When
the two performers in the cello-guitar duo Montana Skies - Jennifer
and Jonathan Adams - began playing together in 1997, the impetus
was "curiosity," Jennifer said in an interview last week.
The classical repertoire for guitar and cello is small, and they therefore didn't have much in the way of an example. So over the past decade they've developed a catalog of original compositions and covers of popular songs - everything from the Beatles to Pink Floyd. They're as adept at energetic flamenco as they are patient, spare melodies.
The
future of Ra Ra Riot sounds as if it's in doubt.
The
Envy Corps hail from Iowa, but the plan is to try to make a splash in
Great Britain before the United States.
Philip
Dickey had a burning question about Huckleberry's, the pizza place
in downtown Rock Island that his band, Someone Still Loves You Boris
Yeltsin, will be playing next week.
Mason
Proper's debut album, There Is
a Moth in Your Chest, is
utterly scattershot. It's a 12-course meal for which there appears
to have been little thought put into the progression or the entirety.
Like many noted directors of opera, Bill Fabris has a résumé that boasts a number of heavyweight titles, among them Bizet's Carmen, Puccini's Tosca, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, and Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto, which Fabris stage-directs - with Ron May music-directing - for Opera Quad Cities on January 18 and 20.
The
title of Pieta Brown's new record, Remember
the Sun, evokes a seemingly
endless darkness without sounding hopeless, and the opening track,
"Innocent Blue," does, too. On a bed of warm keyboards, she
sings: "Iron bars with no irony / One is bound so none get free /
In the innocent blue ... the innocent blue."
Kim
Wiseman & Mark A. Johnson, Visiting
Old Friends at Christmas
If your Mondays are anything like ours here at the River Cities' Reader, they're probably not the cheeriest days of the week. But I think I can speak for everyone here in saying that the next couple of 'em might not be so bad. Work on Monday, December 24, and then - blam! Day off, baby! Work on Monday, December 31, and then - blam! Really lethargic and cranky day off, baby!
