When you invoke the name of Alice Cooper, you’re gonna get a reaction. The rock fan nods in knowing reverence, John Q. Uptight cringes. With a 35-year reign of challenge, instigation, and gender-bending theatrical horror, Cooper is truly a pop culture icon. The music on Cooper’s new record, The Eyes Of Alice Cooper, is […]
Music Features
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Digital cubism
Music made on a laptop computer? It’s nothing new in the Rochester underground music scene. And now you can add Brad Lubman to the mix. “Confrontational, severe, meditative, ambient-electro-acoustic [music]” is how the classically trained conductor, composer, percussionist, and Eastman School of Music professor describes his Clear Housing, part of a sound and visual installation […]
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Still searching
Jack Casady is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most definitive, innovative, oft-imitated bass players. It was in San Francisco that he made his initial mark as a founding member of Jefferson Airplane and later Hot Tuna. He is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, yet it has taken until 2003 for him to […]
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Stringing us along
Back in the late 1990s I was driving in my car when a tune came on the radio that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. An electric guitar was cruising along faster than I was, playing an irresistible, soul-inflected melody. It was “Sweet Georgia Peach” by Russell Malone. A guitar hero was born. Malone, […]
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A rebel within rebellion
Ed Hamell is bald. I mean Yul Brynner, cue-ball, Kojak bald. A regular guitar-wielding chrome dome. Yet when he mailed me a copy of his cool new disc, Tough Love, the package included an official Hamell On Trial comb. Yup, this Ed Hamell is an anti-folk smart aleck. Hamell, who has performed solo as […]
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The warped state of Third Estate
You’ve heard the story before: Friends hang out. Friends jam. Somehow it works. Friends start a band. Their parents and neighbors are sooo happy. The band inundates city dives, makes noise, makes fans, and eventually, a name for itself through all the hoopla. Maybe it even records a CD along the way. But vision […]
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A 30-year Journey
Any band that has survived career ups and downs, fickle music trends, and its own personal obstacles to achieve a certain degree of rock ‘n’ roll tenure has done so by making no distinctions between the past and present. Journey guitarist Neal Schon considers it all, well, one big journey: a journey where the […]
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Grander than you can imagine…
Excitement seemed to build higher during the final six days of the Rochester International Jazz Festival, with a full house for Tony Bennett at the Eastman Theatre on Wednesday evening and a sold-out Water Street Music Hall for Ray Barretto, despite the poor sound. Festival promoter John Nugent says the 2003 festival made a […]
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Agitating beauty
You know, the quieter Chris Whitley speaks and the softer he plays, the louder he seems. I’ve seen Whitley a number of times. He is mesmerizing. Shyly yet intently perched at the edge of the crowd, behind the throb of a lone kick-drum, he drags guttural tones from a rusty Dobro tuned so abstractly it […]
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How sweet it is
From the raunchy wail of his slide guitar to his gutsy, truck full-o’-sugary-gravel voice, George Thorogood is a musical icon, a man who embodies the enduring link between the blues and rock ‘n’ roll. And his new album, Ride ‘Til I Die, is standard-issue Thorogood — simple, straight-ahead, rockin’ blues. “Technically, I learned the […]
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The Bop Shop bop
Recently, a woman strolled into the Bop Shop in search of some jumpblues. Owner Tom Kohn and his staff were on the case with the speed and enthusiasm of a NASCAR pit crew. “We were like, ‘Jump blues? You need Tiny Bradshaw, Louis Jordan. You need Gene Phillips, Todd Rhodes,’” Kohn recalls. The individual […]
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Slap and twang
Slap and twang. You can say both. You can do both. And if your love lies in American roots music, you dig hearing both. Slap and twang. Two organic tones and approaches essential to rock music’s expressive sound. Where lyrics fall short in painting an accurate mood, the less-specific grunts and wails from an […]
