May 31st, 2008 04:16pm
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Kicking off the 10th annual Healdsburg Jazz Festival, the Fred Hersch Trio journeyed through two markedly disparate sets Friday night at the Jackson Theater.
The first set, occasionally mellow and often gliding through sweeping poetic passages, found Hersch casting a wide net. Opening with the elegaic original “A Lark,” Hersch built up a steady banter with bassist John Hebert and dynamite drummer Nasheet Waits (who has a knack for pushing solos …
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May 30th, 2008 04:20pm
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At his very core, Les Claypool is really just an old salty dog.
Percolating his coffee on the radiator, he’s at home on a fishing boat, running lines and reeling in salmon.
With fishing on his mind, he kicked off the set Thursday night at The Mystic Theater with “Rumble of the Diesel,” singing “I been chasin’ tuna nearly 27 years/I got the eyeballs of an eagle but there’s ringing in …
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May 29th, 2008 03:29pm
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This week, let’s start with a quiz. I’ll rattle off four
cocktails and you match the corresponding “Sex and the City” characters:
Dirty Martini
White Russian
Kir Royal
Chocolatini
(Answers below)
The Carrie, The Charlotte, The Samantha and The Miranda will all star
on the drink menu at the Stark’s Steakhouse “Sex and the City”
after-party Friday night.
So what pray tell may quench the palate as Mr. Big?
Try a Manhattan.
(Uh, am I really writing about “Sex and the City”?)
First …
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May 27th, 2008 04:29pm
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I still got Al Green percolating on the brain (on the soul?)
after his Sonoma Jazz+ tent revival this past weekend. So the timing is perfect -
his new CD “Lay It Down” dropped today.
Amen.
The Roots’ Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson produces, keeping that
old tube-amp sound and silky gospel vocals we think of when we think of The Reverend
(like Willie Mitchell produced back in the ’70s), while updating it with members
of The Roots, John …
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May 26th, 2008 04:00pm
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There is something magical that happens when Bonnie Raitt is totally stripped down – no guitar to hide behind, no longer strutting around the stage in vacuum-packed jeans or jamming with special guests like Roy Rogers and Maia Sharp or shaking her big red mane while yelling “This ain’t no jazz stage tonight, I’m pumped up like a big dog!”
Just Bonnie sitting on a stool, hands clasped in her lap, …
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May 24th, 2008 08:44pm
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The highlight of Sonoma Jazz+ so far has to be Herbie Hancock’s globe-trotting, mind-blowing set under the tent last night.
Digging back into the catalog for classics like “Cantaloupe Island” and “Watermelon Man” and pulling from the recent Grammy-winning “River: The Joni Letters,” the dude was on fire.
photo: Kopol Bonick Studio/dkbphoto.com
He was also in a super chatty mood: Introducing West African guitarist Lionel Loueke, he reached way back to the …
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May 24th, 2008 05:21pm
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With heavenly beams shining down all around him, The Reverend buttered up his congregation: “Tonight is about YOU and ME.”
(A line I would later hear two Sonoma swells repeat over and over in the beer line “Dude that’s the best line ever! I’m gonna use that tonight!)
photo: Kopol Bonick Studio/dkbphoto.com
This is after he just showered the front row with red roses and screamed “Sonoma!” like a hallelujah.
Just to make …
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May 23rd, 2008 12:12pm
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Somewhere deep down beneath all the retro booty-shaking funk, soul and R&B that is Kool and the Gang, there’s actually a little jazz at play.
You can hear it in the screaming horns that fire away at the chorus of “Jungle Boogie.” Stirring beneath the roller-skating party shimmer of “Celebration,” there’s at least a trace of a hint that the band started off (44 years ago!) as the Jazziacs.
Well, maybe that’s …
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May 22nd, 2008 03:46pm
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I hung out with delta blues slideman Roy Rogers a few weeks ago backstage at the Mystic Theater. We rolled some video and chatted about New Orleans before he whipped out a beat-up acoustic for some nasty bottleneck blues.
When I mentioned Bonnie Raitt, he lit up.
“We’re a glove fit,” Rogers explained. “She likes my rhythmic sense a lot.”
To make his point, he broke into the meaty intro to “Gnawin’ It.”
“It’s …
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May 20th, 2008 04:59pm
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I’m just gonna come out and say it: “Anywhere I Lay My Head”
is crap.
Scarlett Johansson can’t sing. Not that she really tries
(she nails better karaoke in “Lost in Translation”).
And here’s the funny part: Producer David Sitek (TV on the
Radio) doesn’t seem to care. He’s too busy flooding each song in a thick opiatic
soup of electronic wash to worry about her tone-deaf, reverby, witch-in-a-well rendering of the Tom Waits catalog.
She’s an …
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Your Daily Dose. Whenever. Whatever. Wherever. Trolling Sonoma County and beyond, John Beck looks for cracks in the pop facade.
