Are you in the holiday spirit but can’t stand the thought of yet another performance of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker? (There are three productions of it in the city, you know.) How about supporting a jazzed-up approach to seasonal standbys like “We Three Kings,” “Jingle Bells” and “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem”?…
How many versions of “Jingle Bells” does the average person need? Plenty, apparently. Each year, the recording industry unleashes a torrent of seasonal discs, most of them dominated by a humdrum repertoire of tunes — and each year a percentage of them sells well enough to justify a similar deluge…
The last time William Topley was in Colorado, he almost froze his ass off. It was a week before Christmas in the faux-Swiss theme-park surroundings of Vail Village, and a clearly pissed-off-looking Topley was preparing to play a nighttime outdoor concert in 15-degree weather — for reasons unclear even to…
Several years back, when the record industry was trying its damnedest to stir up an electronica youthquake, Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, was the hitmaker most likely to be denigrated. After all, how hip and underground could he be if every freakin’ tune he created wound up in the background…
On his latest offering, former Colorado picker and current Oregon resident Dick Weissman offers eighteen instrumentals that bring to mind bygone days without seeming like museum pieces — thanks to the spirit of adventure with which Weissman and sometime violin accompanist Keiski infuse them. “From Granada to Kingston,” for example,…
For more than three decades, Hank Mobley was regarded by the bulk of the jazz-listening public as a journeyman of the hard-bop idiom, one of a dozen or so competent tenor saxophonists who toured clubs, filled out various recording bands and cut the occasional side under their own names. But…
As the Denver area resonates with the sounds of the season, there’s a death knell ringing through Broomfield. Last week, the board of directors of Up With People — the do-gooder performance and service group that calls Colorado home and employs more than 260 people worldwide — suspended operations indefinitely,…
Michelle Shocked, with Sonny Landreth, Sunday, December 17, at the Boulder Theater, has always presented a deft combination of punk philosophy and folk tradition, beginning with the rustic and bluesy Texas Campfire Tapes, a sparely recorded acoustic offering that caught the attention of fans and, later, Mercury Records, in the…
Proving that there’s more to music in the High Country than après-ski singers doing Jimmy Buffett covers, the Vail-bred rap-rock quartet Sucker, Friday, December 15, at Tulagi, has spent the last three years establishing itself as one of the state’s most promising live bands. Now based in Boulder, the group’s…
DJ Euphorick is among the resident spinners who have found asylum at the Sanctuary, the newest addition to the LoDo club landscape. And although the space, which sits at 20th and Larimer, is open to the public every weekend — with worldbeat stylings from DJ Qrt on Friday and DJ…
Monica Janzen first felt the lump in her breast eight years ago, when she was thirty. It was small, and her doctors said it was nothing. In fact, a month later it went away, and so she got on with her life as a computer consultant. She continued moonlighting as…
For the musician, the romance of life in Colorado comes with a price, because the state’s geographic gifts — the Rocky Mountains, snow and the surrounding open plains — are a serious obstacle for acts that want to tour for a living. While this may not be a secret among…
A long time ago (about a decade and a half, actually), in a land far, far away (Los Angeles), I was watching U2 play “One” on the video monitors at the Tower Records branch where I worked. In the middle of the song, which the band performed as part of…
In the mid-’90s, Veruca Salt drew countless comparisons to the Breeders, and its hit, “Seether,” received massive airplay that put the Chicago band on the map with that Smashing bald guy for a while. Six years later, after a nasty split with co-founder Louise Post, singer Nina Gordon floundered for…
You know a metal band’s in bad shape when it hasn’t topped the charts in nigh a decade and even its designated pretty boy’s been sporting baseball caps over his balding pate for longer than that. Such has been the case for the Scorpions, who’ve released nothing resembling a hit…
Though it would have been nice if this album had followed up on the oddball studio experiments of 1997’s A Great Noise, Monte’s third album for Metro Blue is another winner. Memories draws on a rotating cast that includes several members of Monte’s standby Brazilian crew, including Dari Moraes on…
Heard some news this morning that set my wheels a-churnin’: Johnnie Johnson, the guitarist/lyricist who helped design the rock-and-roll-song template by co-penning tunes like “Roll Over Beethoven” and “No Particular Place to Go,” has filed a multimillion-dollar suit against his former songwriting partner, Chuck Berry. The suit alleges that Johnson…
When he began a career in the brave new world of New Wave, Joe Jackson, Saturday, December 9, at the Paramount Theatre, seemed poised for long-term success in the vein of equally iconoclastic contemporaries like Elvis Costello and Graham Parker. But Jackson’s subsequent and frequently hard-to-peg meanderings into ska, jump-swing…
Popular saxophonist Vic Cionetti, Sunday, December 10, at the Gothic Theatre, officially returns to the Denver jazz scene with his first public concert in more than ten years. Jazz Alley TV will tape the 8 p.m. show for future broadcast. It will be Cionetti’s first appearance on stage since he…
The Trans-Siberian Orchestra pulls into town on Friday, December 8, at Magness Arena, with Christmas Eve and Other Stories. The performance is the work of producer Paul O’Neill (pictured), who has created a modern format for traditional Christmas music. The evening aims to meld a rock concert, a Broadway musical…
It’s nearing eleven o’clock on Monday, Open Stage Blues night at the Atrium Bar and Grill. In the corner, five musicians — mostly middle-aged white guys with borderline mullets and let’s-get-down looks on their faces — run through a clumsy reading of “Thunder and Lightning.” After they finish, they pass…
When Armando Zuppa’s wife suggested it was time for her Italian-born husband to get out of Rome, he agreed that it was a good idea. “She came into our apartment one day,” he recalls, “and I was standing in front of my stereo with my cowboy hat and boots on,…
