Reviews
Colorado favorites and jam band veterans Michael Travis and Jason Hann spearheaded their second headlining performance at Denver’s nationally renowned Fillmore Auditorium on Saturday night, bringing their Cirque De Bass along with them. To me, the ability to play the Fillmore and Red Rocks adds up to 2/3rds of the Colorado Triple Crown when it comes to live music.
Genuine charisma is what sets Chris and Oliver Wood Brothers Band apart from other contemporary rock bands. Their own brand of Americana, fused by two different musical paths bound together, has evolved from a genre-bending project into a highly popular full time band. Before the groups’ inception in 2004, many were less familiar with guitarist Oliver Wood but knew his brother Chris as the virtuoso bass ace of avant-garde jazz trio MMW.
One of the greatest qualities of Colorado’s Cajun Slamgrass legends Leftover Salmon is their ability to evolve with sincere versatility. Founding members Vince Herman and Drew Emmitt have taken the band to higher creative peaks, with new material (the fantastic Aquatic Hitchhiker release) and welcoming great musicians in that really understand how to play their demanding style while also kicking back and parting with their crowd.
On Monday night in New Orleans, the House of Blues was graced with the presence of one of the next generation’s blues guitar heroes, Gary Clark Jr. Clark, who spent his years learning guitar in Austin, Texas, was preceded onstage by fellow Texans the Moeller Brothers, both bands lending a similar southern blues rock sound to a sold-out room of ears.
Musicians that decide to go the solo route, all by their looooooooooooooonesome, are deserving of respect just for the sake of displaying the confidence it takes to share their creativity and talents to make good things happen. Solo acts have to deal with huge expectations ranging from thousands of folks in a big venue looking to catch the best version ever of their favorite songs or simply being the focus of fifteen people in a small club with strings of Christmas lights as the stage lighting.
Certain casual fans of the Creole Rock Granddaddy Jamband Little Feat may be under the false impression that the band’s true color died along with founding guitarist, singer, de-facto bandleader Lowell George in 1979.
Some things never change.
It’s already out that Mazzy Star’s Seasons of Your Day—their first album in some seventeen-odd years—is a lark’s call back to ’82 and the Paisley Underground, boasting the same beautiful shoegaze melodies behind She Hangs Brightly and So Tonight That I Might See that so endeared singer Hope Sandoval, guitarist David Roback and company within their underground circles in their heyday.
BIG Something sounds like Incubus and 311 had a baby and played moe.
With twenty-one records released through the genre bending marathon existence that is Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, the band has plenty of material to choose from. Original founder and ivory tickler Brian Haas, along with his well-versed cohorts, dug deep into their songbook for a set of re-worked classics spanning their twenty-year career last Thursday at Dazzle Jazz in Denver, Colorado.
