Two Sundays ago I
shoehorned The Buddhahood — the whole Buddhahood — into the 98-9 BUZZ
studios for a cacophonous, polyrhythmic, sexy, super-shimmy-shakedown boogaloo on The
Sunday Night Shakedown (my Rochester-music show). The band mixed New Orleans jazz with Afro-Cuban joy. When the band hits the stage and
the electric stuff gets plugged in, they get a little Rasta slinky. Talk about
world beat. The sound was unavoidably huge and mesmerizing.
Preceding the Buddhahood’s on-air blast was father-son guitar duo Shared Genes. Sam and Teddy Nicolosi rely heavy on the acoustic alchemy of Acoustic
Alchemy as an influence. Teddy’s just 13 years old and exhibits a fresh yet
studied approach to a fairly complicated fingerstyle.
It’s amazing how flawlessly he plays now. Just give the kid a few years, and
there’s no tellin’ what he’ll be able to do.
And speaking of kids,
I braved the thruway last Friday down to Verona, New York, to catch The
Fabulous Thunderbirds rock the Turning Stone Casino Showroom. The T-Birds
have had a revolving door as far as guitar players go ever since co-founder
Jimmie Vaughn split. The ranks have been filled by cats like Duke Robillard and Kid Ramos. And now it’s 28-year-old Nick
Curran, former lead picker for the late, great Ronnie Dawson. Once Curran left
the Dawson fold he dug into his blues roots, resurrecting the loud ‘n’
tight twang of cats like Pee Wee Crayton, T-Bone
Walker, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson. But within all that gabardine slickster cool you could hear a little Jimmie Vaughn.
Well now Curran’s in
The Thunderbirds and the band hasn’t sounded better. It’s pretty much a new
band now — kids playing the music they were raised on alongside the ones who
actually wrote it. Singer-harmonica player Kim Wilson and legendary piano man
Gene Taylor led these greasy pups through the T-Bird catalogue, frequently
dipping in to pull out some gems from their earlier LPs, some recorded when
Curran was in diapers.
But Curran proved to
be too strong to be merely led. Looking like Joe Strummer, he pushed the band
with his ferocious twang and grinding shuffle. When he took the mic to sing “You Really Torture Me” while pickin’ like Magic Sam, you could see the dream had come
true.
— Frank De Blase
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2006.
