition, he covered songs by Fats Domino, Dr. John, and Donald Harrison, and managed to sing Frankie Ford’s 1959 hit “Sea Cruise”  Mardi Gras style.

No Fat Tuesday party is complete without Donald Harrison’s “Big Chief,” usually sung on Mardi Gras morning or “Iko Iko,” a much-covered New Orleans song that tells of a parade collision between two "tribes" of Mardi Gras Indians. Full house or not, Smith and his band were putting the calories into Fat Tuesday.

The Middle East’s Downstairs garage-sized dance floor, with its black and gray exposed duct industrial ceiling, is the middle of a fat sandwich with a bar on each side. A few hardy party couples danced away and the rest grooved in awe of the sheer musicianship on display.

Lucky for you, Henri Smith took up residence in New England after Katrina washed his home away. He’s intent on bringing the saucy musical spirit of the Crescent City to the “laissez-les-bon-temps-roulez” deprived residents of New England.

Check out his schedule, Get out your handkerchief or glass Mardi Gras beads and find him at his next local gig. As far as Smith is concerned, the spirit of Fat Tuesday thrives 365 days a year.

New Orleans Friends and Flavours personnel at Middle East Downstairs tonight: this band makes a joyful noise. You'll have a shimmy in your step when you leave and wish you were somewhere in Louisiana strutting your stuff in the second line behind some big-assed brass band.

Henri Smith, vocalist
Danny Heath, trombone
Amadee Castenell, Jr. tenor sax, flute
Tom Yates, guitar
Rick Maida, Bass
Dave Hurst, drums
John Loud, washboard
Ben Selling, Piano

"In Love With Parris" Valentine's Day Concert

Let’s say you forgot the card and maybe even the flowers for your honey on Valentine’s Day. Let’s also say you brought her to the “In Love with Parris” songfest at the Regent Theater in Arlington on Saturday night February 14th. All would have been forgiven.

Vocalist Rebecca Parris transformed the 500-seat theater into an intimate club setting. We sat in the second to last row in the balcony, for god’s sake, and felt royally entertained. Parris tore gems of love songs from the Great American Songbook and imprinted them with her big, winsome, blonde stamp. Parris’s persona, her zany and off the wall patter, and perfect stage presence made this two and a half hour concert a love fest.

From Ellington to Porter, she scatted, vamped, and improvised. Her voice has deepened in the past three decades to a throaty contralto. She glided up and down the tonal register with a honeyed purr, accentuated from time to time with growls and grit.

Every time the show seemed to verge on the sentimental, Parris deflated that mood with campy patter or an upbeat song with bounce and sass. It’s hard to imagine a singer more at home on a stage. From the first song, she owned the audience. And she knew it.

Parris didn’t have to think much about creating a set list. As she said, her catalogue is full of love songs. Several of her selections were lesser-known titles, one by Duke Ellington. Having left my notebook at home, I can't recall the song’s title but assure you that the Duke must have smiled from the choir loft in heaven when he heard Parris crooning it.

Her stylings, from swing to rumba to ballads, are stunning and original. Listening to Parris deliver a song is like driving down a country road for the first time. You’re fairly certain there will be curves and vistas but have no idea when and where they’ll appear. I cant remember a time Ive heard a musician sing with such fresh takes on every song.

Parris and The Brad Hatfield Trio knew exactly where they were going whether the trio was reading the sheet music or improvising on their own. Parris has teamed up with pianist Brad Hatfield and bass Peter Kotrimas for the better part of 25 years and  drummer Jerry Latinni, the newcomer, for two. Parris’s expressive voice may as well have been another instrument that transformed the trio into a quartet.

Parris finished the show with her rendition of  “My Funny Valentine.” The standing ovation brought out one of the most remarkable moments of the evening. In response to a shout from the crowd, she turned to the band and asked, "Can you guys play this by ear?"

It looked like they were caught by surprise but they were game. Parris halted two brief attempts to launch the song. Hatfield found the range - then he and Kontrimas played the daylights out of several solos while Parris creamed a rendition of Ray Charles' “You Don't Know Me.”

A fitting finale to a concert that was the equivalent of two dozen long stemmed roses.

Photo courtesy of Regent Theatre

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade: Atwood's Tavern

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade
Monday, December 29, 2008
Atwood's Tavern
877 Cambridge Street  Cambridge, MA

ptatlarge pulled open the door at Atwood's Tavern on a chilly January night at 9 pm and walked into a wall of sound with about the same decibel level as the right field stands at Fenway Park in the seventh inning.

Everyone in the narrow space leading from the packed long bar down toward the tiny stage at the far end of the tavern had to shout to be heard over everyone else. Midway between Christmas and New Year, everybody had something to shout about.

No way, I say to myself, are Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade going to claw their way through this din.  During the next hour, I decide that Tess could have attracted a crowd on the heeling deck of the Titanic.

If you’ve played in places like the Dogfish Head Brewery in Rehoboth Beach DE, or Callaghan's Irish Social Club in Mobile AL, or Lee’s Liquor Lounge in Minneapolis MN, or the Town Pump Tavern in Black Mountain NC, you’re probably used to having to earn attention from the audience.

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade bust out of the gate with a groove that will last nearly an hour.  The saxophone wails, and Tess belts out a swinging  “Baby Wontcha Please Come Home.” Hell, this little parade is gonna do some shouting of its own. The thirty or so people in the scattering of tables and long wooden banquette applaud. By the end of the first set, patrons halfway to the front door have noticed there’s something special going on back here.

The first set is filled with vintage Tess, a mix of jazz standards and original songs. Her style is rooted in the past without a whiff of sentimentality. This woman can sing the daylights out of a song.

Miss Tess embellishes one chorus of the swing tempo “Saving All My Love For My Baby” by pursing her lips and producing what for all the world sounds like a muted trumpet solo.  The growing slice of audience cheers lustily.

She sings Hoagy Carmichael’s lyrics to Johnny Mercer’s  tune “Skylark” with a take that is as fresh as when the song was first recorded in 1942. The Bon Ton mix of saxophone/clarinet, upright bass, drums, and tonight's guest guitarist Bruce Millard lights the place up with their solos. Miss Tess scats a verse or two with a voice as silky as a young Ella. 

Tess follows up with Duke Ellington’s "Sophisticated Lady," the sax grooving and upright bass thumping along with her playful timing and exquisite alto voice.

By this time you realize what an appetite there is for Miss Tess's interpretations of jazz standards from the 30s and 40s. She then launches into her original compositions, many of them from her 2nd CD “Modern Vintage,” an apt description of her repertoire and style.

“This Affair” is a sly little rumba tempo and the thought is to stick around a minute, pull up a deck chair, and look for the lifeboats later. By the time the band dives into “I Don’t Need That Man,” a few intrepid members of the audience find tiny islands of floor space to dance to the groove. The rest of the crowd is tapping feet and swaying in their seats.

Tess’s musical sensibilities and her band’s versatility are a combustible mix. You’ll hear everything from Django Reinhardt gypsy riffs to ragtime rhythms to country swing to some low down Besse Smith blues.

None of it would mean a thing without the anchor of Miss Tess’s voice - “Stormy Baby” satin, or “I Only Really Miss You When I’m Stoned” sassy, or  “Child Of The Devil” earthy - Miss Tess crosses genres with exquisite  pitch and respect for the music.

So who is this woman?

Miss Tess’s childhood lullabies were the sounds of her father’s big band rehearsing in the family’s cellar right under her bedroom. After studying classical piano as a kid in Maryland, she started on the guitar as a teenager.

To our lasting benefit, she discovered Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaugh and something clicked. She moved to Boston, and formed The Bon Ton Parade - Miss Tess, guitar and vocals; Alec Spiegelman, sax/clarinet; Paul Dilley, upright bass; Gillian DeLear, drums (Rob Rudin tonight) - in 2005. Spiegelman covers an impressive range - Clarence Clemmons growl, Benny Goodman bop, and isn't afraid to go free-form Charlie Parker once in a while.

Miss Tess at 27 is on an upward trajectory. Her music is unique, her talent rich, and her hunger for success great. When’s the last time you saw an artist work the room with a sign-up sheet for her email list, talk up the patrons during a break, then attend to a problem with the sound system before the next set ?

Take my word for it, she won’t have to do this much longer. She was named a "Local on the Verge" for 2008 by the Boston Globe and recently received a 2008 Boston Music Award for "Outstanding Folk Artist of the Year.”

Whether you call her folk, roots, or jazz stylist, you’ve got to call her talented and ambitious. Check out Miss Tess's tour date schedule for proof. You wont be seeing her have to fiddle with the sound system or see her in the back room of Atwood’s Tavern for much longer.

First Set (partial  list)
"Baby Wontcha Please Come Home" - swing standard mid tempo
"Saving All My Love For My Baby" - swing standard mid tempo
"Skylark" Hoagy Carmichael lyrics, Johnny Mercer music - ballad
“Sophisticated Lady” - Duke Ellington standard
"Train' Ride to Caroline" - original uptempo
"I Dont Care If The Sun Don't Shine" - cover of Elvis Presley first Sun record, uptempo swing
"Stormy Baby" - original ballad

Second set (first five songs)
"Bye Baby" - midtempo swing standard
"What they call the Door"- original
 "Drink My Whiskey With A Straw" - original mid tempo swing
Pokey McMumbles, - original
 "Child Of The Devil" - blues standard, down ‘n gritty

Melissa Morgan: Jazz talent needs the right touch

Q. How does an aspiring jazz singer make it from the guppy bowl to the fish tank in NYC or LA? Twenty something Melissa Morgan has talent. What else does she need besides chops and Nancy Wilson as a major influence?

A. She needs her own style.

Sitting poised and collected, surrounded by a snappy trio and a few patrons, Melissa Morgan certainly looked the part.  The raven-haired singer, her lavender silk dress a perfect complement to her tawny skin and shoulder length tresses, red pump dangling from one foot, looked like she just dropped into your living room to sing a few songs from an album she'd just completed.

During her 50-minute performance, Morgan proved she has technique that could some day approach the caliber of her major influences - Nancy Wilson and Dinah Washington. She has an exceptionally clear voice, fine elocution, and timing that grooves with the swing titles and ballads on her set list.

What she did not demonstrate this slow Monday evening was that she has a grip on a style she can begin to call her own. As she launched into each of the seven songs in the first set, I kept hoping she’d stop singing pretty and start singing with conviction. And take a chance once in a while.

Morgan surprised us with an exquisite falsetto register that climbed an octave as she made her way through two lovely ballads. She found the jazz singer she hopes to become with her final song, “Until I Met You,” a Nancy Wilson classic.

 She caressed the lyrics and seemed to forget everything except her memory of being the little girl who sat transfixed as she listened to her grandmother’s record collection and set her sights on a singing career.

This hastily booked appearance, a “showcase performance,” wasn’t on Scullers schedule and was intended to introduce her to an East Coast audience and a few booking agents in the room. Quite possibly it served as a tune up for seven shows in which Morgan opens for Spyro Gyra in the next five days in San Diego and San Francisco.

If I hadn’t bumped into the bass player as I made my way out the door, I’d never have guessed they only rehearsed for a half hour before the show. And that the bassist and drummer from Brooklyn had never met the LA guitar player until that rehearsal. Their solos were crisp and uninhibited, as if they were coaxing Morgan to let out the stops herself. The falsetto register she used to wonderful effect on "Until I Met You" could become part of her emerging signature style.

In time, her inner voice will merge with her outer talent. Or she may never see her own albums where she dreams of seeing them - a few rows away from Nancy Wilson’s in music store racks across the country.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards

David "Honeyboy" Edwards is 93. His face is craggy, his body creaky. Nothing old about his hands though. His finger picking and bottleneck slide work over the frets of his guitar are powerful and inventive. He plays blues songs he learned growing up around Shaw, Mississippi and as an itinerant musician. His spoken and sung words are thick in the dialect of the rural South and the sounds he coaxes from his guitar are echoes of music that drifted over the cotton fields after the sun had set.

As a blues fan, you’d be inclined to want to get to a concert by a musician with a name like David “Honeyboy” Edwards before you knew a damn thing about him. When you found out he is the last of the great Mississippi Delta blues players, is 93 years old, and is on his last extended road trip, you'd trip over yourself getting to the phone to get tickets for his performance. He played to a sold-out Regattabar last Saturday, November 22.

Metal picks on the thumb and forefinger of right hand, bottleneck steel cap on ring finger of his left hand, Edwards coaxes sounds from the neck of his guitar that evoke African American roots music and themes trailing back a hundred years: hard traveling, attempts to make a living, gambling, segregationist attitudes of the South, and of course women - good or bad, sweet or sassy.

Edwards father bought him a guitar when he was thirteen and a guitar has seldom been more than an arm’s length away ever since. From the early 1950s he played everywhere from boxcars and juke joints to little notice. In 1972, he met up with harmonica player Michael Frank while playing on Chicago’s North Side. Frank saw Edward’s potential and has managed and played with him ever since.

When 60’s British rockers like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Paige were asked who inspired their styles, they extolled the virtuosity of men like Edwards, Robert Johnson, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Were it not for music archivist Alan Lomax, the rockers and the rest of the world might never have heard of Edwards. Lomax's mission in life was to preserve traditional music and promote cultural equity. Impressed by Edwards’ makeshift style and chord changes, Lomax recorded Edwards on one of his trips through Mississippi in 1942.

Edwards is a relic of the Deep South in more than one way. His Delta dialect, especially when singing, is so thick I couldn’t make out more than a repeated chorus or the first few words of each song. If I hadn’t listened to a few clips of his music on youtube before I went to the show, I wouldn’t have had a clue of the lyrics of “Gamblin’ Man.”

Nothing undecipherable about his musicality though. His finger picking, slide work,  rhythm and timing patterns are echoes of music improvised and played for entertainment of field hands and revelers a century ago. Both Michael Frank and guitar accompanist Rocky Lawrence often held back before adding their licks because they couldn’t predict precisely where Edwards would go from bar to bar. Neither could we and it made up for the frustration of not being to comprehend his lyrics.

Mr. Frank realizes that Edwards is a rich source of oral history. Toward the end of the set he prompts Edwards with a Q and A session. The result is a spellbinding glimpse into history. He told the story of his first public appearance. “I was so small they put me over in a corner in the shadows so no one would see me. I only knew a few songs but I played ‘em all night and the people were so happy to have music they didn’t care.” We have to listen intently to interpret his dialect but the stories are riveting.

 One story recounted why black people went out of their way not to drive through Georgia. Another recounted the time he and a blind musician were hitchhiking, were picked up by a truck that stopped a few miles down the road, and each handed a sack and told to get into the field and pick cotton.

“Musicians like him usually only get honored when they die, “said Greg Sarni, who sat at the next table and struck up a conversation when he saw me scribbling in my notepad. “I booked him for our Boston Blues Festival several times. We honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.” He generously handed me a copy of “Live at the Boston Blues Festival, Vol. II” on which Honeyboy Edwards graced the cover of the Blues Trust’s CD.

Born in 1915 to sharecropper parents in Shaw, Mississippi, fifteen miles from the great river, David “Honeyboy” Edwards is one of the last living gateways to our musical and cultural past.

From being picked up on a dusty road and told to pick cotton for $.75 a day to head-lining concerts at major venues across the country, from being jailed for vagrancy for walking the streets on a weekday in  Mississippi to looking into the White House and seeing a black man as president of the United States of America, this man has seen it all.

Whether or not he made money or gained recognition,the blues of the Mississippi Delta is in his blood. He can't stop singing it any more than he can stop breathing.

David "Honeyboy" Edwards is 93. His face is craggy, his body creaky. Nothing old about his hands though. His finger picking and bottleneck slide work over the frets of his guitar are powerful and inventive. He plays blues songs he learned growing up around Shaw, Mississippi and as an itinerant musician. His spoken and sung words are thick in the dialect of the rural South and the sounds he coaxes from his guitar are echoes of music that drifted over the cotton fields after the sun had set.

As a blues fan, you’d be inclined to want to get to a concert by a musician with a name like David “Honeyboy” Edwards before you knew a damn thing about him. When you found out he is the last of the great Mississippi Delta blues players, is 93 years old, and is on his last extended road trip, you'd trip over yourself getting to the phone to get tickets for his performance. He played to a sold-out Regattabar last Saturday, November 22.

Metal picks on the thumb and forefinger of right hand, bottleneck steel cap on ring finger of his left hand, Edwards coaxes sounds from the neck of his guitar that evoke African American roots music and themes trailing back a hundred years: hard traveling, attempts to make a living, gambling, segregationist attitudes of the South, and of course women - good or bad, sweet or sassy.

Edwards father bought him a guitar when he was thirteen and a guitar has seldom been more than an arm’s length away ever since. From the early 1950s he played everywhere from boxcars and juke joints to little notice. In 1972, he met up with harmonica player Michael Frank while playing on Chicago’s North Side. Frank saw Edward’s potential and has managed and played with him ever since.

When 60’s British rockers like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Paige were asked who inspired their styles, they extolled the virtuosity of men like Edwards, Robert Johnson, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Were it not for music archivist Alan Lomax, the rockers and the rest of the world might never have heard of Edwards. Lomax's mission in life was to preserve traditional music and promote cultural equity. Impressed by Edwards’ makeshift style and chord changes, Lomax recorded Edwards on one of his trips through Mississippi in 1942.

Edwards is a relic of the Deep South in more than one way. His Delta dialect, especially when singing, is so thick I couldn’t make out more than a repeated chorus or the first few words of each song. If I hadn’t listened to a few clips of his music on youtube before I went to the show, I wouldn’t have had a clue of the lyrics of “Gamblin’ Man.”

Nothing undecipherable about his musicality though. His finger picking, slide work,  rhythm and timing patterns are echoes of music improvised and played for entertainment of field hands and revelers a century ago. Both Michael Frank and guitar accompanist Rocky Lawrence often held back before adding their licks because they couldn’t predict precisely where Edwards would go from bar to bar. Neither could we and it made up for the frustration of not being to comprehend his lyrics.

Mr. Frank realizes that Edwards is a rich source of oral history. Toward the end of the set he prompts Edwards with a Q and A session. The result is a spellbinding glimpse into history. He told the story of his first public appearance. “I was so small they put me over in a corner in the shadows so no one would see me. I only knew a few songs but I played ‘em all night and the people were so happy to have music they didn’t care.” We have to listen intently to interpret his dialect but the stories are riveting.

 One story recounted why black people went out of their way not to drive through Georgia. Another recounted the time he and a blind musician were hitchhiking, were picked up by a truck that stopped a few miles down the road, and each handed a sack and told to get into the field and pick cotton.

“Musicians like him usually only get honored when they die, “said Greg Sarni, who sat at the next table and struck up a conversation when he saw me scribbling in my notepad. “I booked him for our Boston Blues Festival several times. We honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.” He generously handed me a copy of “Live at the Boston Blues Festival, Vol. II” on which Honeyboy Edwards graced the cover of the Blues Trust’s CD.

Born in 1915 to sharecropper parents in Shaw, Mississippi, fifteen miles from the great river, David “Honeyboy” Edwards is one of the last living gateways to our musical and cultural past.

From being picked up on a dusty road and told to pick cotton for $.75 a day to head-lining concerts at major venues across the country, from being jailed for vagrancy for walking the streets on a weekday in  Mississippi to looking into the White House and seeing a black man as president of the United States of America, this man has seen it all.

Whether or not he made money or gained recognition,the blues of the Mississippi Delta is in his blood. He can't stop singing it any more than he can stop breathing.

Amanda Shaw, Chad Huval Play Cajun at Johnny D's

The Rice and Gravy at Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant and Music Club last week was found on the stage, not the plates of the patrons. And that was just the appetizer. Chad Huval’s Rice and Gravy trio opened for Amanda Shaw and The Cute Guys. The two bands filled the funky Somerville club with warmth of southwest Louisiana, an antidote to Hurricane Gustav’s nor’easter swirling down the streets outside.

Both bands played the bouncy Cajun, Creole, and zydeco dance music that was born in the bayous west of New Orleans. None of this music is authentic without a fiddle or an accordion. Chad Huval and his beautiful squeeze box sat center stage for the first set flanked by veteran Martin Grosswendt and Chris Ash, of Magnolia Cajun Band fame.

 Ash sat in for fiddler Darren Wallace, who injured his elbow, and had about two hours notice to pack up her fiddle and head from Westport, MA to Davis Square in Somerville. “She’s playing on adrenaline and fear,” joked her husband from the bar. And talent, of course, which is why Huval reached out for her in the first place.

Martin Grosswendt, playing guitar for over thirty years, is one of the country’s premier interpreter of Delta and Piedmont blues. He’s renowned for his blues singing, and slide guitar and finger picking expertise. All three took turns singing the French lyrics and playing sweet solos.

It didn’t take long for Huval’s cheery band to coax the audience to their feet. Several adventurous men and women who didn’t know two-step from tango got out on the dance floor to join veteran dancers. The idea of Cajun music is to have fun. By the time Rice and Gravy finished their set of two-steps, sweet waltzes, and snappy zydeco, the crowd had an idea of the music played somewhere in Lafayette, LA every night of the week.

After a quick break, it was Amanda Shaw’s turn. Amanda Shaw is a twenty-year-old fireball of a fiddle player. The five-footer is Cajun to the core. With the first few driving beats of the drums and Shaw’s slashing fiddle, the energy level and decibels got dialed up a few notches. Her band, The Cute Guys, often consists of local musicians she finds for the gig. Joe Ferron, bass, Stuart Star, drums, Greg Mayo, guitar, were able sidekicks this night but Shaw is the show.

 Her stage patter voice sounds disconcertingly like a teenybopper’s but when she sings, you imagine her kicking up sawdust on the stage of the Grand Old Opry, sort of like a young Brenda Lee with attitude. For the dancers in the crowd, the set was a blend of slow and fast swing, waltz, two-step, boogie-woogie, and zydeco.

Shaw drove through a non-stop first set with most of the tracks on her 2008 CD “Pretty Runs Out.” Shaw thinks nothing of transposing pop lyrics over her country roots music. It works. A zippy “French Jig” is followed by a slinky cover of The Clash's “Should I Stay Or Should I Go.”  When she introduced the traditional “Acadian Waltz,” her voice was filled with reverence for the traditions into which she was born…and was born to play.

If you combined a go-go dancer with a fiddle prodigy, you have some idea of how Shaw delivers her music. Bow slashing, brown ponytail switching, she’s a whirl of elbows, knees, hips. The rosin she vigorously applies to her bow between songs keeps it from catching on fire.

She wore her Louisiana heart on the sleeve of her white blouse when told the heartfelt back story about the bluesy ”Chirmolito,” (co-written by Shannon McNally) inspired by Mexican workers who sang to themselves at night after helping to rebuild Shaw’s Katrina-damaged house in New Orleans during the day.

When Amanda was 14, Academy Award nominated film maker Greg McGillivray was searching for four established and up and coming musicians to narrate and add music to a documentary sounding a warning to the accelerating loss of wetlands in the bayous, the buffer between the coast and New Orleans. Shaw was the youngest chosen. The IMAX film explores the natural environment and cultural treasures of Southern Louisiana. The result was “Hurricane on the Bayou.”

“Wetlands are a speed bump against storms,” she said in the documentary and on the stage on Johnny D’s. On August 1, 800 people (including ptatlarge, who shares the same birthday) packed Mid City Lanes just outside New Orleans, to celebrate Amanda Shaw’s 20th birthday. She sent the $8000 raised at the door to “Voice of the Wetlands,” a coastal restoration advocacy group founded by Houma, LA guitarist Tab Benoit. Until those wetlands are restored, Shaw and other like-minded musicians are speed bumps with fiddles, accordions, and guitars.

The audience was made up of dancers who think nothing of driving an hour or two to step out to the sounds of Louisiana music and the curious who wanted to expand their musical horizons. By the time they left Somerville, everyone inside had a whiff of the Gulf Coast.

Susan Huppe: Dancer With A New Orleans Cause

When Sue Huppe learned to speak French, it didn’t occur to her that it was the first step on a winding road that would lead her to help organize a fundraiser to rebuild New Orleans.

A Watertown resident for the past 9 years, she’s been dancing since not long after her first wobbly steps out of her playpen in Delaware. Her day job as a Certified Holistic Nutritionist and Herbalist pays the rent but dancing feeds her soul. One of her first thoughts after listening to a few bars of music is, “What kind of dance can I do to this?”

Twenty years ago, Ms. Huppe drove down to the Cajun and Bluegrass Festival (now called the Rhythm and Roots Festival) in Charlestown, RI. To her delight, much of the music was buoyant, infectiously happy, and sung in the Acadian brand of French spoken in southwestern Louisiana. She was hooked.

In time, she traveled to New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country, to absorb the culture, learn Cajun and Zydeco dance styles, and listen to music that just about everyone in southwest Louisiana knows how to dance to. When she returned, she was eager to keep on dancing. Believing that Cajun Two Step would find an audience in the snowy North, Huppe decided to make it happen by teaching it to others.

The world of dance began to unfold for her. While teaching her specialties of Cajun and Zydeco, she branched out to learn and teach ballroom, latin, and east and west coast swing at Adult Ed classes in Newton, Cambridge, and Boston and at Springstep in Medford. She taught several of these styles at Dancing Feats for 14 years.

“Each kind of dance has its own flavor and allows you to express yourself in different ways. The most important things are to have a feel for the music and feel the connection between you and your partner,” she said.

When Baton Rouge native and Needham resident Rebecca Wilson decided to create a fundraiser to help the post-Katrina rebuilding programs in New Orleans, she knew who to ask for support.

“I took my first zydeco lesson from Sue four years ago. We connected right away because of our shared appreciation of all things Louisiana,” Wilson said.

Wilson knew that Ms. Huppe was acquainted with the organizers of large events since Huppe had taught at the Williamstown Jazz Festival, Swingin’ New England, and Strawberry Park’s Blast From the Bayou. Ms. Huppe is now one of the core group planning an event to raise $10,000.

 “The great contacts she’s made as a dance teacher helped us put this event together,” Wilson said. “She knew which venues would suit our purposes. Some of the organizers she knew offered tickets to their events for our raffle and linked our web site to theirs.”

The “Help ReBuild New Orleans” fund raiser will be held at Springstep in Medford on Sunday, October 5, from 5 - 9 pm. Proceeds will be donated to Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based non-profit organization whose office is in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.

The non-profit group partnered with a licensed general contractor and is rebuilding homes destroyed in Katrina’s wake, and offers legal assistance to homeowners who do their own work to cut through red tape involved in applying for building permits and inspections.

Common Ground Relief has also begun a job training program, placing locals with professional carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who are volunteering their time. One of the members of Wilson’s planning group volunteered his plumbing and carpentry skills to the organization several times in the past two years.

The fundraiser will feature the same vibrant music that first attracted Ms Huppe. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues, Cajun, and zydeco. The bands and vendors offered discount rates since they realize every penny will go toward building houses in the Lower 9th Ward. Tickets are $25.00 in advance and may be purchased through the Help ReBuild New Orleans web site www.rebuildneworleans.net.

“What is fun about teaching dance? Everything!” Sue Huppe said. “Remembering what it is like to be a beginner and seeing the joy it brings to people, in fact, seeing how it can change people's lives!”

The "Help ReBuild New Orleans" fundraiser is a testament to that.

Boston Dance Raises Roofs in New Orleans

Music and politics are unlikely dance partners, but Needham’s Rebecca Wilson is determined to match them up. The Baton Rouge native has been dancing to the music of Louisiana for as long as she can remember. A Mardi Gras dance at Ryles in February, with its infectiously happy music and outlandish costumes, captured the indomitable spirit of Louisiana’s “Let the good times roll” for Wilson. It also reminded her of the dark cloud of uncertainty hovering over some quarters of New Orleans.

“As a native of Louisiana, I go back fairly often, so I’m acutely aware of how New Orleans is struggling to fully recover. Many people haven’t come back yet because they have no homes to come back to. I want to harness the New Orleans spirit that I felt that night at Ryles and use it to make people aware that the recovery is ongoing,” she said. 

As a tourist, Wilson’s friend, Somerville attorney Phil Woodbury, had also been mesmerized by the music, food and vibrant street life of New Orleans before Katrina.

“Like many, I watched in horror the pictures of flooded homes and helicopter rescues, and was shocked to read of the slow and chaotic federal response,” Woodbury said. He heard about Common Ground Relief, a small volunteer based group dedicated to immediate cleanup and long-term relief. He packed his bags. His first two trips were in February and April 2006.

Since the group had several legal projects, including eviction defense and police brutality issues, he thought his legal background would be tapped. “But when the v olunteer coordinator noticed that I had put ‘plumbing’ on my list of skills, I got an immediate call, and reported to a house used by the health clinic staff for offices, overflow exam rooms, and sleeping,” he said. By the time he left, there were two functioning bathrooms and a score of grateful volunteers.

A well-timed letter from Woodbury, who happens to love dancing, sent sparks flying in the local zydeco community. His appeal for money, prior to his return to New Orleans in 2008, saying, “Common Ground’s goal continues to be to help restore the Lower 9th Ward by rebuilding homes and by helping bring back the schools, churches, and cultural events that make community possible,” arrived around the same time as February’s Mardi Gras dance. 

It’s hard to tell what synapses need to be triggered to transform a person from a spectator to an activist. Wilson knew that Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, and other musicians lost their homes in the Lower 9th. She felt that government agencies had been slow to aggressively support rebuilding there. She had witnessed New Orleans musicians play their hearts out in spite of the pain of being displaced. She vowed to make some music of her own.

  Wilson and a core of music lovers created "Help ReBuild New Orleans" to raise awareness and money for the rebuilding effort in the Crescent City. They’re soliciting donations and selling tickets to a music event slated for October 5. Two bands playing a variety of Louisiana based music - blues, New Orleans funk and zydeco - and a great dance floor are all in place. Now they need to fill the hall and raise the money.

Wilson and her cohorts have been bitten by the grass roots bug. They hand out flyers and talk it up with every dancer, band member, club owner and just about anyone else they encounter. Good promotion is the only way they'll reach their goal of raising $10,000.

After research, they decided to send the proceeds to the spunky Common Ground Relief organization whose office is situated on Deslondes Street, in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, a few hundred yards from the levee that was breached in 2005.

Seven days after Katrina devastated New Orleans, four activists launched the Common Ground Relief Collective. It was a grass roots effort and has stayed true to its mission. Short term, the goal is to rebuild. Long term, the goal is to address social and political inequities that the organizers believe have plagued the area long before Katrina put it on the national map.

The ambitious outfit is entirely staffed by volunteers. Rebuilding homes and repopulating the neighborhood with its former occupants is just one part of its mission. Its initiatives are a gumbo of socially progressive programs, including toxin removal, legal assistance, and restoration of the wetlands that have historically protected Louisiana. It’s also one of the 10 organizations in Lower Ninth Ward Community Coalition with the “Make It Right” Foundation begun by Brad Pitt.

Wilson visited Common Ground Relief’s headquarters in August. She talked with Operations Director Thom Pepper, who arrived from Miami to help with the relief operation in 2006. He’s watched the focus change from relief work to rebuilding.

Their assortment of muddy rooms filled with cardboard filing boxes, folding chairs and scrounged desks, has been supplanted by a modest two story building in the heart of the 9th ward near the Industrial Canal. The compact structure contains small rooms for meeting and planning, computers wired to the internet, space for a few office staff volunteers, a shower, and cots for the weary.

 “At the end of 2007 spring break, we were having 500 volunteers a week coming here gutting houses and we were cooking 11,000 meals every week on propane stoves in a tent,” Pepper said. Volunteers distributed food and water, set up a legal clinic, a power tool lending library, a clothing center, tested soil and did massive amounts of house gutting.

By October 2007, the house-gutting program was mostly completed and the process of pulling house permits began. Common Ground Relief turned its attention to the rebuilding process.

“We partnered with a licensed general contractor here in Louisiana to build houses. We’ve begun a job-training program, hiring local people and training them in construction skills, and they will be hired to build and do interior finish work here,” Pepper said. Volunteer professional plumbers, electricians, and carpenters help in the training program.

If Pepper can hire and train 60 to 80 local people this year, he estimates that Common Ground Relief could build a house every three months. In spite of a sense of urgency, obstacles exist. City Hall is open weekdays 9am to 4pm, not convenient for working people.  Pepper has lobbied for satellite offices with longer hours to make it easier for people to pull building permits. It hasn’t happened.

Pepper emphasized that this is a long-term project. “Eighty percent of New Orleans was in six feet or more of water. This house we use as our office was under 18 feet of water for three weeks, as was most of the Lower 9th,” Pepper said. “To put this in perspective, it took Miami 10 to 15 years to recover from Hurricane Andrew.”

   Common Ground has benefited from the help of 20,000 volunteers since 2005. At the time Wilson visited this summer, Pepper said there were 30 volunteers, a half dozen of them long term, who get room and board for their efforts.

 “We don’t accept federal, state, or United Way money. All our funding is from foundations and individuals,” Pepper said. "The money allows us to go out to the wetlands and plant trees and grass, do soil testing and bio remediation, and allows us to keep people from having their homes foreclosed. It allowed us to put an 80 year old woman back in her house a hundred yards from here."

Common Ground Relief has agreed to use money raised by Help ReBuild New Orleans exclusively for rebuilding homes. Every penny from Wilson’s Help ReBuild New Orleans fundraiser will be spent on lumber, sheetrock, roofing and the like.

Wilson’s planning group loves the potent culture of music and dance that makes New Orleans vital and irreplaceable. By the time their fundraiser is held at Spring Step in Medford on October 5, they intend that a few hundred New Englanders will become honorary Louisianians for a day.

“I want to capture the joy New Orleans generates and to remind people that this unique city is still suffering.  New Orleans needs a rebirth. Pull out your wallets and put on your dancing shoes. This is an opportunity for all of us to help with the baptism,” she says with a smile.

Re-Build New Orleans with a wiggle and your wallet

You can take the girl out of Louisiana but not the Louisiana out of the girl. It’s been 27 years since Rebecca Wilson left behind the magnolias, festivals, and gumbo, but her soft Louisiana accent remains. Wilson grew up in a culture in which music and dancing were akin to eating and breathing.

For as long as she can remember, just about anything worth celebrating was done to music. Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, church events, births, and a few other things best left unmentioned. In New Orleans, tears were shed when someone died but the trip to the local cemetery might have been made with the assistance of a bumptious brass band. Nothing, not even death, could muffle the music or deter the spirit there.

That is until Katrina, an unwelcome guest that barged into New Orleans with mayhem in mind. The hurricane wreaked havoc on a city, a culture, and a musical heritage. We saw photos and video of the devastation, people holding on for dear life on their rooftops, then the aftermath of displacement and despair.

It was by far the costliest hurricane to strike the United States - at least 81 billion dollars in property damage. One in 25 people in New Orleans are homeless, double pre-Katrina statistics. FEMA still pops up in the news as do stories of inability, perhaps incompetence and indifference, in rebuilding the hardest hit wards of New Orleans.

The storm swallowed the most vulnerable parts of New Orleans then puked them out in a mass of fetid muck, wooden debris, and sodden dreams. Along with livelihoods, homes, and neighborhoods, Katrina tore at the heart of New Orleans - the music scene. Fats Domino lost his home in the ninth ward and everything in it, including his Steinway piano. Irma Thomas lost her home and her nightclub was a shambles. Marva Wright lost her wedding rings, her mother’s photographs, and the home which housed them. The list goes on.

Wilson’s a dancin’ girl. The sound of funky blues, zydeco, or Cajun music gets her looking for the closest piece of real estate she can find to dance to the music. She’s been known to pull off the road to haul her companion from the car, turn the car radio up to ten, and dance to her heart’s content.

The still-unsettled future of New Orleans gnaws at her. A Mardi Gras party at Ryles in February jolted her into action. “There were three different bands playing various types of music that originated in New Orleans. All that joie de vivre came from the love of all things New Orleans – the music, the outlandish celebration of Mardi Gras, the let-the-good-times-roll spirit, among others.  I felt a pang of sadness at what a treasure New Orleans is and how it’s struggling to fully recover and get its mojo back.”

“I’ve attended the benefits organized by New Orleans musicians. Their sadness is palpable,” she said. “Many shed tears as they performed. They told of losing prized instruments, music awards, and their sense of community.” Money, always tight for musicians, is scarce, and many have yet to rebuild. Their community, once close, is now spread over several states.

From her frequent visits to New Orleans, Wilson knows the devastation was widespread and that musicians and the poor weren’t the only ones to be displaced. “A couple of middle class neighborhoods were hit hard too.  My niece has friends who lost everything, because everything they had was tied up in their homes.  Some people have established lives for themselves in other parts of the country, but many simply can’t go home because there’s no home to go back to.  With no or not enough money from their insurance companies and in many cases no way to reinsure their homes, they’re stuck in limbo,” she says.

A successful interior design consultant, Wilson is a self-starter. She believes the plight of New Orleans has dropped off the radar screen. She intends to do something about that.

Wilson is the point person for an October fund-raiser “Help Re-Build New Orleans.” All money raised, after event expenses, will go directly to Common Ground Relief to be used specifically to repair and rebuild housing in the areas of New Orleans hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina.

“I want to capture the musical heritage of New Orleans for people who want to help and to remind people what’s at stake.” she says. Two local bands, Slippery Sneakers and The Chili Brothers, will perform a mix of New Orleans style funk, blues and zydeco.

New Orleans has given the country much. If you've ever shuffled your feet, taken your love in your arms, and just felt the cares of the world lift momentarily from your shoulders as you've listened to The Big Easy’s music, it is time for you to give something back.

Here’s where to start: http://www.rebuildneworleans.net/

New Orleans photo credits:  Areas in New Orleans still suffering from the effects of Katrina
photographed in January, 2008 by Dr. N.C. Briggs and D. Brower

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade:Modern Vintage at Toad

Toad
1912 Massachusetts Avenue (Porter Square)
Cambridge, MA 02140

Miss Tess and The Bon Ton Parade
First set, May 11, 10 pm

It might be 10 pm Sunday night, the work week a few hours away, but no need to hurry home just yet. There’s a little lady on stage sporting a jaunty black cap and a shiny electric guitar who’s got your foot tapping and head bobbing to an irresistable swing beat.

The twenty-somethings who crammed into this tiny neighborhood bar at 10 pm on Sunday nights have grown up on hip-hop and rap but the way they cheered every song Miss Tess and the Bon Ton Parade played, they could have been bobbi soxers and their beaux listening to their favorite crooner in the 1940s. Miss Tess has style way beyond her own twenty six years. When your dad is a Big Band leader and your mom plays upright bass, you tend to inherit an eight bar sensibility.

The Bon Ton Parade perches on their little float at the far end of the dimly lit bar and launches into its first set. There’s nothing old fashioned about the tight trio of saxophone/ clarinet, bass, and drums that make up this ensemble.

The group opens with a mid-tempo swing standard, “Nevertheless (I’m In Love With You)”, Saxophone, upright bass and drums each take a brief solo that puts us on notice that they’re feeling the vibe. Tess’s muted guitar licks are polished, with a lineage that harkens back to Chet Atkins and Les Paul.

Their second CD, “Modern Vintage” is loaded with a dozen originals that have the flavor of jazz, blues, and swing from the 20s to the 50s. They fill the next hour with a heady mix of these originals and standards.

Miss Tess’s meal ticket is her voice. Her supple alto has the smoke of Norah Jones and the playfulness of Madelyn Peyroux but there’s nothing imitative about it. She gets a rowdy response from the audience when, in the midst of her original "Saving All My Love", she purses her lips together and produces what for all the world sounds like a muted trumpet solo.

Tess’s vocals, her band’s coiled energy, and an engaged audience are like a slowly burning fuse. Everyone’s getting a bang out of this show.

The original ballad “Stormy Baby” is one of those songs you inexplicably find yourself humming on the way to work the next day. As she does on one or two other songs, Tess punches it up when she allows her voice to break into a higher register at the tail end of a lyric. The mid-tempo “Pokey McMumbles” gives her sax man a solo that snakes between twinkly Benny Goodman and growly Clarence Clemmons and Tess a chance to dish out another one of those lip-buzzing trumpet solos.

The only song that didn’t find a home was a Tess original "One Rainy Day."  Perhaps more cerebral than swing, it seemed out of synch with the rest of the show.

Next thing you know, Tess tosses an accelerant into the set with “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans”. Cajun lick sax solo, Tess’s deft guitar picking and velvet voice are organically matched and get the patrons at Toad hollering as the first set came to a close.

So here we are, 11:30 at night, Miss Tess sipping Jameson from a glass tumbler and crooning music you don’t hear on your radio dial. We’ve heard her cover swing, jazz, blues, country, and Cajun styles with smart interpretations of each. There’s a sunshine-in-a-bottle quality to her voice and Monday morning seems a long way off.

First set list
"Nevertheless" - an old swing standard
"Saving All My Love" - original
"Oh No" - original
"Stormy Baby" - original
"Pokey McMumbles" - original.
"It's a Wonderful World" - swing standard
"One Rainy Day" - original
"Give It Up" - Bonnie Raitt
"Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" - standard
"Train Ride to Caroline" - original

http://www.misstessmusic.com/

The White Owls:Gritty Blues, Gritty Bar

White Owls Band
Sally O'Brien's Bar and Grill
335 Somerville Ave, Somerville, MA 02145
617-666-3589
Open 11 am - 1 am

If you’re looking for a launch pad to rocket your blues lovin’ soul into the work week, head over to Sally O’Brien’s Pub on a Sunday night. The resident rocker scientists, headed by Dennis Brennan, will put you in a feel good orbit that will have your feet tappin’ and bottom shakin’.

Brennan fronts the White Owls, a cover band that produces two liquid nitrogen-caliber sets of hardcore blues every Sunday. Sidemen Mike Dinallo (guitar), Dean Casell (bass), Steve Sadler (laptop steel), and Andy Plaisted (drums), rock like it's still Saturday night.

Blues is Brennan’s oxygen. He’s been writing, singing, and scratching out a career since 1992. If you can imagine the hardscrabble life of a musician perpetually just outside the gates of fame and fortune, you damn well know Brennan is pouring it out from his gut. After he grabs a down and dirty ballad or up-tempo number by the throat, there’s no way his bandmates can mail in their solos. They’re too proud and too good to do that anyway.

Tonight’s crowd was thin but Mike Dinallo and Steve Sadler played as if booking agents filled the place. While tipping their hats to the gritty bluesmen that preceded them (see Brennan’s set list below), they gleefully lay down their own inspired licks. Dinallo’s soaring, imaginative riffs had Sadler grinning as he plucked, thrummed and at one point induced amp feedback as part of a solo that careened deliciously into the rafters.

Sally O’Brien’s is one of a handful of Cambridge/Somerville pubs that serve great live music with the beer. Lest anyone lose sight of the bottom line, the two 42-inch HD plasma TVs set upon the brick wall behind bar are dwarfed by the Guinness sign. The ten taps halfway down the bar finish the motif and can wash down the authentic Irish, Mexican, Italian, and American foods on the menu.

A small stage set on a dias, a postage stamp dance floor, and a scattering of high cocktail tables are on the far side of the waist high wall that separates the bar from the lounge. On this night, a few dancers boogie, swing, and grind away. If you’re a dance and blues hound, find this place on mapquest.

The place is a local hangout. You will not see BMWs parked on the street outside. You will hear brogues still thick from the trip across the pond. And on most nights you’ll hear very American music. Check it out for yourself.

Partial list - first and second sets.
The music honors early bluesmen who blazed a trail while battling cultural bias and lack of means.

"Route 66", blazing treatment of 1946 Bobby Troup song
"Strange Things Happen', written by Percy Mayfield 1950 slow blues
'I Aint Mad At You', originally performed by Maggie Campbell, Thomas Johnson 1928
'Whole Lotta Rockin Goin On'
'Stranger Blues', The Crusaders 1960
'This Is The Last Time I Fool With You'
'Mona', written by Bo Diddley 1957
'That’s All Right', written by Arthur Crudup 1954
'I cant do it all by myself', Sonnyboy Williamson II 1955
'Somebody Got To Go', written by Gatemouth Moore 1945
'Fever', written by Little Willie John 1937

Session Americana:Teeny Table, Big Sound

Session Americana

Lizard Lounge, Cambridge, MA
April 8, 2008

Ry Cavanaugh - guitar, mandocello, vocals
Dinty Child - mandocello, fiddle, banjo, guitar, accordion, keyboards, vocals
Billy Beard - drums, vocals
Sean Staples - mandolin, mandolincello, fiddle, guitar, vocals
Kimon Kirk - bass, vocals
Jim Fitting - harmonica, vocals

A bloom of oriental rugs, a few ancient church pews and assorted tiny tables and high backed chairs trademark the rouge-illuminated basement of the Lizard Lounge, the place that is a Petri dish for some of the most talented acts germinating in Boston.

The first thing you noticed tonight as you peered into the middle of this little hideaway was the teeny wooden table surrounded by a several chairs in tight formation and a collection of well-used instruments: guitar, bass, mandolin, banjo, accordion, mandocello (ok, I had to ask someone about that one) and harmonica. On the perimeter were a no-frills drum set, a dowdy looking piano and an electric keyboard sitting on a case that appeared to have been
carted over mountains by mules.

Once again, the Liz has pulled a rabbit from the hat. Actually six rabbits, veteran musicians all, who stumbled upon a concept quite by accident 3 years ago and have become a cult favorite in the area. This would be Session Americana, currently in weekly residence on Tuesday nights.

The six guys crowded around the teeny round wooden table occasionally passed instruments around like chips with the beer. One by one they leaned into the omnidirectional mike to take their solos while the others sat back and sang choruses. For all the world it looked like six friends at their Wednesday night poker game, pints of beer perched precariously on the shared table.

The set list seemed spontaneous. “Let’s do ‘Sometimes I Forget,’” says Ry Cavanaugh. A cascade of banter ensues, then Cavanaugh leans into the mike and sets off, blazing the trail for tempo and feel of the arrangement he wants to try out tonight.

I have no idea of the titles of most of the songs they sang, save one or two like a catchy rendition of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That A Shame”, and a sweet Mills Brothers classic “You Always Hurt The One You Love.” The songs were plucked from some Great American Songbook In The Sky full of lesser known ballads, folk, gospel, and bluegrass titles.

What I do know is that the music was by turns rousing, uplifting, infectious, mournful, lilting, churchlike and profane. And the audience, some of them casually sitting around the floor near the musician’s table, apparently a custom at the Sessions concerts, was eating it up. Lurking somewhere in the intimate cellar was the spirit of the Grateful Dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to smell patchouli and see love beads for sale outside at some future concert. But I digress.

The audience became witnesses at a jam session between guys with prodigious memories, pumped-up musical abilities, and a profound ability to enjoy the hell out of each other’s singing and bonhomie.

They are singing from their hearts and from the seats of their respective pants. The hoohaaas and smiles are genuine as they end a song on the same beat with the same emphasis. Intuition and faith are running rampant here. The singers go for it, stretch lyrics, improvise, and feed on the creativity jangling all around the table. No one’s afraid of making a mistake. It would surely be greeted with a friendly guffaw, then turned into something beautiful or outrageously funny.

Three years ago, Cavanaugh, Beard, and Staples finished a set at a nearby Cambridge club. The next act was a no-show. Cavanaugh unpacked his mikes, set them on a little table, and the three of them, like Joplin’s Bobby McGee, sang every song they knew. Weeks later Session Americana was formed. They were nominated for ‘Best Live Act” in this year’s Boston Music Awards. Their website is http://www.sessionamericana.com/

These guys rock. Their catalog has amazing breadth. They are virtuosos on their instruments, and damn! - they know how to have a good time.

Next time they’re in town, check them out.

Dennis Brennan Band

Dennis Brennan Band
10 pm Show
Lizard Lounge, Cambridge, MA
April 9, 2008

Dennis Brennan is not easily intimidated.

A less assured bandleader would have turned out the lights and said goodnight after his pal, former J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, stepped in to electrify the tiny club with two R&B classics, the second being the popular “Give It To Me”, which would have rocked spectators in the last row of the Fleet Center.

Instead, Brennan, whose band is the regular Wednesday night gig at The Lizard Lounge, nodded his head, grinned “What a showman,” and carried on as if the interlude had been inserted by an upstart high schooler.

Brennan has zings. He kept the train chugging with an uptempo version of Lickety Split then sweetly brought it into the station with a mighty soulful version of “Living in a Fool’s Paradise.”

The man from Marlborough, MA, has been scuffling in the local music scene since 1992. Despite solid reviews, a firewall seems to surround his popularity, relegating him to regional fame. Maybe it’s just as well. Dennis is not an arena performer. He’s very persuasive in small clubs as an in-your-face rocker and balladeer. When he belts out a song, it’s from his gut and it’s for real.

Brennan has range. Don’t be surprised to hear twangy Merle Haggard covers of “You Don’t Have Very Far To Go” and “Skid Row” follow a blistering rocker.

The miking at the Liz made it hard to hear the lyrics of his rock‘n roll songs. It hardly mattered since most of the crowd that drifts in here every Wednesday knows the songs by heart. And when Brennan reaches back to gut out Sam Cooke covers like “Living In A Fool’s Paradise,” there’s an ample sampling of booty shakin’ in the standing audience.   

A self-described blue-collar rocker,  Dennis Brennan resembles an eastern version of Lyle Lovett, craggy, unassuming, understated. His sidemen Duke Levine (on one or the other of the collection of guitars near his feet), Kevin Barry on laptop steel and guitar, Billy Beard on his well-traveled drum kit, and bass player Andrew Mazzone are cream-of- the-croppers. They’ve appeared with Mary Chapin Carpenter, Paula Cole, and Patty Griffin. Several of tonight’s songs were from Brennan’s fifth CD since 1989, a 2006 CD “Engagement”, on which all tonight’s sidemen played.

All of these guys are part of the local scene and play gigs with other bands on a regular basis. Barry and Levine can and did play solos ranging from liquid thunder to poignant heartache. You’d dig listening to any band these four guys are part of.  Tonight I missed the first three songs of Brennan’s set. I wont make that mistake next week.

Partial set for Wednesday, April 9, 2007
“If you’re tryin' to break my heart you don’t have far to go” cover of Merle Haggard tune
“Skid Row”, cover of Merle Haggard tune, up-tempo
“Personal Assistant”, on latest album Engagement
“Miss  Maybelle,” upbeat Mississippi blues
“Sugar Falls”, on latest album Engagement
Three songs by guest Andrea Gillis
“Mother-in-Law Blues,” Junior Parker cover
Two songs by Peter Wolf, first title unknown, second “Give It To Me”
“Lickety Split,” (possible title?)
“Living In A Fool’s Paradise,” cover of Sam Cooke ballad

Jammin' in JP, Part 2

Jammin in JP2
Jam sessions: Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian
Jamaicaway Books, 676 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, 617-983-3204
www.jamaicawaybooks.com

First things first. These guys have got the goods. Nevermind, they may never have played together, or that they may be playing a song for the first time.

Jam sessions like this are more likely to take place at 2 in the morning rather than at 2 on a Sunday afternoon. But an afternoon audience is exactly what the organizers want.

Musicians stroll in as the session unfolds, unpack their gear and step up to play. They might not know each other’s names but they speak the same language: tempo, major and minor keys, and feel.

This jazz is totally accessible. No dense Coltrane, no frenetic Ornette Coleman, just songs plucked from the thick Great American Songbook charts the guys pass around if they’re not familiar with the arrangement.

The afternoon has the intimate feel of a documentary film. Oblivious to us, one of the guys says, “Do you know Miles’ version of Time After Time?” They banter about the difference between Cyndi Lauper’s and Miles Davis’s versions, agree on what key to play in, decide on  “16 bars and a 4/4 intro” and light into the music.

For the casual listener, this is a primer on how musicians go about their business and how utterly at home they are no matter where they are. When vocalist Fulani Hayes says, “What’s your name?” to Earle Lawrence as she introduces the band not long after Lawrence tore the house down with his solo, you realize you’re witnessing a true jam session.

The Jam Sessions have been organized by Ms. Hayes and Cornell Coley. Both are driven by the desire to teach as well as perform. Hayes infuses her introductions to songs of the 20s, 30s, and 40s with anecdotes that reflect her pride in the African American men and women of Harlem, Chicago, and the Deep South who pioneered this music.

Coley has worked for 25 years in community development through the arts and education as a producer, coordinator, administrator, fundraiser, performing artist, writer, facilitator and mentor. This afternoon he’s the slyly entertaining man behind the drum kit.

Hayes says the first half of the afternoon is usually the regulars: Fulani herself, Cornell Coley, and standup bass player Larry Roland. The second half of the afternoon program showcases the people they’ve invited to come in and play.

This week’s lineup: Aurelio Ramos, software writer, today an assured keyboard player; Earle Lawrence, middle school teacher, today an imaginative soprano sax and flute player; and David Ehle, longtime jazz guitarist and friend of Coley’s, who plays the circuit from nightclub to senior citizen homes.

This being a musician’s world, schedules are often improvised and today is a providential example. Aspiring young bass player Dan Janis, who lives three streets away from the bookstore, happens to come in because he’s heard of the place. ‘Sent from heaven today,” says Coley, “our bass player cant come. Unpack your bass and step in.”

Toward the end of the afternoon a musician named Hilary steps in to man the congas and play a sensational flute. The miracles keep on popping up.

“The place didn’t always look this good,” says Hayes. “I rummaged around my own cellar found material for table cloths, objects to brighten up the place, bought the little baskets which we load with chips, and improved the lighting.”

“We want this to be intergenerational and educational,” Hayes continued. “With the arts being cut in school, we want to have place for young listeners to come and enjoy music that may be their heritage. We want to expose kids to jazz.”

Near the end of the jam, Hayes invites 7-year-old Marcel to the stage. Nearly dwarfed by the conga drums he sits behind, he gets a touch of stage fright.

“Let me start you off,” says Coley. After about 16 beats, little Marcel’s feet begin tapping and his hands get to work. “He’s right on the time!” Hayes nods approvingly. Marcel finishes, Hayes takes him by the hand to the center of the makeshift stage and tells him to take a bow. The people in the  basement of Jamaicaway Books cheer lustily.

This is exactly what the musicians want - spread the word of the gospel of jazz. and insure that this music is taught, nourished, and thrives in the next generation.

My bet is that Marcel will be there on the congas again next week. Maybe he’ll bring some pals.

Some of today’s playlist
Time After Time
Body and Soul
On A Clear Day
Summertime
Blues Bossa
All the Blues
Girl From Ipanema
Take the A Train
Watermelon Man
That’s All

Jammin' in J.P.

Jam session: Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian
Jamaicaway Books
676 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, 617-983-3204
www.jamaicawaybooks.com

A jam session? Jamaica Plain has a reputation for the quirky assembly of restaurants, bakeries, ethnic stores and coffee shop that line Centre Street, the main drag down  the middle of town. But a jam session? On Sunday afternoon? In the basement of a bookstore?

You’d never know about it unless you happened to walk right by the sign in front of Jamaicaway Books proclaiming "Jazz, Latin, World Beat, Pop, Folk, Brazilian - Today 2 pm - 5 pm."

Never mind the small crowd. The musicians were having a grand time. Singer Lisa Law, who performed in her church choir in Dorchester earlier in the day, reeled of a searing rendition of “The Nearness of You” and scatted up version of ‘Route 66”. Fulani Hayes followed with  “Georgia on My  Mind” and the Duke’s “Take the A Train”.

In a space this tiny, it’s like having an ensemble play in your living room. The fun of listening to a group of musician’s who haven’t played with each other before is watching them signal  each  other for solos, changes of tempo, and timing to end the tune. Band leader for the day Hakim Law on electric keyboard played graceful ballads or laid down funky rhythm and blues riffs. A glance at Cornell “Sugarfoot” Coley or Larry Roland, and they got busy on percussion and standup base, respectively.

Larry Roland has toured with Miles Davis in his early days. Coley teaches percussion down here.   Coley and singer Fulani Hayes decided to “do something to involve the community” and came up  with the Jazz Jam idea. Conga player Les Wood dropped by as did a local horn player, and they all teamed  up to pass a chart around and play a cool AfroPop version of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Black Nile.”

A couple of college kids, a family including youngster who’s studying drums, a sprinkling of other passers-by, didn’t jam the place but the music certainly did.

The noble idea may not take off but for a measly $5.00 contribution,it’s the best jazz you’ll find around these  parts on a Sunday afternoon.

Lizard Lounge: Underground music scene, really...

Setting the scene:
Greater Boston is blessed with a handful of small music venues that have as much 'character' as the musicians that play in them. Escalating rents,changing demographics in neighborhoods, and pressure to wring as much money per square foot from real estate has caused some of these places to shutter their doors.
Like lizards themselves, The Lizard Lounge has survived over time. At the moment, this quirky place is thriving with local acts hoping to flourish and veteran acts who've become part of the local scene. It's anyone's guess how long its run will last.

Lizard Lounge
1667 Mass Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138
Monday 9pm - 1am, Tues and Wed 7:30pm -1am, Thurs - Sat 7:30pm - 2am,
Sun 7:30pm -1am
617-547-0759
http://www.lizardloungeclub.com/main.html 

Whether you like music or not, visit The Lizard Lounge as if it were a cultural artifact, an installation you’d see in the Smithsonian Institution next century under the heading “funky rock, folk/pop, blues, acid music scene in the late twentieth early twenty-first century”.

From the street, push open the door that heads downstairs, into what was likely a storage area for the Cambridge Common, the large Mass. Ave. pub with the polished wood bar, wooden booths, rivers of tap beer, mountains of good cheap pub food on the main level.

The Lizard Lounge doesn’t try too hard to impress. It’s one of its endearing qualities. The proprietors knew they weren’t gonna make silk from a sow’s ear - but create a terrific little joint to hear homegrown live music…yowzahh.

So down the stairs you go and enter a softly welcoming, reddishly lit… basement.  The room’s a little gussied up but it doesn’t take much to imagine the beer cases, kegs, broken barstools and the like that formerly inhabited the space.

Smack in front of you at the bottom of the stairs is what we’ll charitably call the stage, a twelve by ten space covered with two oriental rugs, assorted mike stands, amplifiers, speakers and a somewhat battered piano.

Rickety small tables surround the stage. More oriental rugs cover the floor and snake under a nook of booths at the far end of the room.  The back wall is mirrored to give the illusion of space. The stand up bar isn’t much longer that two guitar cases but is stocked with a serious assortment of your favorite beverages. This basement has style.

Check out the burgundy velvet curtains softly lit behind the bandstand and the black painted overhead ducts and ceiling. Substitute couches for the tables and you’d have the salon of a New Orleans bordello.

The Liz qualifies as a ‘scene.” The jambalaya crowd is a mix of regulars, partisans of the band, and the adventurous looking to find a diamond in the rough. Amongst the torn jeans and studiously casually attired younger crowd you’ll see the occasional boomer in relaxed fit Levis. The music is original, eclectic, and fearless.

Most come to listen. Alas, even in music rooms like the Lizard, a small but annoying minority treats the live music as if it were a jukebox. The woman twitting a non-stop one-way conversation with her friend next to me at a recent Jennifer Kimball concert, blurted, ”I love that song,” after talking every second through it.
I rolled my eyes, wishing she noticed, and moved to stand in back of the sound engineer, whose console was ten feet from Kimball on stage. Perhaps subject for another story, the need for some people to downgrade from multi-tasking to just paying attention during a live music presentation.

Every Sunday night features “The Legendary Lizard Lounge Poetry Night” with the Jeff Robinson Trio working around poetry slammers of all stripes.

In the Darwinian culture of music, most of the performers here will never have the good fortune to live off their music. But from the broth of places like the Lizard Lounge emerges singers, songwriters, and musicians who who’ve become solid local performers or well-known household names. You won’t always like the music but you’ll see a place where it is born.

Music rooms like this may be an endangered species. Check the web site, pick a night, and capture the scene.

Carrie Newcomer: from the heart and the heartland

The distinct register of Carrie Newcomer's buttersmooth throaty alto singing voice immediately separates her from the folk/pop pack. The singer/songwriter from Indiana visited Club Passim in Cambridge, MA on the second stop of her tour to promote her new CD "The Geography of Light."

To see lyrics, listen to clips of her music, and find out more about what makes her tick ( and sing) visit her website at http://www.carrienewcomer.com

Carrie Newcomer
Club Passim, Cambridge, MA, February 21, 2008
Gary Walters on Kurzweil electric piano

Carrie Newcomer’s singing voice is one of those “Beam me up, Scotty” instruments that seems to transport a listener into a state of grace. After the first few minutes of being sonically bathed by her honey rich alto, a listener’ sits back, involuntarily releases tension in the shoulders, and smiles. On a recent night at the venerable Club Passim in Cambridge, MA an audience was about to hear 75 minutes of “the world according to Carrie”.

She writes the music as well as she sings it. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, somewhere in Newcomer’s music you can find universal truths sketched in small details of everyday life. She’s a perfect antidote to the noise all around us - unsettling world crises, economic recession, random acts of violence, and the chatter of talk radio.

She’s no Pollyanna, though, and is not blind to loss, grief, or injustice. She just counters it by putting lyrics and melody to the indomitable spirit that can endure it, survive it and gather strength from it.

“I know that we have failed,
But I’ve seen that we can fly.
There’s goodness on this earth that will not die.”
she sings in “A Mean Kind of Justice.”

It takes confidence, talent and deeply rooted beliefs to put this stuff over.

With shoulder length auburn hair that matches the amber waves of grain of her native Indiana, Carrie Newcomer ‘s songbook is pure heartland. Expect rich melodies, wry guitar picking and echoes of folk, country, rock,and gospel traditions.

The song “Betty’s Diner” encapsulated the character of an entire town and Newcomer’s sensibilities as a songwriter. The song’s chorus shows an eye for detail that melds time, place, and the human condition, in which ‘despair and hope sit face to face.’

“…here we are all in one place
the wants and wounds of the human race
despair and hope sit face to face
when you come in from the cold
Let her fill your cup with something kind
eggs and toast like bread and wine…”

Club Passim was the second stop of her tour to promote “The Geography of Light,” her eleventh CD for Rounder Records. Her songs have been inspired by the poetry and stories she’s written, contacts with other writers, and her Quaker faith. But just as often, they’re inspired by observing what’s right under her nose, giving the songs a spinning-straw-into-gold quality

The axis of many of her songs is personal observation, what she calls ‘paying attention’ the world around her. Geodes are commonplace sights around her southern Indiana home, bumpy gray stones on the outside, with gorgeous crystal formations in their centers.

She sings
“You cant always tell one from the other.
And it’s best not to judge a book by its tattered cover.
I have found when I tried or looked deeper inside.
What appears unadorned might be wondrously formed.
You cant always tell but sometimes you just know.”

Underlying the philosophic, reflective tone of this album is a sense of affirmation.
“Leaves don’t drop, they just let go,
And make a place for seeds to grow, ” she sings on “Leaves Don’t Drop.”

For her, “There is a song at the center of things,” including her dreams, reading list, and personal experience.

“I’ve come to believe that mystery is as near as my front porch," Newcomer says when she introduces “There Is A Tree”, and proclaims,
“I’m the fool whose life’s been spent
Between what’s said and what is meant.”

When the set threatened to slide into sonorous monotony, Newcomer hauled out goofy upbeat songs like “Bowling Alley Baby” and “E-mail”. The songstress had all of us singing the “Don’t Hit Send” chorus and chuckling at her comment “Merlot and email don’t mix well.”

“Why do I do this, I ask myself, “ she ponders before her last encore number.
Her answer, “You get where you want to go but rarely where you thought you’d be.”

That just might have the makings of a future song.

Photo courtesy of Carrie Newcomer's web site

McCoy Tyner still going strong

McCoy Tyner Trio with Christian Scott
Regattabar
Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
December 28, 2007
First set

McCoy Tyner’s two hands can still generate thunder on the keyboard. His measured, tentative walk to the stage at the Regattabar Friday night suggested the legendary 69-year-old pianist had slowed down physically. Once he sat down in front of the Steinway, he hit the speed limit and, with one exception for a ballad, kept the pedal to the metal for the whole first set.

Tyner played his classic up-tempo “Blues On The Corner” in characteristic two-handed style. He plays east to west on the keyboard and hits most of the eighty-eight keys on his way through a tune. (Note: a piano tuning specialist tweaked the piano back into shape during the break between first and second sets.)

His patter between numbers was poorly miked and a bit rambling but his playing was crisp and powerful. To trade chops with Tyner, who played with his “hard bop’ mentor John Coltrane, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones, you’ve got to have the goods. Trumpet phenom Christian Scott matched Tyner’s speed and clarity with confidence.  Upright bassist Gerard Cannon ranged impeccably up and down the neck of his upright bass and drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt used every part of his drum kit on his solo.

McCoy Tyner was a seminal force in improvised jazz for the second half of the twentieth century, releasing nearly eighty albums under his name. He expanded his range by incorporating the sounds and rhythms of music from Africa and Latin America. Best known for his work with his trio, he’s arranged for big bands and even released his renditions of Burt Bachrach’s songs.

Mortality has a time signature of its own. Some in the sold-out house harbored the suspicion that this could be the last live Tyner performance they’d witness.

The man who played in the 1960s with John Coltrane when he was seventeen, the man who has become a legend himself, isn't ready to play in the past tense. With the third release for the McCoy Tyner Music label scheduled for this fall, Tyner shows he's ready to make his mark on the twenty-first century.

Andy Bey:incomparable jazz stylist

Andy Bey
Regattabar, Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
December 21, 2007
First set

When Andy Bey sings a jazz standard, he plants a flag on it and claims it as his own. After listening to Bey’s version of “Ain't Necessarily So,” the first song he played in his opening set at the Regattabar, the audience was momentarily still, unwilling to disturb the breathtaking beauty his voice cast over the room. A moment later, a torrent of applause filled the vacuum.

Fans had come to take in a rare appearance of this re-emerging jazz stylist whose singing pedigree goes back to the 1960’s. Bey massaged the languid ballad, stretching lyrics with his sweet falsetto vibrato or amping up with a fierce gospel-like wail. The occasional fraying of his multi- octave range voice gave the bluesy song a satisfying edge.
How on earth did he find so many ways to reinvent the familiar lyrics and melody? He spent the rest of the set doing similar alchemy with most of the songs on his newest CD release,  “Ain’t Necessarily So.”

His trio’s opening instrumental proved Bey’s chops on the piano. His playful sense of humor surfaced after he introduced upright bass player Joe Martin and drummer Vito Lesczak. "You all know who I am, but just in case: My name is Ziggy Marley," he said, referring to his physical stature and the long dreadlocks hanging over his shoulders.

Bey signing CD's after the show

Fuse the sound of Nina Simone, Tony Williams and Billy Eckstein and you get the feel of Bey’s first lines of Mary Rogers’ “Hey, Love.” Bey played sinuously with melody and lyrics, delicately fingering keys and pounding chords to pop the song’s achingly sweet, melancholic core.

By the time Bey sang the up-tempo, scat driven Rogers and Hart “All The Things You Are” and then launched Ellington’s “I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart,” I thought, “Where has this guy been all these years?”

After shooting out of the gate in the late 1950’s and 1960’s and hailed by the likes of Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, and Lena Horne, Bey sank below the radar in the 1970’s. By the mid 1990’s he came out as openly gay and HIV positive and ready to resume his career on his own terms. Lucky for us.

Stepping away from the piano. Bey said, “I want to sing music that inspires me to this day,” With Lesczak and Martin riding shotgun, he charged through a driving scat laced version of the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis tune “Cheryl,” and somewhere in the midst of it cracked up the audience with a chorus of “White Christmas.” What a ride.

Back to the piano, “OK, guys how about a graveyard tempo.” Bey counted out his trademark, “ahhh…ahhh… ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh” and wrapped his supple baritone around a cover of “On Second Thought.”

Referring to his 68 years, (“Not too fast, guys”) Bey ended the set with an edgy, up-tempo “Brother, Can You Spare Me A Dime.” Martin and Lezchak left the stage. Bey remained and seemed genuinely surprised and grateful for the thunderous applause. The man has had his trials. He's lived the songs. The fervent demonstration of awe and appreciation must have felt good to him, as would the standing ovation a few minutes later.

By the time Andy Bey finished his encore of “Someone To Watch Over Me,” you knew you’d heard something special - and visceral. The man sings and plays with a sense of emotional immediacy, tenderness, pain, loss, and resilience. This is not just performance. This is catharsis, survival, reincarnation - the residue of the life of a man who’s looked into the abyss and stepped back to join us. Yes, someone has watched over Andy Bey.

Louisiana Red, Delta blues from a man who's lived it

Every so often a person gets a hankering. Maybe for a cheeseburger, medium rare with crispy fries, or a hot fudge Sundae with whipped cream and nuts, or, in this case, a gigantic helping of The Blues. If you happened to get the hankering on Saturday night August 25, you hustled over to The Boston Blues Festival Legends Revival, a banquet of bluesy sound organized by the Blues Trust. Like the Last Supper, the servings of the good stuff came later in the night (in this case, after intermission).

Ten seconds after his black shoes tapped out the beat for “Leave My Woman Alone,” Louisiana Red transformed the musical spirit in the theater from artful imitation to authentic, gritty, gut-felt singing and guitar picking that come from raw talent and personal experience.

Red didn’t need a brass and reed front line to buttress his singing. Delta blues is predominantly guitar and harmonica based. Mouth harp player Lazy Lester (whose act would follow Red’s) and keyboardist David Maxwell would do just fine, thank you.

Red was not mailing his music in. Watching his lanky frame stooped over his guitar and the silver metal sleeve over his finger flash as he slid it up and down the frets, you could almost see him indulging in a ‘whooo, that’s the first  time I did it like that’ grin after he heard himself pick through an especially creative improvised riff. This music is his oxygen.

It was “all in” time on stage. Lester and Maxwell dug deep to match Red’s improvisation. We spectators were treated to a jousting match between friendly rivals who weren’t gonna be upstaged.

The primal force of Red’s music, the utter match between his instrument, emotions and words, transported us to the Mississippi Delta of the mid twentieth century.

We were ripped from our sedate emotional moorings and swept into a churning sea, swirling on the transcendent acoustic currents Louisiana Red let loose. This was not just singing. This was catharsis.

The man has jammed with B.B. King, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker but he doesn’t sound like anyone but Iverson Minter, born in 1932, better known as Louisiana Red. You wonder how these Delta blues are in his blood? You wonder why he’s called Germany his home for the past twenty years. His father’s death at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in 1941 and newspaper headlines about persistent race-based problems in his native land might have something to do with it.

His intro to a song on one of his CDs goes like this: “The blues is a thing one has to feel in his soul, you have to  feel it in your heart, you got to live it day by day. You got to feel insults, you got  to be throwed out into the streets several times, you got to be put in jail many times before you learn  the blues. This little song I learned in prison is called Parole Blues.”

The youngest of authentic, roots-based bluesmen are in their seventies. Seventy -five-year- old Louisiana Red has returned to the US every summer for the past seven years.

If we’re lucky, he’ll be here again next summer. And if you’re lucky, you’ll go listen to him rock the house.

Leah Souza, aspiring vocalist with good genes

Leah Souza and the Leah Souza Trio, with special guest Johnny Souza
Ryles, 212 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, MA
www.ryles.com

Leah Souza’s dream to break into the jazz scene may or may not happen but it won’t be from lack of support. The trio that played behind her last night at Ryles in Cambridge would have been at home sitting in with a singer with far greater name recognition. Pianist Michael Shea and bassist David Landoni were the chief instigators in the evening’s creations. Once Souza established the tempo and sang her first stanzas, this little duet went to town exchanging improvised riffs that had them grinning and the audience applauding.

“We don’t have formal arrangements for the songs,” drummer Rick Klane was overheard saying to a patron after the first set. “Michael gets an idea going and he and Dave take it on after that. I go along for the ride and fill in on my own.” The playing behind Souza was spirited and tight.

The other Souza on the stage, special guest Johnny Souza, happened to be Leah’s dad - and does have name recognition. The Chet Baker-smooth trumpeter has been a fixture on the regional music scene for years and sat in on several of his daughter’s songs.

Leah Souza’s been listening to music since she was a kid in Plymouth, MA. “I started singing pop music as a teenager. My dad introduced me to jazz a few years ago and I got hooked.”

The dark haired 24-year-old has a dusky mezzo-alto voice that can shift into a pleasing upper register.  It’s no surprise that she occasionally grooves on the scat style of her mentor, veteran Rebecca Parris,  Souza’s phrasing, as evidenced by her renditions of first set standards of “Autumn Leaves”, “Nearness Of You”, “September In The Rain”, “Night And Day”, and “Summertime”, was pleasingly fresh.

Souza’s singing meshed seamlessly with the elegant stylings of her dad’s trumpet. One of the night’s highlights was their sweet vocal duet of Horace Silver’s “Song For My Father” backed up by Johnny Souza’s velvety trumpet soloing.

The young songstress knows what she wants. “I don’t have a day job. I want to have a career in music. I really like Kurt Elling. Others who’ve influenced me are Diana Krall, Natalie Cole, Frank Sinatra, and Dianne Reeves,” she said. Singing professionally for nearly four years, she was at ease fronting a band. This was her third performance at Ryles.

While she’s clearly in tune with her band, Souza often seemed to teeter off pitch as she shifted between notes in her phrasing. If she can overcome this distraction, Leah Souza wont be scanning advertisements for a day job anytime soon.

For more about her, see www.leahsouza.com

The Little Coffee House That Could

Lincoln Street Coffee
15 Lincoln Street
Newton Highlands
617-244-1600

Sippy cups and coffee cups. That’s what you saw on the little round tables. Kiddies, adults in various states of advancement, and a sprinkling of teenagers sending and receiving text messages were plopped in wire backed chairs and well-worn sofas and easy chairs around the confines of the L shaped interior of, well, a coffee shop. Oh yeah, and two musicians in the far corner playing two sets of lovely music over the occasional ssshhhh-ing of a latte maker and yelps from toddlers wanting their mommy’s attention. All of it is incongruously chic.

Monday through Sunday this little locally owned emporium serves exclusively roasted premium coffees and a select menu of soups. salads, sandwiches, baked goods and homemade Italian gelato. But on Friday nights, it’s as if Cinderella’s prince stumbled in by mistake and discovered a perfect fit for the glass slipper. For only two hours, between 7 and 9pm the little place is turned into the most unlikely coffee house - as in live entertainment - that you’ve ever seen. By 9 pm, as if Cinderella’s coach has arrived to whisk her home, the night’s two sets of mu sic are over and Lincoln Street Coffee reverts to its quieter self.

Lincoln Street Coffee is delightfully unassuming. The terra cotta shaded walls give the L-shaped shop a cozy feel. Before Friday’s music begins, owner Peter Meyer shoves a few overstuffed couches and armchairs around to make a stage setting in the front corner of the room and voila, a stage is created.

It’s quite possibly the only time in ages that the young parents have been out en famille, aside from the shopping at Stop and Shop or a trip to the grandparent’s house. Patrons and musicians show forbearance for toddlers’ enthusiasm realizing this may be the rare night the young parents will have cultural contact with the civilized world. And in fact the place has set up a kid’s corner with a little library. As they say on their web site,  “We know how it feels, we have kids too.”

The music is as rich and various as the coffee beans the Meyer’s import from around the world. Tonight there’s singer-songwriter Michelle Cummings, a 24-year-old Berklee College of Music graduate, softly singing songs from her new EP “Wallflower.”

Two hours of music by up-and-comers. Whether they make it big-time or not isn’t the point here. The deal is that you’ll hear fresh music, watch couples make small talk on their first dates, see how moms or dads can sip coffee and hold a sippy cup up to their child’s lips at the same time, and maybe munch on one of the tempting scones or biscotti in the bakery case.

And it’s absolutely free.

For the menu, music schedule, and other facts about Lincoln Street Coffee click
http://www.lincolnstreetcoffee.com/index.html
To hear Michelle Cummings, click
http://www.michellecummingsmusic.com/

Marcia Ball, Louisiana R/B Bayou Queen of the Piano

Marcia Ball
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA
January 24, 2007

Heads in the crowd were bobbing, bodies shimmying to the beat, and patrons hooting and whistling after each song. This wasn’t Avalon, or even The Orpheum in Boston. It was the Regattabar in Cambridge. This, my friends, is not standard operating procedure for the staid jazz bar on the second floor of the Charles Hotel.

You might witness theatric behavior outside the hotel, say, in Harvard Square, where street jugglers, magicians, and itinerant musicians operate in extroverted bliss. But inside the Regattabar? I don’t think so.

The long-legged woman pounding the daylights out of the electric keyboard would have been right at home doing it outside where the action is fast and loose. But there she was on stage, Marcia Ball, dazzling a mostly middle-aged bunch of closet rockers out of their minds.

Marcia Ball is not a household name in these parts but apparently every household in which her name is known was attending this show. Or the next set or the two sets on Thursday because the place was packed and every show sold out. What’s the deal?

Ms. Ball is the real deal when it comes to Texas blues, Louisiana R&B and Gulf Coast swamp pop. If she hasn’t written the book about the genres, she’s been singing them for thirty years. If you saw her in the Harvard Coop, you’d assume that the prim looking, gray haired, ramrod straight, six-foot woman wearing the scoop necked jersey top and ankle length black skirt was managing a nearby library.

Uhn, Uhnn. What she was in charge of that night was a crack four-piece band that played a brand of honky-tonk and bluesy Texas/Louisiana music so hot the patrons in the front rows had their eyebrows singed.

If you’ve ever wondered how residents would recover after two fierce storms named Katrina and Rita beat down Louisiana and left it for dead, listening to Marcia Ball’s music would explain a lot.

The howling wind and surging water crushed dance halls, diners, restaurants, and theaters where the locals congregated. Entire neighborhoods disappeared. When the water receded, the first thing some of these people did was to dig barbecue pits and figure out a way to sing and dance again.

The predominant themes of Gulf Coast music are family, good food, and good lovin’. It must be said here that it’s often hard to distinguish exactly whether what’s cooking is gumbo or hormones.

Ball’s sous-chefs for the evening were Mike Keller (guitar), Chad Scott (saxophone), Cory Keller (percussion), and Don Bennett (bass).

“I Got My Red Beans Cookin’” got the audience loosened up with Ball’s honky-tonk piano, Scott's hard driving sax, and Keller's guitar solo. “Just Kiss Me Baby (“that’s all you have to do, and I’ll be satisfied)”was a satisfyingly standard bluesy number until young Mike Keller unleashed a slow, sensual guitar solo that made you realize that a kiss was just the beginning of what the lady had in mind. Keller fingered the strings with just the right rhythm for kissing and other activities then finished with a lightning lick that brought fans out of their seats. Judging from the audience’s raucous response, Keller’s bluesy frankness might have postponed many couples’ sleep for an hour or so when they got home.

Born in Orange, Texas, in 1949, Ball’s life was transformed after she heard blues legend Irma Thomas when she was 13. When Ball formed her first band, Thomas’s songs were on the playlist. Watch Ball's fingers and elbows roam up and down the keyboard you can even see a shade of Jerry Lee Lewis. She does everything but plunk her fanny on the keyboard as Lewis used to do.

The relatively small room, and ragingly devoted audience ignited a two-hour concert (titles below).

Up-tempo songs like “Gonna Forget About You” and Zydeco chugging “That’s Enough Of That Stuff” were setups for ballads like “Every Day Will Be A Holiday When My Baby Comes Home” and slow burners like a cover of Etta James’s “Good Rockin’ Daddy.”

By the time Ball joyously sang “The happiest I’ve ever been, is when my feet are on the road to sin,“ a refrain from swamp boogeying “La Ti Dah, " the steadily eroding façade of Brahmin reserve had completely broken down. People were boogeying in their seats, some while hugging their partners. “No matter how long you’ve been gone, we’re going to party till you come home,” she sang. Baton Rouge could have been just outside the door.

Ball often looked up from pounding the keyboard to smile broadly at the audience and easily filled a few minutes between several songs to tell tiny stories while the band took a breath. One that got a big laugh came before she sang about her youth in her home town in “Down The Road, ”- “The rules changed at the river” (border between TX and LA), she said. “You could drink legally in Louisiana at age 18, not 21 as in Texas, so on Saturday nights bunches of Baptists from Texas crossed the bridge and acted like Catholics.”

By the time Randy Newman’s “Louisiana, 1927” was over you could smell the gumbo in the pot, hear mothers calling their kids home for dinner, and feel homesick for a state a thousand miles away that you’ve never set foot in.

The set ended with the Bayou anthem “Crawfishin’”. “Bring cousins by the dozen and tell them to bring some wine, we’ll go crawfishin’ and we’ll have a real good time.”

I’ve already packed my bags.

For more about Marcia Ball, click http://www.rosebudus.com/ball/index.html

+++++++++++++
Playlist of first set at Regattabar, January 24, 2007

“Rockin’ Is Our Business”
“Red Beans”
“Just Kiss Me Baby”
“Gonna Forget About You”
“That’s Enough Of That Stuff”
“Every Day Will Be A Holiday When My Baby Comes Home”
“Good Rockin’ Daddy”
“La Ti Dah”
“Buck Town”
“Yeah Baby I’m a Red Hot”
“Mama’s Cookin’”
“Mobile (AL)”
“It’s A Miracle”
“Down the road”
“Sing It”
“I Love You Baby”
“Louisiana 1927”
“Crawfishin’”

Encores - three of ‘em
“Louella”
“She’s So Innocent”
I was so busy clapping that I didn’t write it down

Toad revisited, Shwang swings

Toad revisited -Shwang with Anita Suhanin
Toad, 1920 Mass. Ave, Cambridge, MA 02140  • 617-497-4950
November 20, 2006

ptatlarge revisited Toad last Monday, caught Shwang’s second set and wondered why he ever went anywhere else on Monday nights. http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2005/08/shwang_with_ani.html

Anita Suhanin and company have got to be one of the best little cover bands in town. This woman effortlessly swings from blues to ballad; her tiny band locks into her stylings and nails solos that cause the patrons to holler in appreciation. The narrow place was packed to the gills, all eyes were on the tiny bandstand at the end of the matchbox of a bar, and the band was revving up and downshifting as they followed Suhanin’s slalom through the set.

The bartender was pulling drafts by the bucket. Customers preemptively drain a couple of inches off the top so they don’t end up wearing their pints while they bob heads and jiggle body parts as they stand, which half the crowd had to do, and keep time with the music. The band’s synergy and raw talent threaten to burst the joint’s seams with joyous vigor.

Lou Ulrich, Andy Plaisted, Anita @ Amazing Things Arts Center [photo M. Moran]

Normally either Duke Levine or Steve Sadler plays guitar for Suhanin. “Play” is such a lame word to use to describe what they do. Either guy regularly brings the house down with his talent. When both of them show up, as they did tonight, you get a seismic set on the order of 6.0. Levine tends to finger the frets to coax imaginative lyrical riffs and nimbly pick his way through a down and dirty lick. Sadler wraps his big paws around the neck of the guitar and chokes it with gorgeous plangent chords in raw roadhouse style. When they solo in tandem, delirium ensues.

The well is deep. Anita Suhanin has an overstuffed black notebook filled with hundreds of songs she likes, including a generous handful of her lovely originals. When she feels like a change of pace, she riffs through the book, pulls a rabbit out of the hat, calls the title to the band, claps out the time signature, and they’re off. She actually cradled the book in her hands as she refreshed her memory about the lyrics of the Platters’ ‘Twilight Time.’

The work week hasn’t even dried off from being delivered on Monday morning and we’re rocking here. Show up at Toad any Monday night between 8 and 10 and I guarantee you’ll leave humming at least one song you heard and saying to yourself, I gotta come back here next week.

Second set playlist

• ‘Sugar’ - a ballad penned by Suhanin. Suhanin gets warmed up, Levine and Sadler follow suit.
• ‘Slowly but Surely, I’ll find my way in’- a ballad penned by Suhanin. Anita closes her eyes, rocks back on her heels and croons poignantly, Levine and Sadler solo with trademark virtuosity.
• ‘Things to remember’- by Willie Nelson. Upbeat swing with monster Sadler solo
• ‘”Til I kissed ya’- Everly Brothers. Up-tempo beginning, downshift to slower ending with Sadler.
• ‘Never go home’- Up-tempo blues number written by Anita Suhanin.
• ‘Twilight time’ - The Platters, for god’s sake! Anita is reading lyrics from her big song book and ends with slow vamp.
• ‘It’s a sin to tell a lie’- a Slim Whitman version of this old swing tempo song. Levine hits his notes in a Les Paul mode, Sadler answers Levine’s solo with trademark chunky chord changes. Suhanin ends with yodeling the lyrics. Oh, yeah.
• ‘Have love, will travel’- this funky hard driving tune from the fifties features a Lou Ulrich solo on bass and Andy Plaisted solo on drums before Levine and Sadler nearly torch the joint with pile driving, amplifier defying solos.
• ‘If I had feelings’- wtitten by Noam Weinstein. Suhanin sings an achingly sweet bluesy ballad, the kind you end up humming all the way home.

http://www.toadcambridge.com/
http://anitasuhanin.com

Shemekia Copeland belts out the blues

Shemekia Copeland
Grammy-nominated soul and blues singer
Regattabar, Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
Second set
November 16, 2006

Shemekia Copeland knows how to belt out the blues. At the tender age of 27, Copeland is on her way to becoming a hip shakin’ mama in the mold of Irma Thomas, to whom she tipped her hat during the show. Copeland’s compact, broad shouldered body and prodigious lung capacity are ready made for the long haul.

“We can play whatever we want in this second set,” she said with a big grin. Despite whatever energy she and her band poured into the first sold-out set at the Regattabar, she wasn’t about to coast.  The first result was an upbeat “I’m a wild woman - and you’re a lucky man.” The men bobbing their heads during this first Shemekia shimmy weren’t just keeping time - they were agreeing.

No genre more than the blues seems to authorize performers to let the audience in on their loves and losses. In the first of several ‘true confession’ song introductions she made during the show, Copeland confided, “You know how relationships have a way of getting comfortable, then just breaking apart. And the more you try to keep them going, the worse they get. Well, I’ve had four or five experiences with that. I know what I’m talking about.” Then unleashed “The harder I try, the harder it gets.” We knew what she was wailing about when she sang “got to let go, I know it in my heart, I got to let go, it’s the way its gotta be.”

“The worst thing is when another woman tries to steal your man but it’s harder than that when the other woman turns out to be me,” she said and launched into the gritty “The other woman was me.” We could hear her pain as she sang,  “…never said he was married, didn’t wear no wedding ring, I’m not the kinda woman to steal another’s man, she needs your sympathy.” We were ready to offer it in buckets. Shemekia’s big big voice hit the final refrain in a slow Aretha type boil. Answered by Neilson’s classic bluesy licks,  Copeland seized every bit of soul in those last lines and took down the house.

What, you ask, would funky blues be without the Hammond B3? As good as Shemekia can belt ‘em  out, “Seems like everything I do is wrong” was owned by Jeremy Baum and his B3. With the B3 capturing this funky blues in its distinct way, the band seemed to get into high gear. They weren’t just performing now, they were playin’. Hard.

The set turned biographic as Copeland introduced “Beat-up old guitar,” an homage to her late musician father Johnny “Clyde” Copeland of Houston. Although the senior Copeland moved his family to Harlem, “where I came about in 1979,” she said, he never lost his love of Houston. “We buried him wearing that Houston guitar strap that he wore all the time.” The other band members slipped off the stage and Neilson pulled up two folding chairs for him and the singer - and cradled a silver National Steel guitar in his arms.  In the right hands, the National has the capacity to evoke the soft focus images of life in the bygone Delta. Its sweet, twangy sounds recall the flash of the whip and the scent of magnolias in the evening breeze. Johnny Clyde didn’t live to hear her break out, but the crowd in the Regattabar felt the daughter’s love. She enrolled the audience to act as the choir to sing the final refrain, “…but he could really play the blues on that beat-up old guitar.” It wasn’t revival tent vigorous but it hit all the right notes.

The song offered a welcome change in tempo and modulation. Whether the limitation was due to the Regattabar’s system or the band’s amps, each song’s sound had been coming down as a unisonic wall of music, the same decibel level. It all rocked but had a tendency to sound redundant.

“Beat-up old guitar” gave us the unmitigated pleasure of listening to the authority and range of Copeland’s voice, and to focus on the unique sound of a classic blues instrument. The show would have been richer with one or two other songs that highlighted the smoky muted sound that Copeland’s voice and band can certainly manage.

“Who stole my radio” gave Shemekia a chance to lament the dearth of blues music on mainstream FM and to tell us about her weekly Saturday afternoon gig on Sirius Satellite Radio. Her folksy introduction compared the differences in going to church in NYC and the south. “NYC people sing with passion and get into it but in the south people shout, teeth come out, wigs fall off, pantyhose falls down to the knees, they let it all hang out.”

Shemekia closed the set with a satisfying romp of “Has anybody seen my man” in which Neilson peeled off some spectacular bluesy chops,  Baum jammed Billy Preston style, and Kevin Jenkins’ bass and Damon DueWhite’s drum kit got to show off their talent for the final tune of the night.

With four CDs and several big time awards to her credit,  Shemekia Copeland is going to inherit territory that Irma Thomas and the just departed Ruth Brown have owed for a generation or two. She’s only gonna get better.

Roomful of Blues, an eight piece house on fire

Regattabar, Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA
November 10, 2006

The Roomful of Blues band fails the truth in advertising test. Roomful of Blues, N’Orleans tinged Funk, and sashaying Swing is more like it. They burst out of the gate of their second set at the Regattabar in Cambridge, MA with licks that packed the energy of most bands’ finales. And they juiced it up from there.

This eight-piece group has the biggest sound of any little band you’re likely to hear. Piano, two saxophones, trumpet, lead guitar, bass, percussion, singer/harmonica player, - a perfect example of the expression “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

The saxes and trumpet are a teeny front line that can blast or croon with equal intensity. The piano and guitar lay down classic licks that you can feel coming a mile away. The bassist and drummer aren’t just there to keep time, they’re adding their own ideas to the mix. The lead singer (and most recent member of the band) switches from smoky to swing with equal authority.

Photo from Roomful's web site

Their playlist was flawless. Short, tight arrangements, shifting genres and pace, mighty or muted sound. Most in the audience were boogying in their seats and wishing there was a dance floor handy.

The Providence based group’s roots go back an astonishing 37 years. Personnel have changed but not that party sound. ptatlarge got a last minute invitation to hear them play and showed up without so much as a napkin to take notes upon. Result?  Short on details but long on recommendations. This Roomful is a Houseful of Blues.

Check out their web site at http://www.roomful.com  (The current lead singer seems to have more range than the singer on the video)

Sean Jones Quintet

Sean Jones Quintet
Regattabar, Cambridge, MA, October 25, 2006, first set

This young band is going places. Not every jazz lover will dig the group’s hard edge but they’ll recognize the great technique each musician brings to the table.  First and foremost, there’s Sean Jones himself. He’s young and has some serious musical credentials.

Jones’ first number, a cut from his “Gemini” CD, set the mold for the rest of the evening. A slow, melodic intro with piano, bass, percussion, alto sax and Jones’ trumpet outlines a melody, and then - everyone duck.

Photo courtesy of Jones's web site

Faster than you can say John Coltrane, fierce and frenzied solos blast from Jones’ trumpet and Brian Hogan’s alto saxophone.  A conversation between piano, bass, and percussion followed with an arrhythmic dynamic then Jones and Hogan returned to sock the song home. The audience, made up of lots of Berklee School of Music students and adventurous types like 'ptatlarge' was put on notice: this was gonna be a night to savor bop played by very cool cats.

Although this quintet could play sweet, soft,  even rhapsodic, music, they aren’t interested in playing it safe. They start with a melody, turn it inside out, pull it to shreds, then put it back together and check for burn marks.

Jones second piece, “Divine Inspiration”, from his new CD titled “Roots,”had its own roots in his childhood. “I was brought up in the church and had a very soulful upbringing,” he said, as he brought the trumpet to his lips. He blew a smoky, languid opening frame then slowly accelerated his phrasing and before long was hurtling through phrases, nimbly fingering the trumpet with lightning speed and playing at that high, thin level only a horn in good hands can reach. It's often hard to hear references to the introductory melody once the musicians take it for a cerebral ride in their solos but there's no denying how well they play. Once again, the group took the song apart and rearranged it like a rubik’s cube.

‘In Her Honor’ was named after a former band mate now playing with Beyonce and “earning several more zeroes at the end of her paycheck than she ever saw from me,” Jones chuckled. The rendition had a high Coltrane quotient, fast and furious, with the Berklee students roaring hosannas from their seats as Jones again played about 1001 notes per minute at impossibly high octane level. Brian Hogan's vigorous ‘Trane-like sax solo had Jones grinning like a schoolboy as he listened while leaning against the wall at the side of the intimate stage setting at the Regattabar. Like the lull after a violent thunderstorm, the piece ended peacefully with all five musicians playing a slow, swinging melodic thread.

Jones likes to riff with the audience, sort of like the host of the party checking in with everyone to make sure they’re having a good time. “This is a ‘feel the love’ tune. I wrote it for my nephew. I want you to think about humanity, not notes and chords which people don’t care about. There are a lot of educated people in this room. I want you to feel the music, feel the love.” He proceeded to play “BJ's Tune” as a quartet, sans saxophone.

This tune started out in Chet Baker territory, quiet brushwork from Obed Calvert’s drum kit, soft counterpoints from Orin Evans piano and Lou Curtis’s bass, then began to build momentum. If you’d been paying attention to the way earlier pieces were structured, you could sense the liquid intensity building and wondered how long it would last before it blew wide open.

Bam. Sean Jones’ extended solo flowed like lava from an awakened Vesuvius. Slowly rocking back and forth, bending his knees as he drew in mighty breaths, Jones blew steam from that trumpet. For several minutes, high, piercing, intense, trumpet notes full of passion and exhilaration, with Calvert rolling thunder all over his kit, Evans jamming chords on the keyboard and Curtis’s bass holding the line. His eruptive energy spent, Jones turned on his heel, leaned over the open piano box, and began to play into it. The piano wires began to reverberate like tuning forks, creating a soft, mystical, eerie lullaby - an amazing juxtaposition to the white heat that preceded it.  And slowly, BJ’s Tune trailed off, as softly as it began. Yes, Sean, we felt the love.

Jones played one more number, “Serpent”, but honestly, I couldn’t get “BJ’s Tune” out of my head.

Jones teaches at Duquesne University, has a Master’s Degree from Rutgers and has a classical trumpet performance degree from Youngstown State University. Myles Davis would be smiling from the great beyond to hear that Jones was inspired by Davis recording of  “Kind Of Blue,” which Jones recalls hearing when he was in fifth grade. He’s played with big-timers like Jimmy Heath, the Illinois Jacquet Big Band, Joe Lovano, Jon Faddis and the Louis Armstrong Legacy Band.

Someday down the line, a fifth grader might hear Sean Jones playing his horn and think, “That’s what I want to do, I want to play that trumpet.”

To check him out further,  see http://www.seanjonesjazz.com

Wesla Whitfield sings The American Songbook

With its walnut paneling and subdued lighting, Scullers Jazz Club is the perfect setting for a chanteuse. When Wesla Whitfield wheeled herself into the limelight there last Tuesday night , many patrons who knew of her only by reputation rubbed their eyes in wonder. Wheelchair?

Ten seconds after Whitfield began singing, the chair and the puzzle about how and why she needed it all but vanished from consciousness. The woman’s voice has the range of an IBM missile and the precision diction that characterizes vocalists who like to sing big. That’s exactly what’s called for when singing pages out of the Great American Songbook. Whitfield owns the territory.

Her opening numbers, up-tempo versions of “I woke up singing this morning” and “It’s a most unusual day” sparkled with pace and pitch. She confessed to having battled pneumonia last February after her voice slightly cracked and betrayed a frayed pitch in her second song. Oddly enough, subsequent small imperfections in the timbre of her voice made listeners realize the extent of the talent they were witnessing.

Whitfield sang the opening verses to several songs a capella, her piano and bass accompanists listening carefully and chiming in right on time. Such was the case on “Let there be you”, which she introduced by blurting out “I love this song…” During one of Whitfield’s sustained high notes, I wondered how many wine glasses those notes would shatter when she was at full vocal capacity.

Pianist Mike Greensill and bassist John Wiitala, who traded elegant and spare solos all night, were perfect foils to her singing style. Greensill, her husband of twenty years, arranged many of Whitfield’s songs.

Wesla’s been around. A boomer from California, she’s performed at places as diverse as The Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, Garrison Keillor’s 'Prairie Home Companion', and been featured on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air.” She and Mike Greensill were recently guests with Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz” radio show (I would love to have heard that).

“Once in a while (will you try to give one little thought of me…)” was one of many of the songs reprised from her sixteenth recording, “Livin’ on Love.” (High Note records, 2006)

The mystery of how a singer can melodically interpret the simple words of one song and evoke such a range of hope, reverie, pain, joy, and wistfulness is a rare experience. As her final notes to "Once in a while" faded, many in the audience could be heard sighing in dreamy silence before an escalation of applause and cheers erupted. The Great American Songbook isn’t much without great singers to interpret it.

“The gentleman is a dope” is an upbeat tongue in cheek refutation of a man whose main acclaim to dopeyness is not realizing that his current girlfriend “will never understand him half as well as me.”

“East of the sun, west of the moon,” and a Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini song “Whistling away in the dark” were followed by a tune introduced in theatric deadpan that went thusly: “Alright, we have to do a Cole Porter so here it is.”

And here came a zippy version of ‘Get out of town”, punctuated by solo gems by Greensill and Wiitala, who were models of how to be so damn good that their seamless playing was almost unobtrusive. Whitfield added a catty little reprise of “Get out of town” to the Bush administration that had every Democrat in the room roaring with laughter.

There are reasons the Great American Songbook has survived. One is the archived performances of legends like Ella Fitzgerald. Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Carmen McRae. (two of Whitfield’s favorites are Rosemary Clooney and Dean Martin).Another reason is that singers like Whitfield who were brought up with the music, understand it, and are passing it on to the next generation.

And of course there’s love. When simple lyrics like “In this world of overstated pleasures and underrated treasures, I’m glad there is you…” are transmitted to live audiences through the vocal pipes of performers like Wesla Whitfield, you are convinced that the Great American Songbook won’t be out of print anytime soon.

For more about Wesla Whitfield, and to find out about that wheel chair, visit http://www.weslawhitfield.com/index.html

Patricia Barber, singer/songwriter, intense lyrics, elegant playing

The Patricia Barber Quartet
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd.
Boston MA 02134

September 21, 2006

The voice. Sultry, clear, alto modulated to loft to the back of the room and no farther. The piano playing. Trained, understated, tightly constructed, elegant. The quartet. Technically brilliant, seasoned, tuned to Barber’s quirky style, voicings, and improvisation.

Scullers, the dusky lounge at the Guest Quarters Suites in Boston, was a perfect venue for a recent Patricia Barber concert. Dozens of elbow to elbow little round tables packed around the L shaped room, decent sight lines to the stage, fine sound system, it’s got it all going for the right performer. And Barber is all of that.

For one recent transplant to Boston, she was a lifeline to the Windy City. “I’ve been following her since her days at the Gold Star in Chicago where she was the house piano player in the late 80's. The last place I saw her play was at the Green Mill, where she plays frequently,” he said of Chicago-based  Barber. The carefully wrapped white rose on his table was to be an offering to Barber after the concert.

Few players get inside the music like Barber. Long black hair piled on the back of her head, hoop earrings dangling, she hunches her shoulders and leans over the keyboard, her ear cocked close to the keys as if her breath would coax the right notes from her fingers,

When she begins her second song with gorgeous a cappella lyrics “If I should lose you, the leaves would wither and die,” her dusky hushed voice walks you to the edge of love's abyss,your hand outstretched to your lover. There is nothing syrupy about her style. Her perfectly pitched whispery singing bares her heart but doesn’t surrender her soul. The mood of her faultless phrasing is picked up by guitar, percussion, and bass. Occasional most unladylike yelps rise from Barber as she adds keyboard fills to the group’s performance. The piece’s gorgeous ending cements the fact that I’d follow this woman anywhere.

To snap us out of the romantic vibe, Barber fires up “Hunger” a tongue-in-cheek vamp. Wacky with a Latin backbeat and a funky guitar solo, the tune has the audience chuckling with its spoofiness. The song appears on her latest CD, “Mythologies” The song’s first lines “The more you want me/ the more you want/ the more you want to be free/ there’s no slaking of thirst/ no quenching of need/ and there’s never enough… to eat,” give you some idea of how Barber’s lyrics can bob and weave between silly and serious when she feels like breaking the spell.

She finishes the set with renditions of “Icarus” and “Pygmalion” from her “Mythologies” CD that featured brilliant solos from long standing quartet members - guitarist Neal Alger, bassist Michael Arnopol and drummer Eric Montzka. And encores with the sultriest version of “Light my fire” you've ever heard. I'd  walk to Chicago to hear her again.

Her web site is exceptionally informative
http://www.patriciabarber.com/index.html
 

Upon First Hearing Hank Williams, Jr.

Within a minute of sliding his Out of Left Field CD into my home stereo system, I’d cranked up the volume and was shouting, “Sing it, Hank, you sing it!”

By the second track, I gave up trying to read the Boston Globe at the kitchen table and started singing along, not giving a damn that in reality my voice was a startlingly poor karaoke version of the man’s.

By the fifth track, I realized that anything that got me out of my chair and singing like a damn fool was grist for my writing mill. I headed upstairs for the computer.

Good Lord, as I'm writing this, I am listening to him camp it up on another track - a playful, jazzy version of “You Got A Dirty Mind”, complete with piano riffs, brush work on the drums, and a bass keeping the rhythm. Is there any style this singer can’t cover?

He gallops through some songs with chaps flying and canters slowly through others, roaming the range from the melancholy of love lost to sweet gratitude for the grace of a loving woman. He inhabits the territory between heartache and heartthrob.

I believe I can hear the entire history of country singing in his lyrics, intonations, rhythms, and subjects. I hear echoes of Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Hank Williams, Sr. This  dude just loads the micro grooves of the CD with his maxi-baritone voice, which easily rises above the accompanying slide guitars, basses, drums, and backup singers. When he sings one of those melancholy songs, it makes me think that people in the southwest get their hearts broken in ways we northerners just don't.

I’d been looking to pick up a Hank Williams, Jr. CD for over a year and never got around to it. Now, I’m at home with his music and his stories of yearnings, losses, and the bliss being held in a loving woman’s arms.

I feel like bustin' out the door to taste that kind of love. Not the kind in the “Someone Special” greeting card section in CVS, but the kind where decent people with good intentions go for broke and win it all or go down tragically in flames, smashing into the earth with enough impact to be felt in the next county.

Yep, I’m aimin' for that all-or-nothin’, Mach Two, pinned-to-the-back-of-the-seat kinda love.

Hank sings, “I’ve loved and been loved, but not at the same time, I’ve been on both sides of good-bye”. Damn, I want to ride my heart south of the Mason Dixon line and live to tell the tale. I'm gonna play that CD again right now.

Al Vega’s 85th - An All Star Birthday Celebration

Al Vega’s 85th - An All Star Birthday Celebration
Scullers, Doubletree Guest Suites
400 Soldier’s Field Road, Boston, MA
Thursday, May 11, 2006

Al Vega has a musical wake as wide as the Titanic's. The Titanic’s career lasted three hours. Vega, however, has been playing piano for well over 60 years and shows no signs of sinking. He’ll hit 85 on June 22... and has been on the jazz scene since the 1930s. That's not a typo.

You don’t have to be steeped in jazz to recognize the names of Billie Holliday, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, and Charlie Parker, with whom Al Vega has rubbed elbows. The names of musicians and singers who stepped up to play with Vega at Thursday’s party don’t have the cachet of a Getz or Holliday, but they’re well known to the cognoscenti of the local music scene. And they’ve kept him happily anchored in Boston over the years.

Knowing the list of guests was long, MC Ron Della Chiesa (WGBH, WPLM-FM) kept the sold-out birthday bash at Scullers moving with the pace of a metronome. No one present disputed Della Chiesa’s reference to Vega as “an American icon, a legend in the jazz business.”

So yes, the evening turned out to be a swingin’ love fest for a man who’s encouraged scores of performers over the years. Each guest had an “Al Vega’ story to tell and each summoned a song that was right up his alley.

As fast with a quip as he is with his fingers, Vega is a charmer. Natted up in a dark suit, shirt, and white tie, he bantered with easy familiarity with everyone on the stage. The grin that he flashed during the brief reminiscences was mischievous, endearing, open hearted - and lit up a room full of youngsters in their forties and oldsters who’ve been Vega fans since FDR’s New Deal.

How right it was that Vega opened with a propulsive version of ‘Take the A Train’, an Ellington classic from the 1940s. With his short and sturdy frame hunched over the keyboard, Vega’s strong fingers rambled up and down all 88 keys. With his head cocked toward Mark Creel (trumpet, sax. flute, vocals), Ted Casher (sax), and Eric Ojala (bass), Rick Klane (drums) - one nod and these guys improvised one imaginative solo after another.

ptatlarge first set highlights: Ellen O’Brien’s “At Last”, delivered Patti LaBelle style, with Vega answering a torrid O’Brien burst with a blistering solo of is own; DD Martin’s “My Funny Valentine”, drop-dead styling “reminds me of Dinah Washington and Dakota Staton” said Della Chiesa; Mark Creel: “She Was Too Good To Me”, a Chet Baker song, with Creel playing flute and very smoky muted trumpet; Cassandre McKInley: “Fever”, beautifully phrased, and McKinley flirting on the piano stool next to Vega, who put his arm around her and quipped, “that’s how I learned to play with one hand”; Grace Kelly, a thirteen year old saxophone prodigy Vega has taken under his wing; Rebecca Parris: “Happy Birthday” while fooling with Vega’s hair "He's got the hair of a fifty year old!", and singing “East of the Sun” with scat and vamp.

By the middle of the first set, the sight of a dozen performers standing in the back of the room, those who had performed already and those waiting their turn, was enough to make a talent agent swoon. “Only Al could bring this range of artists together”, observed Ron Della Chiesa.

The night was a glorious celebration of the present and wistful nostalgia for the past. Al Vega, the living legend who bridged both, still has the chops of an American icon.

Tower of Power

Tower of Power
Scullers Jazz Club at the Doubletree Guest Suites
400 Soldiers Field Road, Boston, MA 02134 617-562-4111
Thursday April 13 - Saturday April 15, 2006

The Tower of Power blew into town Thursday night. The timbers of Scullers Jazz Club are still shivering and the eardrums of Thursday's sold out first set audience are still ringing. It’s a wonder that the down and dirty din created by this band of funksters didn’t blow the club’s doors off their hinges.

Two trumpets, three saxophones (one played by big guy in black fedora, another played by rotund guy with a perpetually conspiratorial grin on his face), one electric organ, one guitar, one bass guitar, one drum set, and one lead singer equals one certifiable Tower of Power.

Tenor sax player Emilio Castillo, the grinner, and baritone sax player Stephen “The Funky Doctor” Kupka, the fedora, met in Oakland, CA thirty eight (not a typo) years ago, formed a band and began writing and playing their stuff in the Bay Area. They picked up a few more guys who love to play and developed their lean and mean sound. Their catalog hasn’t evolved a great deal from their original funk and ballad format, but when you can play with their brand of energy, you can live on your laurels.

Tower of Power 1971 Castillo (right foreground, Kupka center rear)

This band is not an acquired taste. Either you like loud and propulsive music or you don’t. The lady sitting next to me lip synched the words to all the songs and had all she could do to restrain herself from leaping out of her chair to boogy all night long. The band singled out one die hard fan who made it to the concert even though his house had been on fire that afternoon. They celebrated his loyalty by putting a blowtorch to the first set.

These ten guys ripped through a good chunk of the band’s nearly four decades and counting catalog. They charged out of the gate with “Soul with a capital S” and within thirty seconds the crowd was hootin’ and hollerin’. From time to time, the whole front line showboats between choruses. “Can’t you see you do me wrong?” featured all five plus the lead singer shimmying and jiving like the front line of a James Brown band. We loved it.

“Got to groove”, “You ought to be havin’ fun”, “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream” had the audience clapping and tapping. Lead vocalist Larry Braggs sang the lights out of the ballad, “Willing to learn”, using a soaring falsetto to a whispering plea, bolstered by crescendos of brass and reed. The dramatic pauses between the lines of his ballads became booming silences in an otherwise blistering evening of funky soul music.

As the seventy-five minute concert hit the home stretch, the band spanked into overdrive with “Still be diggin’ on James Brown” and their classic “What is hip?” By this time, you’d given up hope of ever passing a hearing test again.

Vocalist Braggs dedicated the encore, another of their classics, “You’re still a young man”, to childhood friend and Celtics assistant coach Tony Brown, who’d helped Braggs in times of need and who was in the audience.

The days of hearing TOP music on top 40 radio are long gone. But memories die hard - there are plenty of fans that grew up listening to the fifteen albums they’ve released since “East Bay Grease” in 1970. And remember the unmistakable sound of the TOP horn section, which has appeared on recordings made by the likes of Santana, Huey Lewis and the News, Elton John, Lyle Lovett, and Aerosmith.

Tower of Power 2006 Castillo (Left foreground, Kupka right with fedora)

Over sixty musicians have been part of Tower of Power through the years, yet the horn section, the core of the sound, remains true to its first incarnation. Band leader Emilio Castillo and Stephan Kupka are two reasons. They still blow hard, look like they’re having the time of their lives while on stage, and make the rest of us feel like twenty somethings, give or take thirty eight years.

Photos: TOP 1971 and TOP 2006
http://www.bumpcity.com

jennifer Kimball CD Release Party

Jennifer Kimball
CD Release party at the Lizard Lounge
Cambridge Common 1667 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
January 25, 2006
By 8:30 the Liz was standing room only, conversations over the house music were loud, and laughter was abundant. A buzz of anticipation, as warm as the red filtered lights that illuminate the cave-like Lizard Lounge, animated the crowd. The bon vivants came from near and far to hear Cambridge based Jennifer Kimball sing her heart out in the second night of a two-night CD release party hosted in the downstairs of the popular Mass. Ave pub Cambridge Common.

The nearly two-hour set that ensued was almost too much of a good thing but Kimball’s fans gobbled it up as if it were manna from heaven. Kimball’s second CD, “O Hear Us”, has just been released and she and the musicians who’ve been her band in residence during her regular Wednesday night gig at the Liz responded with a shoot-the-light’s-out set that unleashed the new songs.

A singer-songwriter, Kimball sings her own songs with conviction and unique voice phrasings that are at home in minor keys, a signature style. As a writer, she finds kernels of truth in her lyrics, keenly observed small details that illuminate entire relationships or states of emotion. And then sweetly sings them into life with a veteran performer’s sense of melancholy, longing, loss, camp, or jaunty humor. The new CD “O Hear Us” has it all.

Three songs into the set and it was clear that Kimball and company were in the zone. Kimball’s “band in residence” knew how to take solos that bored deep into and then eased out of the emotional core of her songs. Kevin Barry on laptop pedal steel guitar and Duke Levine on guitar and laptop synthesizer, reeled off several riffs so poignant that the bartenders didn’t dare open a bottle let alone shake a margarita during their solos. Richard Gates on bass and Billy Beard on percussion built foundations for each song that could hold the weight of Yankee Stadium. Once the critical mass was established, we were all in collusion to make the moments last as long as we could.

Kimball can mix two parts melancholy and one part loss and end up with a ballad as elemental as water. I’ve been humming the words to “Don’t Take Your Love Away From Me” all week. “Wrap your troubles in dreams” was a delightfully rendered Bing Crosby tune featuring over the top solo work by Barry and Levine, suggestive scat singing by Kimball, drums and bass fills from the rhythm section. The sheer fun they had as they skipped through this chestnut was worth the price of admission. One of the only other covers of the night, a lustily gritty “You really got a hold on me” made you want to pull your love interest onto a dance floor, maybe elsewhere, and groove to this deliciously rendered song. In the end, it’s Kimball’s singing and writing that sticks with you. She called upon “my wasp past” to compose “Eternal Father”, part Episcopal hymn, part navy hymn. Haunting ballads like “East of Indiana” and “Last Ride Home” are ethereal meldings of vocal and narrative skill in which she scales notes that only an accomplished voice can reach.
Boston is blessed with talented singers and songwriters. Jennifer Kimball just happens to be one of the best of them.

http://www.jenniferkimball.com
http://lizardloungeclub.com/main.html
Top photo by Rose Polenzani

The Epiphany Jazz Mass,Cambride, MA

The Epiphany Jazz Mass, January 8, 2006
Old Cambridge Baptist Church
1151 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

Only in Cambridge would a church service be accompanied by a jazz quartet. And the church, Tiffany stained glass windows and all, also be home base for a progressive ballet company. And within the first minutes of the service, would the minister decry several hot button topics that might make headlines in the real world but are usually tiptoed around in church services.

Ahhh, such was the case at The Old Cambridge Baptist Church in the republic of Cambridge on the January 8 Feast of the Epiphany, also called the Feast of Lights.

The roots of the Epiphany date from the dawn of Christianity in the first few hundred years after Christ, when prayer was conducted in catacombs in secret, illuminated by torches and candles. In one of his sermons, Jesus said, “I am the light.” and today the music and homilies were redolent with metaphors of darkness and light. Ephesians 5:8-20 was cited as an example, “This may be a wicked age but your lives will redeem it.” The sermons from the Baptist pulpit today made it clear the redemption would come about only if each of us sitting in the church lit the way by becoming the agents of positive change.

The Old Cambridge Baptist Church dares to take as many positions as the dancers in the Jose Mateo Ballet Company headquartered under its massive vaulted ceilings. In the first three minutes of the service, the minister lit into the shabby state of health care, the illegitimate prosecution of the war in Iraq, and prayed for the recovery of Ariel Sharon so he could continue to advance the cause of peace. George Bush would squirm in his seat in this activist church.

Just as there are red states and blue states, I’m sure there are “red” churches, synagogues, and mosques, and “blue” ones, liberal pulpits and conservative ones. They all seem pretty confident that the almighty is on their side. Most Christian churches celebrated the Epiphany today and Jesus’ name was probably invoked all day long. When it comes to religious holidays, it’s a given that the names of Jesus, Yaweh, and Allah are referenced with great frequency.

If I were Jesus, Allah, or Yaweh, I’d feel like a piece of taffy, what with my name being pulled right and left. And probably wonder why those people down there couldn’t just get along, which is what I’d been telling them to do for ages. I’d also be chagrined that they were fighting over me and what I stood for. What’s not to get? Haven’t I made it abundantly clear?

I mean, how many ways can I say to them, “Love thy neighbor”?

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band

The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band
Performance at First Parish of Watertown, 35 Church Street, Watertown, MA
Sunday, October 30, 2006, 3 P.M.
Printed November 18, 2005

These women have brass and they know how to use it. The Mood Swings Orchestra, an all-woman big band hailing from Boston, played to an appreciative audience that filled the pews of the First Parish Church in Watertown on Sunday. The seventeen piece group is a classic big band, with the brass line of trumpets and trombones standing in the back row and the golden tenor, alto, and baritone saxophones seated in the front. Piano, bass and percussion make themselves at home on the side, supplying the rhythm that’s the backbone of a good band.

Photo:Ryles Jazz Club, February, 2005 (from moodswings web site)

The band’s repertoire reaches back to the thirties and forties. Their two full sets had the silver haired listeners who comprised most of the afternoon’s audience bobbing their heads and mouthing the words to familiar standards. After band leader Kathleen Hepburn’s second invitation to come on up and dance in front of the bandstand, several pairs of dancers answered the call. It may have been the writer’s imagination but the dancers seemed to shed a few decades as their muscle memories took over and they smoothly navigated swing dance passes and tuck turns. The hearty applause at the end of these tunes could as easily have been a salute to their by-gone youth as well as appreciation for the music.

The acoustics in this little church are heavenly for musicians. When the band amped up, its richly textured sound filled the room with sonorous harmonies that were the signatures of the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey bands. The solo turns were a bit uneven, often a little brittle or underpowered, with an occasional errant note heading into the choir loft. But what unites the members of this not-for-profit group founded in 2003 is a love of music. No formal auditions are required. While the level of skill varies, they’re clearly having fun, the veterans paving the way for the newcomers.

Several renditions stood out in each set. Neal Hefti’s down tempo arrangement of “Little Darlin’” was very sweet, a lilting invitation to polish fox trot skills and appreciate the unique way a big band merges the smooth-as-butter reed and brass sounds. “Night Train” featured the front and back lines playfully swinging back and forth, arching their instruments during glissandos, camping it up in the best big band style. Hogie Carmichael’s “Stardust” featured a classic introduction and the audience unabashedly singing along after bandleader Hepburn’s invitation.

Second set treats included another Neal Hefti arrangement, “Why Not” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Shiny Stockings”. The audience, no longer needing invitations, continued to dance in the small area in front of the bandstand. “Splanky”, named for Count Basie’s patented four note ending to many of his arrangements, was elevated by a rousing solo from a fleet fingered trumpeter who blew with power and command.

Each set might have benefited from re-sequencing to avoid too many similar tempos in a row. The Andrews Sisters “Pennsylvania Polka” gave the program a needed change of tempo near the close of the second set. Their encore number, “Bandstand Boogie”, featured a blistering solo from the leather lunged trumpeter in the back row and sent the happy crowd home with a little extra swing in their steps.

For more information about this band’s next stops, click on their web site, www.themoodswings.org