items tagged with Redstone Room

Elvis Perkins is so full of articulated doubt in our interview that I ask him a blunt question: Does he like being a songwriter, musician, and bandleader? Because it seems like a miserable existence for him.

"Is that how it sounds?" he replied.

Railroad Earth mandolin player John Skehan notes that most recording studios are set up so that even when musicians are isolated from each other in separate rooms, they can see each other.

But when the New Jersey-based bluegrass/jam band convened in a three-century-old farmhouse owned by Todd Sheaffer, the band's singer and chief songwriter, the setup was different. As they tracked last year's Amen Corner mostly live, the sextet didn't have the benefit of body language and visual cues. Bass was in the kitchen. The drums were in the dining room. Multi-instrumentalist Andy Goessling was stuck in a bathroom.

"We had a little headphone system where everybody could control their own individual level and everybody else's level," Skehan said in a phone interview last week. "And we pretty much barely had eye contact. We just went into our individual little rooms and put our ears on, and that was the extent of the interaction. ... It does put you in a place where you're just listening."

The closing track on Killin' It, the new release from the Quad Cities reggae-rock trio Rude Punch, is called "Payment," and unfortunately it's overdue. Loose and light, the guitars and drums at the outset seem to be searching for the groove, and when they find it 35 seconds in, they sustain it for another four minutes. Brady Jager's singing is heartfelt and nimble, and background vocals and twin guitars add satisfying accents and interplay, while bassist Robb Laake and drummer Adam Tucker are each given opportunities to fill in the gaps. The lead-guitar and drum breaks suggest a band adept at jamming within a song's structure.

I'm guessing the band's CD-release party on Saturday at the Redstone Room will be a good time, as its music goes down easily and has the benefit of familiarity. If you've heard reggae, you'll have plenty of reference points. Most importantly, the band works it right on stage, and "Payment" shows what they're capable of.

But the album itself suffers from a lack of imagination.

As Michael Doucet tells it, the Acadian people of Louisiana have in their blood a penchant for both adaptation and preservation. They moved from France in the 17th Century and colonized Acadia - in what are now the Canada Maritime provinces and Maine. And many settled in Louisiana after the Great Expulsion of 1755 and became Cajuns.

"I think our culture has always looked at this - and not necessarily intellectually, but more on an emotional level - that you would adapt to whatever was around," Doucet said last week in a phone interview from his southwestern-Louisiana home. "That's how the Acadian sort of ethnic culture continues to be vital today, because it adapted.

"That's what we're doing now, is adapting to where we are now."

Born in Mississippi, veteran jazz trumpeter Art Hoyle was raised in Oklahoma in the early 1930s, and says that jazz "was just an inevitable part of the black community when I was growing up. You heard it everywhere - jazz and blues, and gospel music, of course. It was just part of everyday living."

It became a much bigger part for Hoyle, though, on his eighth birthday, when the young man received his first trumpet - a gift he'd long been longing for. "I was overjoyed," says Hoyle, recalling that before he turned eight, "My mother took graduate courses at Lexington University in Oklahoma in order to qualify to teach in that state, and I picked up a trumpet in the band room one day and played some notes.

"Everyone was astounded at what I could do," he says with a laugh, "and I enjoyed the attention, so I decided I wanted to play the trumpet."

When J.J. Grey got off the road late last year, he immediately started preparations for what would become the Orange Blossoms record.

"I essentially recorded the album in November," he said last week.

Then he did it again in January.

And once more in February.

And then he went into the studio to finish the job with his band, Mofro.

Ask Polyrhythms' Nate Lawrence about the highlights of more than two years presenting the Third Sunday jazz series at the River Music Experience, and his response tells you a great deal about his goals.

"Lenora Helm put together a choir real quick, out of the kids, and they're doing ‘Ain't Misbehavin','" he recalled last week. "Ray Blue, he had a six-piece with percussionists and whatnot, and as soon as the workshop was over, the kids just bum-rushed the stage. They sat at the piano. Some of the kids just grabbed the mic and started singing. Some kids went to the congas and started playing. The drummer got up, the kids sat down. It's hands-on. Those are the high points."

3c gaming gaming curse gaming online gaming pennsylvania and gaming girls of gaming gaming computers electronic gaming monthly free online gaming gambling national indian gaming association xbox gaming tips gaming pcs gaming laptops internet gaming timeline

When Lois Deloatch recorded what became Hymn to Freedom in late 2006, she intended it as a tribute to pianist Oscar Peterson, a living legend.

But one of the perils of being an independent artist is that albums done right require patience. "I'm a totally independent artist," the North Carolina-based Deloatch said earlier this week, in advance of her November 16 performance and workshop at the Redstone Room. "When you're literally doing every piece of it yourself, it takes a little bit of time."

Carrie Rodriguez has always gravitated toward the spotlight, even if it's taken a while to get there.

"My mother said that when I was in Montessori school, they would put on these plays," she recalled in a phone interview last week. "And I would always have the part of the tree or the plant or something. And my mom asked the teacher, ‘Why do you keep giving Carrie the role of the tree?' And the Montessori-school teacher says, ‘Because no matter what I do, Carrie's going to end up on the front of the stage, singing and dancing, so I can afford to give her the tree role. I need to give the shy kids the main roles.'"

In 1980, Living Blues magazine founder Jim O'Neal approached left-handed guitarist Eddy Clearwater about making an album for his new label, Rooster Blues.

That's when everyone started calling Eddy "The Chief," he said in a recent phone interview, "because I wanted to wear my headdress and ride a horse for the artwork, for the cover." The headdress has since become a signature piece in Clearwater's stage shows.