On Tour
Small venues are a mixed bag. Maybe it’s due to the prevalence of festivals popping up over the land or just the trend of me attending more concerts in larger venues, but smaller venues don’t sound quite as good as they did before. Don’t get me wrong, Cafe du Nord is a wonderful place. As mentioned before, it’s a really charming former speakeasy, but its’ intimacy is a gift and a curse. Tuesday’s Generationals show was a perfect example for why this is so.
When Papadosio took over the Fox Theatre Thursday night and turned it into a hypnotic display of light, sound and video projections, the crowd and band both knew that something special was in store. This was documented at the end of the show when lead guitarist Anthony Thogmartin called Colorado a second home for the band to mass cheers and rooster crows.
The legend of the Delta Blues is a somber story. Its grandfather died at the age of twenty-seven under debated circumstances. The legacy that Robert Leroy Johnson left Mississippi was a new style of guitar playing and singing that would eventually become the predominant defining form of American roots music. Nearly every style of American-born music can be structurally traced back to blues. Jazz and Rock ‘n’ Roll is blues music, and wouldn’t have been birthed without that foundational backbone.
This November 11, Boulder, Colorado’s Fox Theatre hosted Xavier Rudd, one of Australia’s most iconic voices, for the last American stop along his Spirit Bird Tour. Behind his custom drum set equipped with two didgeridoos, Xavier Rudd appeared like a mythic creature from an aborigine creation story. Rudd embodied the totem spirit vision as half-man and ecstatic bird with colossal tusks.
One of the more humorous developing attitudes of newer bluegrass acts is that they don’t like applying the label “bluegrass”. Though their instrumentation, song selection, and style all point to an existing form. The trend seems to be that up-and-comings feel marginalized by being cornered into accepting the label. In certain ways I understand this fear. Donning the title of a “bluegrass” band makes its musicians pressured into accepting a certain catalogue of songs and a limiting context in which they can expand and improvise their instrumentals.
Beats Antique brings us a new 8 track EP bursting with many styles of world music and theatrical composition, its impossible not to get into it. Beats Antique was formed in San Francisco, California and in 2007 created their first album.Beats Antique's music can’t be classified to one genre. The track The Allure gives off a spooky vibe. Like it should be in a haunted house frightening children on All Hall
There are bands that throw a CD Release Party, and there are bands that are a party every time they take the stage, no matter what night of the week it is. Cincinnati bred fastgrass up and comers The Rumpke Mountain Boys, the region’s ultimate newgrass party band, took over the stage of the Beachland Ballroom, where Yonder Mountain String Band got their start
Sometimes all that a band needs to do is throw a small party before your tour, inviting your closest friends to wish you luck as you head out on your first major tour across America. Or you can do things like The Dayton, OH bred psychedelic powerhouse band The Werks, who after their now legendary performances at their own festival, aptly named Werk Out, immediately launched into tour mode, leaving for their coast to coast US tour before all the paper w
In a move that excited many DSO and Furthur fans across the country, Phil and Friends have pulled off a trade for Rob Barraco, keyboardist for Dark Star Orchestra, sending keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to the chilly east coast to play four DSO dates in New York, Maine, and Massachusetts and Connecticut.
