Ol’ gravel throat himself, Bryan Adams, sounds a lot better live than he ever did on the radio. His show at the Auditorium Theatre on March 9 brought out more stonewashed jeans and mullets than there were in the summer of ’69 (sorry, I couldn’t resist — cuts like a knife, doesn’t it?) Adams looked […]
Music
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Now is the time
I don’t know. Maybe the blues just ain’t fair. It’s not like anyone with a harmonica or a guitar and a dream was ever promised a fair shake. But it just seems sometimes the cream doesn’t rise to the top. Cream like British blues legend John Mayall. Mayall has been playing the blues for […]
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Beautifully bombastic
The Suicide Girls have brought bump ‘n’ grind one step closer to rock ‘n’ roll. Pushing the standards of traditional burlesque and augmenting it with punk rock, this troupe of punk pop tarts stripped and teased and copped heaps of attitude to a capacity crowd at Buffalo’s Soundlab two weeks ago. Black electrical tape pasties, […]
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T-Model Ford is a bad man
You can romanticize all you want, but the blues has been gentrified. It’s been homogenized and castrated. Hell, it’s for everybody now. It’s practically Disney in some parts. That is unless you travel deep, deep into the Delta. There’re cats down there that never got out — at least until the revivalists at Fat […]
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Giving Alec Wilder the credit he’s due
Among composer Alec Wilder’s autobiographical papers is a story of kismet that begins in the Main Hall of the Eastman School of Music. Wilder’s writings betray the anxiety he felt every time he walked through Eastman’s Gibbs-Street entrance, as a lesson-taker and not a registered student. “It wasn’t a habit of mine to spend […]
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Your Mom’s Big Muff
I don’t know what it is with all these old black blues guys and their stereo chorus and flanger effects. Cats that came off rough-and-tumble raw in the rock ‘n’ roll dawn now sound like Andy Summers on a Thunderbird jag. Example numero uno: Fat Possum legend T-Model Ford — a truly murderous and […]
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The best and only
Of all the guitar slingers in the world, living, dead, or otherwise, Sonny Landreth stands alone. Landreth’s playing style is as unique as it is stunningly hypnotic. With merely the 10 fingers God gave him, Landreth blends deft finger-style picking with slippery slide in a sea of reverb and bluesy redemption. Landreth was born […]
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Sending listeners to the cosmos
Perhaps a mysterious gravitational force pulls Krzysztof Penderecki and the Eastman School together. Seventy-year-old Polish composer Penderecki (PEN-der-ETS-kee) received an honorary degree from the Eastman School in 1972. In the late 1980s, while in Rochester conducting the RPO, Penderecki returned to the Eastman School to give a composition symposium on his Grammy Award-winning Cello […]
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Boom de boom de boom de boom boom
It’s the beat, the beat, the beat. OK, so Chuck Berry had the licks and Elvis got all the chicks. Buddy Holly had the twang and Little Richard made ’em shake that thang. But Bo… Bo Diddley had the beat. The Bo Diddley beat. If you’ve ever heard the Strangeloves’ “I Want Candy” […]
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Chilean cool
The distance between the coat check and the stage at the Blue Note may have been only a few dozen yards, but to Claudia Acuña, in the mid-1990s, it sometimes seemed miles way. Acuña took the coat-check job at the world famous Manhattan jazz club after moving from the security of her home in […]
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Whole lotta Low Ton
A band is a kinetic thing. It is motion. It is emotion. It is the sum of souls with something to say. You love them. You hate them. You see their picture before hearing the music, and that snap says something about them. It draws you in. Low Ton is a heavy progressive rock […]
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Swinging more than the Swedish
When the Danish band Phønix (pronounced, roughly, “FooER-nicks”) takes the stage at Milestones next week, it will be the second Scandinavian group to play Rochester in a year. Yggdrasil, whose members hail from Norway and the Faroe Islands, was featured at last summer’s Rochester International Jazz Festival. But while that incarnation of Yggdrasil (there have […]
