A couple of Thursdays back The Badenovs paced and raged on The Bug Jar stage with lots of textbook crazy and new-wave cool. Badenov carrot-top newbie and ex-Profile Greg Hassett dwarfed his Telecaster while still making it roar. It’s good to see the big man back, slingin’ on the bandstand. Frontman Stan “The Man” led […]
Music
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Funkier than funk
A young girl seductively swings her hips between two zip codes while a long-haired cat does an interpretive dance that looks like he’s swatting mosquitoes or driving a bus. A bar back does the camel walk weaving in and out of pockets of people undulating in unison, diggin’ and dancin’ to Giant Panda Guerilla Dub […]
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And they’re big in Japan
Over the last two years the Sim Redmond Band has become increasingly popular in Rochester… and in Japan. At its initial Milestones appearances, audiences were mostly out-of-towners, fans that had followed the band from its hometown of Ithaca or from some jam-band haven like Geneseo. But lately what I think of as the “Dave Matthews […]
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The devil is on his way
The devil just ain’t evil anymore. In fact, evil ain’t what it used to be. Satan has been co-opted by Disney and being bad has just been plain played out. As soon as artists figured bad was a good career move, good music by bad people became a thing of the past… until now. Texan […]
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Bringing back the age of Atari
How ironic: As a society we consistently become lazier, but our video game controllers keep adding buttons. And joysticks. And vibrating packs that are supposed to make your hands feel like you’ve actually been shot, or hit by a car, or snuck by a gargoyle, or something. Playing today’s popular video game systems is less […]
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One pissed-off hillbilly
Joe Buck is the kinda guy you just wanna to be friends with. He’ll add color to your otherwise mundane life. Besides the riotous music and musings you’ll be exposed to, this friendship will probably save your life. Buck’s on the edge, you see. And when he finally snaps and goes all Travis Bickell on […]
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The rebirth of cool
Every now and then, I’ll be at a happening event, a slick soiree, or in the middle of nowhere for that matter, and I’ll run into Rochester’s painting, guitar-slingin’ philosophizing bon vivant, El Destructo. We’ll exchange pleasantries, laugh at each other’s off-color humor, and discuss the current goings-on. We think we’re so smart. One such […]
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But seriously, folks
Barret Hanson’s music roots run deep. He learned the piano at an early age and found himself gravitating to the family phonograph. He began collecting 78s at the age of 12 and by 1957 was DJing for high-school sock hops. Graduating with a major in classical music from UCLA, he wrote his thesis on the […]
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Mexican bar mitzvah
Dave Alvin gave everything he had and everything we wanted at his Montage show a couple of weeks back. The sound was incredible — fairly loud but distinct enough to pack a punch. The band played with such whisper-to-a-scream dynamics that it continuously brought the SRO crowd to their feet and to their knees. Blasters […]
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Take four
With the Rochester International Jazz Festival concluding a successful third year, a 24-hour jazz radio station (WGMC 90.1 FM), and world-class jazz educators at area colleges, few can doubt Rochester’s prowess when it comes to jazz. But if further proof is needed, consider this fact: over the past few months four excellent jazz CDs have […]
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The end of heaviness as we know it.
Flash back to last year’s Bug Jar festival: It’s a picture-perfect summer day on the lawn near the Highland Park bowl. Between acts, audience members toss Frisbees, hacky sack, drink beer, and mingle. As local trio Sulaco sets up, guitarist-vocalist Erik Burke, sounding barely awake, says: “We are the heavy metal portion of this event. […]
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Out standing in their field
The Finger Lakes Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance began 14 years ago in the Puryear kitchen. Jordan and Jeb Puryear had been friends with two other musicians, Richie Stearns and Shane Lamphier, since they were all kids playing together in the Bubba George String Band. A friend recently had been diagnosed with AIDS, […]
