The closing Masterworks concerts of the Quad City Symphony's centennial season included a commission meant as a prelude leading, without pause, into Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. I was skeptical. The Choral symphony - one of the greatest compositions in music - was a logical conclusion for a season-long celebration of 100 years, but attaching contemporary music to it raised two questions: What could the new music possibly add, and would it diminish Beethoven's towering work?

Yet James Stephenson's A-ccord worked on several levels April 11 at the Adler Theatre. It successfully connected Beethoven to 21st Century musical thinking. More importantly, it neatly summarized the rigor and thoughtfulness of Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith's highly symbolic program - which presented a unified message bridging time, style, and language, and ceded the spotlight to guest vocalists as the Quad City Symphony closed its milestone season.

A-ccord brought all that together, featuring both voices and instruments, placing an English translation of Friedrich Schiller's "Ode" (a component, in German, of the Ninth Symphony) alongside words from Quad Cities poet Dick Stahl, and treating Beethoven's source material in a contemporary way, with an innovative use of a single melodic line with rhythmic and orchestral variations.

Hey Rosetta! Photo by Scott Blackburn.

It's not often you'll hear a story about label interference making a record better, so let's marvel at Hey Rosetta!'s Second Sight.

The band was twice short-listed for the Polaris Music Prize and has been nominated for a Juno Award - the Canadian equivalent of the a Grammy - and Second Sight has been warmly received. SputnikMusic.com described it as "a collection of profoundly beautiful and well-arranged songs that I'm sure will stand the test of time."

Yet the story of its creation shows some of the opportunity inherent in a little adversity.

The Canadian septet had finished recording the album's 11 songs, and the band's label liked it, but ... the staff felt it needed a single, something to launch it. Singer/guitarist/pianist/songwriter Tim Baker - in a recent phone interview promoting the band's April 24 Communion Tour gig at Rozz-Tox - said he disagreed.

"We thought we had a great record, and we had to go back in" to the studio, he said of the band's frustration. Hey Rosetta! assented because they also wanted to make the album as commercially viable as possible, "to get it out to people."

But writing to grab people's attention is difficult, and something that was foreign to Baker as a songwriter. "I'd never written a single before," he said. "We'd gotten this far just playing our sprawling tunes and touring all the time. If we were going to try to get something on the radio, then I really wanted it to be moving and really mean something to me. And hopefully be one of those songs that isn't just skin-deep, kind of asinine music. ... A song that actually reaches past and does something to you. ...

"We took it as a challenge ... trying to write something short and catchy but meaningful. ... I think we got it, but it was a trial for sure."

Shook Twins

Shook Twins came into possession of the magical, giant golden egg in 2010. According to the story on the band's Web site, Laurie Shook happened upon a young man holding the thing, and when she asked about it, he said a woman gave it to him and told him to sign it and pass it on to the next person.

Laurie Shook was that person, and she promises on ShookTwins.com that she will eventually hand the egg off to somebody else: "Until then, it shall be musical!"

In that way, the egg is being passed every night Shook Twins perform - including almost certainly April 16 at the Redstone Room. Laurie and her identical twin Katelyn don't appear eager to part with it, but they turned the egg into an instrument: Laurie filled it with popcorn (making it a giant egg shaker) and mic-ed it (making it a drum).

I'm trying to pin Chris Noth down on some dates, and he's not helping.

"The older you get," he said, "the years just start running together."

In fairness, it's not merely age. The topic of our interview is Natty Scratch, the band Noth co-founded that will be celebrating 43 years of existence this weekend with a pair of shows featuring all the group's original members - and people who've joined over the years.

The band's current lineup includes founding members Noth (guitar and vocals), Tommy Langford (bass and vocals), and Steve Cooley (percussion and vocals). Keyboardist Rick Stoneking joined in the early 1980s to replace Noth (who joined several touring bands), and drummer/vocalist Richie Reeves has only been with Natty Scratch for about a decade.

For this weekend's concerts, the group will also feature original drummer D.L. Blackman (who cut back on performing, making way for Reeves) and - returning from Alaska - guitarist/singer/co-founder Pat Ryan. (Noth said he's not sure when Ryan left the Quad Cities, except that it was before his own return in 1991.)

Nnenna FreelonPrior to her career - or rather, careers - as a jazz vocalist, composer, author, and actor, Nnenna Freelon was employed in the worthy but far less glamorous field of health-care administration. She says, however, that in her late 20s, while working as a North Carolina-based administrator in the early 1980s, "I suddenly had an epiphany that I was not happy, even though I loved working in a hospital environment. Because even in that job, I used to find myself in patients' rooms singing.

"I just had a nay-saying kind of narrative," she continues. "You know, 'I want to sing, but I don't want to live in New York or California ... .' It just didn't seem attainable. But I remember whining, blah blah blah, to my grandmother about it, who was 93 at the time, and she said something to me that was very profound. She said, 'Bloom where you're planted. If God wants you to sing, He can handle wherever you are and whichever situation you're in - what you know, what you don't know - and nothing is too hard."

Culture Coup, Blue Faith Sunrise

Culture Coup

Music rooted in reggae has an inherent warmth, and that's certainly true with the Quad Cities quintet Culture Coup on its debut album, Blue Faith Sunrise. But it doesn't take much time with the record to notice that there's a drag on that vibe, an early-adult ennui in the vocals and lyrics.

Rather than being a wet blanket, however, that contradiction actually enlivens the 11-track whole - bringing a welcome complexity to a style that too often feels one-dimensional to me.

Lead singer/guitarist Ben Miller, guitarist/singer Chris Miller, drummer Jack McNeil, bassist Jim Drain, and keyboardist/singer Joey Pautsch successfully meld the building blocks of reggae with indie-rock's youthful angst, and crucially they never coast on easy grooves. Every song features some combination of compositional depth and articulate playing, particularly in the drums and lead guitar. There's often a magical interplay among the instruments, a cohesive collection of distinctive voices.

The pieces in the Quad City Symphony's fourth Masterworks concerts of the season would seem to have little in common: modern post-minimalism, a Mozart concerto, and a symphony rooted in religious faith. Yet in different ways, the presentation of each piece on February 7 unlocked the music.

Revisiting Michael Torke's Quad City Symphony-commissioned Oracle, the orchestra reached a comfort level with the composition that brought to light new facets through a sparkling, seasoned performance. Demarre McGill, principal flutist with the Dallas Symphony, redefined his instrument as muscular yet supple in an imaginative treatment of Mozart's Concerto No. 1 for Flute & Orchestra. And the highlight of the program was a towering performance of Anton Bruckner's epic Symphony No. 4: Romantic, aided significantly by introductory comments that framed it in the context of the composer's life.

All Them Witches hails from Nashville, and the combination of name and hometown gives you a pretty good sense of a split personality. The moniker hints at a band in thrall to Black Sabbath, and the Tennessee city hints at something Southern - although its debts are to blues and Southern rock and not in any way country. (Bassist/singer Michael Parks Jr. noted, however: "We have been known to just pop up on the street somewhere during tour playing bluegrass on the street.")

But when the band returns to Rozz-Tox on February 15, it will be apparent that the quartet is far more expansive than that would suggest. All Them Witches embraces not just blues-based music but the blues themselves, particularly on "The Marriage of Coyote Woman" from its most recent album, Lightning at the Door. The elemental riffs of Ben McLeod have the heaviness of Sabbath's Tommy Iommi but also the razor-sharp lyricism of Queens of the Stone Age's Joshua Homme.

And, most importantly, there's an experimental psychedelic core, a grounding in improvisation that allows each person in the band to bring a distinct personality to tracks that might go anywhere - including, to cite just one example, throat singing in the folk-ish and completely un-metal "Romany Dagger."

And that anything-goes quality is the reason I was curious about this comment I read from drummer Robby Staebler: "As individual players we are more concerned and focused on our own playing. We are not focused on what the others are playing. We all do what we want. It's why it works."

(For a sidebar on Ellis Kell's efforts in music education and community programming, click here.)

Ellis KellWhat can you say about Ellis Kell? Better question: What can you not?

He's the director of programming and community outreach for Davenport's River Music Experience, and barring a six-month 2006-7 hiatus, has been employed by the venue since November 2003 - seven months before it opened its doors to the public.

He's an area legend among blues and roots musicians and fans - a 35-year veteran of solo and ensemble gigs who's an accomplished singer/songwriter, guitarist, and pianist (if, as he admits, maybe not the best trumpet player).

He's spent a remarkable quarter-century serving as bandleader and performer for The Ellis Kell Band, which has shared stages with, and opened for, the likes of Robert Cray, REO Speedwagon, Willie Nelson, Etta James, Little Feat, Johnny and Edgar Winter, and B.B. King - the latter of whom hugged Kell, on stage, during a 2008 Adler Theatre concert. (The Ellis Kell Band will celebrate its 25-year venerability and versatility in a February 6 concert at the River Music Experience's Redstone Room.)

And he is, by common agreement, one of the most engaging, and engaged, storytellers you'll ever hope to encounter, whether speaking at the RME or appearing in a special event at an area library ... or just sitting at a table, quietly recounting stories for an audience of one.

So why say anything about Ellis Kell when, in describing his road to local iconography, he can do it for me?

For the past eight years, I've compiled a year-end album of favorite songs released in the 12 preceding months, with no artists repeating from previous years. I've done it again.

Beyond the artists presented here, my favorite album was O'Death's Out of Hands We Go - which, if not quite as consistently great as the band's 2011 record Outside, is a stunning accomplishment - a warbling, adventurous, authentic backwoods blend of introspection and primal emotion putting bluegrass instrumentation through the aesthetic amp of folk, punk, lo-fi, and indie rock. The band's "Vacant Moan" is probably my favorite song of the past decade (it was on my 2008 album), and since then O'Death has largely abandoned thrashing furor in favor of a more measured sound that finds its power in places other than speed and volume.

My initial effort at compiling this album was decidedly pop-oriented, with a few digressions into my natural proclivity toward the odd. But 19 songs became 16, and as I pared away tracks I loved that felt a little too reliant on formula, I recognized a thread of elemental music. Sometimes it took the form of naked aggression (another proclivity), but just as often it was songs stripped down to base emotion - concentrated states of the heart and mind. I ran with that.

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