Now in its third year, the Westword Music Awards Showcase is rapidly becoming a Denver tradition. But it seems like only yesterday that it was nothing more than an idea. In 1995, several Westworders wondered what we could do to raise the profile of local music in Denver. From these…
Carla Bozulich, lead singer and primary songwriter for Los Angeles’s Geraldine Fibbers, is in a drab New York City hotel room, waiting to cut Kevin Fitzgerald’s hair. Fitzgerald, the Fibbers’ drummer, is not the only bandmember whose noggin Bozulich trims on a regular basis; she’s also sheared the follicles of…
As any lover of the blues realizes, one of the music’s principal themes is love gone bad. It’s a subject with which Chicago-based bluesman Son Seals is extremely familiar. After all, he was shot in the face on January 5 of this year, and the alleged gunwoman was his estranged…
By almost any measure, Wayne Shorter, 64, is among the most influential jazz musicians of the past two generations. The saxophonist first made his mark during a late Fifties/early Sixties tenure with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Then, in 1964, he took on the nearly impossible task of filling the chair…
On the surface, there seem to be plenty of reasons why guitarist Rick Nielsen should be feeling good about himself and his longtime band, Cheap Trick. The quartet (which also includes bassist Tom Petersson, drummer Bun E. Carlos and vocalist Robin Zander) is among the few hard-rock groups from the…
This year has been a bad one for a lot of prominent Colorado bands: Foreskin 500, Roots Revolt and the ‘Vengers are just three of the well-known acts to have folded their tents and gone home. And now, unfortunately, Baldo Rex must be added to the list. The factors that…
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, native Webb Wilder has produced one of the most literate, entertaining and flat-out barn-burning musical catalogues of the past couple of decades–which means that he’s done more than a few interviews in his day. So before launching into another one, he makes a declaration. “I’ve been asked everything…
Boulder’s Preacherman and the Congregation got its biggest break yet when it was chosen to open last month’s Reggae on the Rocks concert. But shortly after leaving the Red Rocks stage to a positive reaction from thousands of fans at the beginning of the daylong bash, Preacherman (given name: Herman…
Denver musicians frequently complain about the local scene. But in the minds of the musicians in Venus Diablo, Colorado’s capitol is a virtual mecca compared with their home base of Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to bassist Johnny Cassidy, a onetime member of the M80s, a trashy, Sixties-style garage act signed…
America is in the midst of another British Invasion, at least in terms of the electronica movement. Almost all of the electronic-dance groups making impressive showings on the Billboard sales charts these days hail from merry old England, and even as we speak, A&R representatives desperate to cash in on…
According to Alec Empire, a key part of Germany’s incendiary Atari Teenage Riot, the act’s songs are “not like popular music, which is there to entertain. We want to destroy the fake harmony that’s created by the music and the entertainment industry and the government.” That’s hardly the only revolutionary…
Echo & the Bunnymen Evergreen (London) Most bands on the comeback trail attempt to reproduce their previous sound but don’t quite manage it; an essential, ineffable something is missing. Not so the Bunnymen. Evergreen so precisely duplicates the act’s classic style that it’s downright astounding–and more than a little creepy…
The middle-aged men behind Denver’s Bob Gillis Group don’t look like musicians. Trumpeter/ keyboardist Gillis could pass for the realtor who lives down the block, the cop who cruises the mall parking lot on Friday nights or a youth pastor at the neighborhood church–and drummer Alan Aluisi, bassist Bob Underwood…
The Rocky Mountain Music Association, a group that’s promoted local acts and musicians for ten years, has faced plenty of challenges during the Nineties. Early in the decade, attendance at its annual MusicFest events began to fall off precipitously; in fact, the turnout for a daylong bash at the University…
Repetition is an element common to virtually every musical style. African drummers pound out beats that conform to set patterns. Rhythm-and-blues figures such as James Brown vamp atop roiling grooves that gain power through their very immutability. Pop tunesmiths like Hall & Oates sing melodic hooks again and again until…
Slaughter Revolution (CMC/BMG) Warrant Belly to Belly (CMC/BMG) Dokken Shadowlife (CMC/BMG) A recent Rolling Stone article declaring the return of Eighties-vintage hair metal probably left many readers wishing that the government would set up a hard-rock subsidy program similar to the ones that pay farmers not to grow any crops…
In 1989, Andy Daring was a successful mortgage banker with a six-figure income and a lifestyle to match. But he was also a guitarist who played alongside his wife, Chris, a gifted fiddler whom he had married five years earlier–and when he resolved to quit his day job in part…
Boulder-based Starkland Records, owned and operated by Tom Steenland, has issued some of the most idiosyncratic discs imaginable during its years of operation: Take, for example, the recordings of Tod Dockstader, a onetime sound editor for Mr. Magoo who went on to become an influential musical avant-gardist. (See the August…
Musical anthropologist Alan Lomax first captured the voice of bluesman Fred McDowell on tape in Como, Mississippi, in 1959, three years after Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and five years before the British Invasion. Because the homogenizing effects of satellite dishes, video rentals and cable-television networks specializing…
Just because the music of Scotland’s Del Amitri is tuneful and accessible doesn’t mean that the group’s lead singer, Justin Currie, is shy about expressing himself. He fires off his opinions straight up, with no chaser. Examples? In Currie’s words, the neo-hippie movement that, from a commercial standpoint, is hotter…
You’ve got to hand it to Sammy Hagar. A man less sure of himself might have crawled under a rock in shame after being ignominiously dumped by Van Halen in 1996, a full decade after replacing David Lee Roth as the mega-band’s lead singer. (The three other members of the…
For vocalist/composer Marie Daulne, founder and lead singer of Zap Mama, multiculturalism was a birthright. She was born in Zaire, the daughter of a Belgian father and a Zairean mother. When she was still an infant, her father was killed during an episode of so-called “ethnic cleansing,” causing her mother…
