Frank De Blase

Tom Waits is a man who has penetrated every rag-tag genre of music, even going so far as to create a few new genres along the way. He’s turning 70 on December 7, and a lineup of Rochester musicians has assembled to play the Waits songs that are influential to them. Presented to you by […]

The three brothers who comprise Televisionaries are red hot and relentless as the trio burns up traditional Bandstand rock ‘n’ roll with grease and guts. Dressed unassumingly in velvet dinner jackets, Trevor, Austin, and Brendan Lake have a coppertop snarl that adds a splash of sinister to the proceedings. It’s the biting twang of Eddie […]

The Slocan Ramblers are built for speed, but these Juno Award nominees don’t waste it as a flash trick for the stage. There’s no doubt the band of Canadian pickers can handle blinding fingerpickin’ speed. All the instruments are turbo-charged and yet the four musicians don’t get in each other’s way. It’s a foot-stompin’ time. […]

The high point of a Bill Kirchen show is the tour of guitar-hero riffs he takes the crowd on in the middle of “Hot Rod Lincoln,” a rock ‘n’ roll rave-up that Kirchen recorded in 1972 as a member of Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. Riffs from The Beatles, The Ventures, Merle Haggard, […]

Without a percussive strike, spike, or slap of an instrument, or even a harsh puff from a singer’s lungs, it’s hard sometimes to distinguish a note’s origin. The music of California sextet Dustbowl Revival is full of this mysterious phenomenon, especially with the fiddle, which seems to appear out of thin air. The same goes […]

She likes dogs and she has a thing for boys who drive trucks. But the country clichés abruptly stop there. When you hear Alyssa Trahan sing in that lovely country alto of hers. Trahan is gambling on the long dollar, and since 2016 she’s split her time between Rochester and Music City, USA. She can […]