Your weekly virtual roundup of what appears in today’s print newspaper, delivered directly to your eyeballs via weblog:
– The Americana/gypsy-jazz band Taarka comes through Bend two or three times each year as part of their busy, busy tour schedule. I chatted with David Pelta-Tiller about the band’s new album “Adventures in Vagabondia” and the evolution of Taarka’s sound. Read the results of that chat here.
– The Autonomics got their start in Bend but moved to Portland a couple years ago. On Thursday, they’ll return to celebrate the release of their first full-length album, the excellent “Trust Your Instincts,” with a show at Silver Moon Brewing & Taproom. Click here to read it!
Elsewhere in this week’s music section: Papadosio and the Acorn Project hit the Domino Room, the Mountain Country Superstar competition holds its finals, AfroMassive brings the funk to Liquid Lounge, Fallstar and Capture the Flag get loud at The Sound Garden, the Hideaway Tavern hosts Hot Club Sandwich, Top Shelf plays the Astro Lounge, Vandella at The Horned Hand and more!
When we were discussing what to put on the cover of today’s GO! Magazine, I mentioned tonight’s Macklemore & Ryan Lewis show at Midtown Ballroom and told my coworkers this: We get a lot of has-beens and not-yets and never-will-bes in this town, but it’s not that often we have an artist come through at the very same moment that they’re the hottest story in music. Tonight is one of those times. Macklemore – aka Ben Haggerty from Seattle – is in his moment.
Tonight, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis will rock a sold-out Midtown Ballroom. I wrote about their current wave of success and their new album “The Heist,” but focused on the best, most important song on that album, “Same Love.” Here’s an excerpt.
In it, Haggerty tackles the topic head on, ignoring a long-held taboo in hip-hop. He lays out his own stereotypes about homosexuality, decries the casual use of “gay” as a synonym for “bad” in our culture, calls out his own genre for looking the other way and, along the way, weaves in commentary on politics and religion. Seattle vocalist Mary Lambert ably sings the beautiful hook: “I can’t change/ Even if I wanted to,” which is lifted from one of Lambert’s own songs.
Haggerty closes his third verse this way:
“I might not be the same
But that’s not important
No freedom till we’re equal
Damn right I support it.”
Whether or not you or I agree with Macklemore is not the point here, by the way. The point is to acknowledge the guy’s forever-place in a watershed summer for the heretofore odd couple of hip-hop and homosexuality.
Also tonight, the third Jazz at the Oxford series kicks off in Bend with a night of Portland blues. My colleague David Jasper spoke to iconic Oregon bluesman Curtis Salgado about his battles against cancer and how they’ve changed him as an artist.
“It’s scary because the older I get, the older I want to get. It’s scary because you don’t want to know how you’re going to die,” said Salgado, who saw his mother die of cancer. “Cancer is the ultimate predator. Cancer’s like a great white shark. It’s dangerous and fascinating at the same time.”
But, with no chemotherapy required, Salgado has been able to do what he’s done for decades: get back out on the road, this time in promotion of “Soul Shot,” his first all-soul album, which dropped April 10 on Alligator Records.
If there’s any plus to cancer, Salgado said, “It just fine tunes you into life, and what’s around you, and every moment. I used to want to fill a coliseum with people and win lots of Grammys and have a nice house on the McKenzie River, you know what I’m saying?”
Now, “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I’m just very blessed to be here. I’m blessed to play my music with my friends, and play to people who are so nice to me. It’s like, look, man, I owe the universe.”
Read the whole thing and peruse the series’ 2012-13 schedule here.
Elsewhere in this week’s music section: Adventure Galley, The Autonomics, Black Pussy, Aldrine Guerrero, Matt Woods, Michael Dean Damron, The Rum and The Sea and more.
Fans of the loud and the heavy should probably get down to The Horned Hand tonight for two Portland bands with local connections: The Autonomics and Black Pussy. The former plays blues-punk with spittle-flying urgency, and the latter is a sludgy, swaggering stoner-rock band. Both are excellent. Read more about them here, and find details for the show on the poster below.
PLUS: the Rum Rebellion, Sagebrush Rock Festival, The Autonomics, Cadence, Rare Monk, Necktie Killer, Jay Tablet’s b-day bash, Larry and His Flask, Third Seven, David Bowers’ return and more.
If you will indulge me for just one minute, I would simply like to say that regularly reading our music section in GO! Magazine (every Friday in The Bulletin) is by far your best bet for staying informed about what’s new and what’s happening on Central Oregon’s busy music scene. You have other options for that kind of info, of course, but nowhere will you find coverage as extensive and in-depth as you will in GO!
I say that only because I’m really proud of today’s section. Here’s what’s in there (click to read):
Elsewhere in this week’s music section, you’ll find briefs on The Autonomics’ two-night stand in Bend, James Hunnicutt, Rehab, the 4 Peaks festival lineup, Left Coast Country and more!
This week, there are a couple of bigger names playing shows in Central Oregon, and you can find more on them below.
But for my main music story this week, I decided to focus on the South Carolina roots/jam band Dangermuffin, which is playing out at Black Butte Ranch on Sunday.
I chatted with Dangermuffin’s Dan Lotti about his love for Bend, the influence of living in a coastal town, and getting tagged with the jam-band label.
“We feel like it’s just really eclectic music, and I think sometimes we get grouped in with the jam thing, simply because of the eclecticism,” he said. “We don’t mind being included in the jam-band conversation, because I think what you find there within that community are true music fans.
“Those are the kind of people we want to reach out to and connect with anyway, so we don’t really look at the jam-band thing as being a four-letter word,” he continued. “We’re happy to just be a part of that community, and if that’s where we’re finding a niche, then we’ll take it.”
Elsewhere in this week’s music section: Tornado Rider plays The Horned Hand, The Autonomics kick off Parrilla Grill’s Show Us Your Spokes series, just-crowned Last Band Standing champ Necktie Killer visits Silver Moon, folkie Carinne Carpenter does two nights at Scanlon’s, the Jazz at Joe’s series hosts the Warren Rand Quartet, and JazzBros! return to McMenamins.
I didn’t even have room for Cherry Poppin’ Daddies at Munch & Music, Franchot Tone’s free Summer Sundays show, The Whiskey Rebellion at Silver Moon and several other things. The summer music season is really getting busy, folks. Go support your local bands, venues, events and promoters!
(For the second week in a row, I forgot to post this on Friday. My apologies to the events that already happened … on Friday night.)
Two shows to kick off summer series, two album release events, two benefits for people halfway across the country and one farewell by an old favorite. It’s a crowded music section in GO! Magazine, as usual. Here’s what’s in there:
Elsewhere in this week’s music section, we’ve got all the details on Australian guitar wiz Tommy Emmanuel at the Tower Theatre, Portland Americana act Redwood Son at McMenamins, two house concerts featuring three fine songwriters and two separate dinners/concerts to benefit the tornado-ravaged folks in Joplin, Mo. Plus a Last Band Standing update.
Frequency and its big print sister, GO! Magazine, are longtime fans of The Autonomics, a powerful rock trio that formed a few years ago in Bend and moved to Portland last year. Click here to read about how they blew my mind at the 2009 Bend Roots Revival, or here to read my feature story on the band from January, 2010.
Anyway, the fellas are back with a new EP called “Hot Doom” and did I mention it smokes? Because it does. It’s a huge step forward for The Autonomics, and if you like catchy, buzzy, urgent rock ‘n’ roll, you need to hear this. It’s terrific. I’d say more, but I’m saving it for this Friday’s GO! (The band is playing an EP-release show Saturday at Century Center as part of the Rise Up Spring Jamboree.)
Stream or download all five tracks at the band’s Soundcloud, below, or visit their Bandcamp.
Lap steel guitar wizard Robert Randolph and his Family Band will bring their gospel-blues-rock to Bend on Sunday. My colleague David Jasper spoke with Randolph about the past and present of sacred steel music.
“There’s a history of our church … which goes all the way back 70 years,” Randolph explained. “In those days in the south, guys couldn’t afford organs and pianos in church. The thing was basically to buy a lap steel guitar because they couldn’t afford” organs. “And this basically turned into a historical thing. It reached me, and it’s reaching kids younger than me.”
“You see, long before me, there were some guys that played who would have been huge rock stars — just as big as Muddy Waters and those guys in the ’50s, ’60s and into the ’70s. And those guys just weren’t really allowed to leave” the auspices of the church.
“It was a much different time then. By me being younger, and things sort of changing within the organization, it was sort of my focus to really go out there” and share the music with the world at large, he said.
Elsewhere in this week’s music section: The Builders and The Butchers roll into McMenamins, Person People and Empty Space Orchestra play B.I.G.S.’ big fifth birthday bash, the Sagebrush Rock Festival goes down in Christmas Valley, and Intervision visits Sunriver, plus the latest on locals Franchot Tone, Tuck and Roll, The Dirty Words and The Autonomics.
And last but not least, the 4 Peaks Music Festival happens this weekend, but thanks to a last-minute change of plans, the article in the paper has the wrong venue. So click here to get up-to-date info.
Aphrodesia, an Afrobeat (and so much more) band based in the Bay Area, will kick off the 20th season of Munch & Music Thursday. I spoke with bassist and bandleader Ezra Gale about the rising profile of Afrobeat in America.
“I think (Afrobeat) is definitely more in the mainstream consciousness than it was when we started doing this,” Gale said via telephone Monday. “Where I live in Brooklyn, there’s now at least three or four young Afrobeat bands who are playing (in the style of genre godfather Fela Kuti), and I remember when Aphrodesia first started, as far as we knew, it was us and (New York’s) Antibalas. It really was this new thing. Nobody knew who Kuti was, and we were playing this music that felt obscure.
“It’s important to keep it in perspective, because there are things that are pushing it into the mainstream (such as the Kuti-focused “Fela!” Broadway musical), but at the same time, when you talk about most people in this country, most still have never heard of it, really,” he said. “So us Afrobeat musicians kind of live in a bubble. To us, it may seem sort of played out and passé, but in fact, it’s still new to probably 98 percent of people.”
Elsewhere, we’ve got all the details on the Breedlove Festival, a concert and barbecue at Maragas Winery, Lisa C. Pollock’s Indie Freedom Tour at Silver Moon Brewing, Eric Tollefson and the Show Us Your Spokes lineup, Curtis Salgado and the Picnic in the Park lineup, folk singers Kasey Anderson and Anastacia, and a scaled-down Pinback returning to the Domino Room. And as always, you can find lots more in The Bulletin’s complete music listing.
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