Wayne Shorter didn’t start out playing the saxophone — or even music. His first mode of expression as a teenager was the graphic arts. “Back in 1949, I did a lot of drawings,” says Shorter, now 69, as close to a jazz legend as anyone alive could claim to be…
During the ’90s, when he played bass for the edgy combo Iz and fronted a group pointedly dubbed Love Supreme, Adrian Romero established himself as one of Denver’s most complicated musicians — a performer eager for popular success, but not at the expense of artistic accomplishment. If Shirts Against Skins,…
Trumpeter Brad Upton’s previous CD on the Black Orchid label, Dragon, was recorded in May 2001 and released earlier this year; it revealed a jazzman whose ideas and gifts were spreading far and wide. His “current” release, also called Black Orchid, is, in truth, a leftover from 1999 that’s just…
Prior to February 2002, Kronow played to little fanfare and seemed to be spinning its collective wheels. Enter new frontman James Brennan, a visual and sonic dervish, who gave the band the momentum it sorely needed. With its November 2002 release, Tenfold, Kronow pulls no punches, doling out thickset bass…
Aurora native Matthew Moon does the best with what he has: an artlessy sincere voice and a knack for writing songs that flirt convincingly with mainstream FM rotation. Having slugged it out in sports bars and ski resorts, Moon sure knows his way around the jagged side of a blown…
I had a ritual as a kid. Every Thursday, I’d pick up a Westword and sit in the corner booth at Rosa Linda’s Mexican Cafe, flip to Backbeat and pore over Gil Asakawa’s prose, line by line. I couldn’t wait for the day when I’d be old enough to actually…
India.Arie hails from Denver — she lived here until she was thirteen, when her family relocated to Atlanta. But her roots have a more musically exotic flair: Arie’s parents hail from Memphis and Detroit, home of the R&B, blues and Motown sounds that percolate to the top of the young…
Sometime after Pong’s golden age, a Japanese video-game designer named Toru Iwatani pulled a single wedge from a circular pizza, envisioned an eyeless, pellet-munching little fella, and baptized him Pac-Man. Aside from launching multiple cartoon programs, trading cards, lunchboxes and a godawful hit song called “”Pac-Man Fever,” America’s favorite slow-witted…
MURS, a card-carrying member of the Cali-centric rap crew Living Legends, just released his third record, titled The End of the Beginning. Meanwhile, a recent bacchanalian binge in the city Bugsy Siegel built almost spelled the beginning of the end of his still-burgeoning career. “I had a wild night in…
Ester Drang defies the innate human need to categorize and define everything. Each new direction the enigmatic four-piece has taken breeds a new comparison. To slap a label on the group is to invite an almost rebellious metamorphosis. The challenge is to stay one step ahead of the pundits and…
On Saturday afternoons in a dark bar on Colfax, a group of boys in baseball caps convenes to drink cheap beer, smoke cigarettes they’ve given up on giving up, and argue their particular philosophies of Music Thus Far. Hunched over Budweisers, they weigh the relative merits of Bowie, Bruce, Bob,…
There’s a scrappy two-piece from the Rust Belt that works from a minimal palette of drums and guitar, bashing them into an unpretentious cacophony of masterful rock, culling elements from Delta blues and classic soul, and overlaying the whole with the guitarist’s wailing, manic vocals. And, just for the record,…
Gravelly vocals and grinding guitars copulate with a rhythm section that sounds like a cheap motel’s headboard banging against a wall, as Reno Divorce delivers the kind of music you’ll need to have a cigarette after. The outfit, formed by singer/guitarist and Florida transplant Brent Loveday, in his native Orlando,…
If European television ever produces a show called Scandinavian Idol, Sondre Lerche could fill the Clay Aiken slot perfectly. The twenty-year-old singer-songwriter from Bergen, Norway, exudes the sort of fresh-faced allure that invites declarations like, “What a nice young man!” and he frequently pays tribute to influences such as Burt…
Where does a trio of venerable indie-rock icons go when OD’ing isn’t an option but the world is simply too annoying to tolerate any longer? Somewhere quiet, perhaps, a place to escape the often tiresome adulation of the hipster-cool, record-store-clerk, high-fidelity types. On their two most recent recordings, the oldsters…
Mike Mitchell learned to be adaptable at an early age. When he was in the seventh grade, his schoolteacher mom pulled up the family tree in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and replanted it in the Wind River Indian reservation in central Wyoming. “She saw one too many episodes of Little House on…
Someone at Merge must have had a screw loose to okay the release of a sprawling retrospective spotlighting an obscure New Zealand act that means less than nothing to most Americanos. But please leave that screw untightened, because Anthology is capable of making the average listener nostalgic for a group…
Which lucky lady gets to be wined and dined by Mr. Biggs? Mack Daddy is large. Mack Daddy aims to take you shopping, girl. Buy you everything. Take you away in a convertible under cherry rain. After a glass of Beaujoulais and a Tic Tac, he’ll draw your bath. There…
The city of Denver wet its collective baggy pants at last week’s announcement that Def Jam founder Russell Simmons would bring his Hip-Hip Summit to Denver sometime this year. In town to launch a new credit card designed for low-income and debt-scarred individuals, Simmons made the spontaneous decree while sharing…
Pretty Girls Make Graves, appearing Sunday, June 8, at Tulagi, with Last Chance Diaries and Against Tomorrow’s Sky, is at once menacing and seductive. When the gravitational pull of the rhythm section combines with the guitar lines of hardcore’s past, then converges with the muscular, vitriolic vocals of Andrea Zollo…
Originally a three-piece, Pure Drama has evolved into a sextet, with new members Gabriel Ratliffe, David Ferguson, Chris Cardone and Tim Trower rounding out the lush musical landscape founding members Ryan Policky and Becca Gomez established in 1997. The expansion of its lineup isn’t the only sign of progress: From…
Allan Vest is from Oklahoma City, but he doesn’t want to talk about Wayne Coyne, thank you very much. His band, the Starlight Mints, emerged from the same dusty landscape that birthed the Flaming Lips and, eventually, a nation of Yoshimi-battling fans — and the connection has been difficult to…
