Friday, June 22, 2018

Impala photo

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Click for high res, credit: Dan Ball

Impala bio

Impala was formed in Memphis, TN in the early 1990s. Their first long

player, El Rancho Reverbo, was co-produced by the legendary Roland
Janes (Jerry Lee Lewis' guitar player and session player at Sun
Records) at Sam Phillips Recording Service. After receiving rave
reviews and gaining exposure playing one-niters across the South East,
Impala was picked up by West Coast label, Estrus Records. The band's
first release on Estrus was Kings of the Strip, recorded at famed
Easley Studio in Memphis. Following the release of this album, Impala
toured relentlessly, appearing at Garage festivals such as Garage
Shock, Sleezefest, Crap Out and Dixie Fried and appearing on shows
with guitar legends Dick Dale and Davie Allen and the Arrows. Over the
past decade numerous films and television shows have featured the
band's music. Most notable is Impala's arrangement of Henry Mancini's
"Experiment in Terror" in the George Clooney's, Chuck Barris biopic,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.   

When Impala surfaced on the Memphis garage scene in 1993, local
audiences hardly knew what hit them. The group built a sonic time
machine that, once you paid the cover charge and crawled on board,
might deposit you in 1955, 1967, or 2239. With just one song, they
could turn gritty, dumpy Barristers into West Memphis' time-honored
Plantation Inn, the home of their musical ancestors like the Mar-Keys,
the Packers, and the Royal Spades. Another tune would drop you into
Ennio Morricone's wasteland desertscapes; still another would
transport you to a New Orleans whorehouse, on a magical night when all
the girls were turning tricks for free. Instrumentals exploded from the amplifiers with a rumbling guitar, a honking sax, the type of drumbeat that
liberated strippers from their spangled costumes, and a
steeped-in-Memphis tradition bass line. The kind of nervous energy
that could propel a sensible Catholic schoolgirl into the arms of a
dangerous man, make a sailor catapult off the mast into a stormy sea,
or cause a veteran gunslinger to fire madly into the air before
plunging over a rocky cliff. The 'party now, because we're gonna pay
later' attitude that pervades the Southern consciousness, from
Tennessee Williams' plays to Jerry Lawler's ringside antics.

Estrus Records released Kings of the Strip (recorded at Easley-McCain
Recording Studio) and Square Jungle (cut at Sam Phillips) soon
followed. Impala proved perfect for then-nascent filmmaker John Michael
McCarthy, who needed a score for his movie Teenage Tupelo. Several
years later, George Clooney tapped Impala's back catalog for a medley
of Henry Mancini's "Experiment in Terror" and Duane Eddy's "Stalkin'"
which ended up in the Chuck Barris bio pic Confessions of a Dangerous
Mind. Another song, "Incident on the Tenth Floor" was used in the
trailer for the indie flick Way of the Gun.

The time spent offstage was never dull, the men of Impala amused
themselves with genuine Italian switchblades (purchased, naturally, at
an Arizona truck stop), intra-vehicular fireworks (Missouri's Boom
Land was a favored stop), and detours to shake joints, BBQ stands, and
Norman Petty's recording studio (where Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, and
the Fireballs laid down infamous tracks) in Clovis, New Mexico.

A mythology, hammered home with songs like "Ronnie and the Renegades"
and "Last Tango in Turrell," was carefully built, then carelessly laid
to waste by beer-fueled gigs and burnt roadmaps, even as Impala wrote
tunes like "Wild Night at the Bloody Bucket," an homage to onetime
Carl Perkins' pianist Bill Grantham, who worked alongside Bomar at
Select-O-Hits, and "King Louie Stomp," a salute to fellow musician
King Louie Bankston of New Orleans' Royal Pendletons. "Choctaw" turned
Jorgen Ingmann's momentous "Apache" inside out and regionalized it,
while "Cozy Corner" acknowledged the Bluff City's best pork ribs. The
never-before-released "Amarillo," meanwhile, proved to be the final
nail in the coffin – cut at the end of the session for Impala Play R&B
Favorites, released on Estrus in '99, it languished in the vaults for
years as the last number Impala ever recorded. Combust or be combusted, these songs instructed. Destroy yourself before the music destroys you. Praise the drumbeat, and pass a bottle of booze to the stage. One final album, an anthology called Night Full of Sirens, was released on Bomar’s label, Electraphonic, in 2006.
Then Impala disappeared. The band was put on ice. Members of the group found other ways to make a living: Bomar, the group’s bassist, began producing and running his own studio, formed the seminal blues-soul combo the Bo-Keys, and began composing, creating scores for films such as Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan and Mississippi Grind. Other members turned to bail bonding in Memphis, doing private detective work, and freelancing for various combos at honkytonks and “adult-themed” nightclubs across the U.S.


Yet their muse pursued them like a siren’s call. Unable to resist, Impala reformed in 2017, and after woodshedding with a series of local gigs, returned to the recording studio to create this brand-new album, aptly titled In the Late Hours. Recorded at Bomar’s Electraphonic Studios in downtown Memphis, In the Late Hours features ten intoxicating guitar- and sax-driven R&B songs, born out of that golden era of Memphis music when rockabilly, rhythm and blues, jazz, garage and soul music collided. These songs channel potent ghosts—namely, Packy Axton, Willie Mitchell and Ike Turner, all pioneers of Memphis’ instrumental scene—but they’re hardly derivative. They bristle with urgency and make your heart beat fast. They’ll make you wish for a time long past—when men wore hats in the street and women wore silk stockings fastened with a sexy garter belt. It’s music that is a remedy for hard times. Put it on, and let your mind wander. Take refuge in those darker places. Pour yourself another drink. And make sure the door’s locked—it’s later than you think.

-Andria Lisle, Memphis, TN
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Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Kevin Gordon 2018 artwork

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All photos credit Jacob Blickenstaff





Kevin Gordon 2018 bio

Kevin Gordon’s Louisiana is a strange place. In his songs, it’s a place where restless teens road trip to where the highway dead-ends at the Gulf of Mexico; a place where prisoners who are in for life compete in a rodeo in front of spectators; where a man can get lost in the humid afternoon and where religion may not signify hope; where the KKK greets a high school marching band and its African-American teacher along a parade route; where a post-ZZ Top show hang out outside a McDonald’s reveals a hidden gun; where a Pontiac GTO gets stolen, ends up in a lake, and punishment takes precedence over remuneration; where half-Comanche folksinger Brownie Ford can escape death and proffer advice on staying real and free; where Jimmy Reed is the true king of rock & roll; and where rivers, never far away, carry secrets behind levees.

The kicker? All of these songs are based on true stories. Kevin Gordon has been exploring Louisiana for twenty years now, on the eve of the release of his powerful new album Tilt & Shine, out July 27, 2018 on Crowville Media. “One of the things I like about it and am mystified by is that what passes for normal in Louisiana would not make the grade elsewhere,” Gordon says. He continues, “It’s only 4 ½ or 5 hours from Monroe,where I grew up,to New Orleans; the influence of south Louisiana, the Acadian culture, the diverse influences of New Orleans, all that stuff kind of floats around the state.” Gordon’s MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop allows him to capture it with a degree of precision. As the New York Times put it in its headline of a feature on Kevin, “A Musician Or A Poet? Yes to Both.” Lucinda Williams said, "He’s writing songs that are like short stories" and noted music journalist Peter Guralnick has said, "Think of John Lee Hooker tied to the hard, imagistic poetry of William Carlos Williams, and you get a little bit of the picture." With all these accolades, it’s no wonder that Gordon’s songs have been covered by the likes of Keith Richards, Levon Helm, Irma Thomas, The Hard Working Americans (featuring Todd Snider), Ronnie Hawkins, Sonny Burgess, and Southside Johnny.

Echoing Faulkner’s famous line that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past,” Kevin declares, “There’s something about that bouncing back and forth between present tense and past tense that provides a powerful energy to work from. There are so many stories in Monroe and it’s a place that nobody pays attention to. It’s still got a real provincial thing about it that is intriguing because you feel like not everything’s been figured out. For me, you can feel the arc of time passing: you can drive by the house you lived in when you were 12; you remember things that happened there. I’m captivated by the power of strong memories—those films that run continuously in your mind, if you let ‘em.”

Before you even hear Kevin Gordon’s vivid lyrics, you start feeling the sound of that ’56 Gibson ES-125 tuned down to low, open D, with the tremolo flowing like a river, and an unstoppable groove distilled from swamp blues and Sun Records. “It inevitably provides weird sounds and chords that I would not have figured out on my own,” Gordon says. “You’re just sitting there playing and listening until something accidental sounds interesting.” It’s also a sound that comes of the four-album partnership with producer Joe McMahan (Patrick Sweany, McCrary Sisters, Shelby Lynne & Allison Moorer) , who says, "It still blows my mind how after all these years he continues to bring songs to the table that are as good or better than anything he has written in the past. When the bar is raised to such a high level by songs like these, it mandates that all of us involved demand the highest level from ourselves. I’m very fortunate to be involved.”

Coming of age in fits and starts is a theme to which Gordon has returned several times and he finds a new story here in the unsettling, insistent groove of “Fire at the End of the World,” a tale of friends who ran off with their parents’ car and a stash of drugs to see the point where the highway ends and the backwaters of the Gulf of Mexico begin. “Saint on a Chain” ranks up there with some of the best songwriting around, according to Paste Magazine’s Geoffrey Himes, who witnessed a live version at Americana Fest. It also came out of one of Kevin’s visits to Monroe, talking with an old friend. “We were sitting in his truck one time. He was playing a Springsteen record for me and he was under the influence of something pharmaceutical,” he remembers. Gordon spent years perfecting the song, saying, “I started thinking about the St. Christopher’s medal he wore, and ended up reading the story of how Jesus appeared as a child to the saint, as Christopher was helping people cross a flooded river. The Ouachita River runs between Monroe and West Monroe, and like a lot of rivers, it isn’t exactly crystal clear.” The song’s finale could see the character about to run his car off the road in a fit of self-destruction or perhaps on the verge of redemption.

These same themes play out in a more humorous fashion on rocking album closer “Get It Together” aka “Shit Together.” Sardonically, Gordon says, “It’s easier to talk about yourself when you’re not using the first person point of view. This is a song about what seems to be a constant battle of adulthood—negotiating that gap between knowing what you need to do, and actually doing it.” “Get It Together” also reminds one that Kevin’s no folksinger, launching into a kicking rock and roll groove. Similarly, “Right On Time” rips out of the gate, poking fun at the notion that things happen when they’re supposed to but also accepting the strangeness of the rock & roll road and its little victories.

One of the most powerful songs on the album, “One Road Out (Angola Rodeo Blues)” kicks off with a wicked John Lee Hooker-esque guitar line. Kevin says, “Joe handed me [Delta bluesman] Son Thomas’ fake Strat and I plugged it into one of his little amps and it sounded like Satan coming up from the sewer.” The sound evokes the setting, the infamous Angola State Penitentiary (one-time home to Lead Belly, bluesman Robert Pete Williams, and setting of the recent documentary “Serving Life”), where prisoners engage in a rodeo and a craft fair for a public audience. He adds, “It’s hard to watch, heartbreaking, even though those guys look forward to it.” With Tilt & Shine, Kevin Gordon takes the bitter with the sweet. His eye for a great story and ear for a key turn of phrase makes his songwriting a masterclass in craft, and an unflinchingly honest look at life in Louisiana.

Friday, June 1, 2018

Kris Gruen & Peter Morén "Everyday and Night Now" video

THIRD ANNUAL JALOPY INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL, JUNE 7-9 BANDS FROM AN ARRAY OF NYC’S DIVERSE COMMUNITIES BODOMA GARIFUNA CULTURAL BAND, Cumbiamba eNeYe, BROOKLYN RAGA MASSIVE, AND MORE!

The Jalopy Theatre is proud to announce the 3rd Annual Jalopy International Music Fest! Three nights of music from June 7th-9th at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The evenings will include music representing the traditions of Honduras, Serbia, Colombia, Mali, China, Sardinia and more! The festival celebrates the diverse wellspring of music among NYC's communities.

This festival will bring together players from different musical backgrounds and styles in one space, showcasing what makes NYC such a unique and vibrant musical landscape. The festival is put on by and occurs at the newly non-profit Jalopy Theatre. The festival is also joining forces with Brooklyn Raga Massive, a local collective rooted in and inspired by Indian classical music that holds a weekly residency at the Theatre.

“This Festival is a cross pollination of music and scenes from the world’s most diverse city. The audience will be enthralled by the breadth of talent,” Festival organizer, Feral Foster, said.

"Over Jalopy’s first decade, our music and educational programming has become increasingly rich, and the relationships we have developed with artists, audiences, and students have deepened. And we have seen an opportunity to build a broader community of support for our work, realizing our communal values even more fully." - Geoff and Lynette Wiley

TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE HERE: https://shop.jalopytheatre.org/category-s/161.htm
Thursday, June 7th
Brooklyn Raga Massive Weekly
Join us for an evening dedicated to the music of Raga-inspired composer John McLaughlin. The lineup includes original Mahavishnu Orchestra member Premik Russell Tubbs from "Visions of the Emerald Beyond" album on Woodwinds, Rez Abassi - guitar, Vin Scialla (BRM/Snehasish/Mission:on Mars) - Drums, Neel Murgai (BRM) - Sitar, Neil Alexander (Mahavishnu Project) - Keys, Brian Mooney - Bass, and Guests.

Friday, June 8th
8:00pm - The Jalopy Chorus (choral music from The Balkans, Caucuses and beyond)
9:00pm - Tenores de Aterue (Sardinian songs a cappella)
10:00pm - Bodoma Garifuna Cultural Band (Garifuna Dugu, Sambay, Gunchey, Wanaragu, Paranda from Honduras)
11:00pm - Fada (Occitan Music)

Saturday, June 9th
7:00pm - Zong Li Lu (Chinese Monochord)
8:00pm - Yacouba Sissoko (Kora music from Mali)
9:00pm - Rosa (All female Serbian vocal group)
10:00pm - Cumbiamba eNeYe (Traditional Colombia Music and Dance)
11:00pm - Turkish Music with Jenny Luna, Kane Mathis, and Philip Mayer

WORKSHOPS on Saturday, June 9th, 2018
Sardinian and Corsican Polyphony Workshop
3:30-5:30pm

Join the Tenores de Aterúe for an exciting workshop that will explore several styles of vocal polyphony from the island traditions of Sardinia and Corsica. From Sardinia, we will sing sacred music from the cuncordu tradition, and the throat-singing tradition called cantu a tenore will also be introduced. Ornamentation from Corsica will be touched upon as we learn a piece from the beautiful and vast folk repertoire.
Link:  https://shop.jalopytheatre.org/product-p/w3-060918.htm

Maqam Made Easy: Vocal and Instrumental Workshop on the Arabic Melodic System
5:30-6:45
Are you curious about the microtonal scales used in Middle-Eastern music? Do you want to expand your improvisation skills? Sami demystifies maqam by presenting basic melodies in a straightforward call-and-response style, accessible to musicians and aspiring musicians of all levels. This 90 minute workshop will introduce several common maqamat through both songs and improvisation. Vocalists and instrumentalists welcome.
Link: https://shop.jalopytheatre.org/product-p/w2-060918.htm