“The blues has always been the traditional underpinning of all American pop,” says John Hammond via telephone from his Phoenix hotel room. Hammond has been playing traditional folk-blues for more than 40 years. He’s now reaching even deeper, teaming with Tom Waits, whose oddball-troubadour Americana underpins the blues. Hammond’s latest album, the Waits-produced Wicked […]
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The Purrs keep up the rock
…and God said, “Let there be attitude.” Before rock ‘n’ roll’s bloody birth somewhere in the deep, dark jungle; before some savage with a bone in his nose started beating the drum; there was attitude. It’s this primordial moxie that makes a band stand out, over and above their prowess, their message, their appearance. […]
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Superduty moves your booty
“It’s totally a history lesson,” says DJ superDimensional, dressed today as Tony Bacchiocchi, a customer at a local record store in search of vinyl. He looks more like the associate art director at Kodak who pays his bills than one-half of Rochester’s Framers of Funk, Superduty. Describing Superduty’s upcoming show (October 25, at The Bug […]
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Paul Mark and The Van Dorens come to dinner
The blues has become too derivative. It’s a lampoon. But Paul Mark isn’t mad about that, he’s just a little sick and tired. “One of the reasons I got into this to begin with was to build little stories, not just mimic old acts,” Mark says via Bat-phone from Gotham. “There has to be […]
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Polish boy, monkey man
Anyone who remembers The Resisters (“Slut Rock,” “I Like Her Ass”) or Dog’s Life (“Dog’s Life,” “Queenie Gots a Pinworm”) will remember the odd-ball, sea-foamed Strato-twang of one Lee Chabowski, a nice Polish boy from Dansville. Both aforementioned groups proved to be tragically ahead of their time and comfortably out of place in a past […]
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Speak like a child
In the same week that heightened Homeland Security forced Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes to postpone his upcoming Rochester concert, the Swedish improv-experimental music duo Sudden Infant was making its own plans to penetrate our borders. And, as far as we can tell, Sudden Infant has been successful. If it seems strange that Valdes, […]
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One-note samba
Caption: Profound statements, profound moves: Gray Mayfield comes of age. Gray Mayfield will never forget the day Wynton Marsalis showed up at his dorm room. “A friend of mine used to study with Wynton. He was always saying, ‘I’m going to contact Wynton and have him come and hear you.’ So, one day, when […]
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A nice bunch of guise
There’s this… thing about Mike Patton; this spooky, almost intimidating vibe. For years now, Patton has been flying below radar, creating challenging and experimental music. Naturally, accompanying this kind of output is the perception that he’s as unnerving as his discography, in the same way that parents once thought Ozzy was the Prince of Darkness […]
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Still pithy after all these years
September 11, anthrax, shoe bombs, dirty bombs — are we depressed yet? Sometimes the only defense against gloom and doom is finding the dark humor where you can. One night, while losing sleep, I tried thinking about what would make the perfect line-up of songs on a compilation album for the apocalypse. There would […]
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Party of one
Here’s a mild-mannered guy with super-hero potential: an unassuming individual of shy opulence with a keen willingness to share nonetheless. No heart on his sleeve; nothing up his sleeve, for that matter. You might mistake him for a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief: anything but a musician. You probably wouldn’t expect to read about […]
