When Los Angeles-based jazz singer Pamela Stonebrooke began billing herself as the “Intergalactic Diva,” the smoky-voiced chanteuse was not yet renowned for mingling with non-human life-forms. A sign-up sheet for a jazz showcase overseen by a drummer friend asked participants to list their names and instruments–“and just as a joke,…
Here at Westword, we joke about the so-called Best of Denver curse. The mythology goes something like this: As soon as we give an award to a struggling restaurant, it closes; as soon as we salute an up-and-coming club, it’s shuttered; as soon as we praise a television personality, he’s…
“Actually, I always like not to go into anything about government or politics,” explains the planet’s foremost practitioner of juju music, King Sunny Ade. “But what is happening in Nigeria at the moment is more or less like going forward, going backward, going forward, going backward.” True enough, the political…
David Booker is one of the few Denver performers who could complain about playing too many shows–but that’s the last thing he’d do. A singer-songwriter and guitarist with the ideal name for someone with a heavily inked calendar, Booker describes his credo as “telephone by day, microphone by night.” In…
When asked whether he likes Hello Nasty, the latest album by the Beastie Boys, singer-songwriter/keyboardist Mark Ramos Nishita, aka Money Mark, pauses. For a long time. Under most circumstances, this wouldn’t be much of a news flash: Even though most listeners who’ve heard Nasty dig it like a stretch of…
How difficult is it for a local artist to get a song played on a commercial radio station? For the answer, consider the following cautionary tale, which pits rising Denver hip-hopper Kingdom (born Jeffrey McWhorter) against the apparently impenetrable playlist of KQKS-FM/107.5. Kingdom, a previous Westword profile subject (“Kingdom Comes,”…
“There’s still a stigma attached to the South,” says Chet “the Cheetah” Weise, one-fifth of the Alabama-based guitar army known as the Quadrajets. “We’re doing what we can to wake people up to that and convince them that this stigma isn’t necessarily true. I mean, there’s a lot more going…
“I don’t want to say we’re porn rock,” says J.J. Nobody, vocalist and bassist for the Colorado Springs-based punk band called the Nobodys. “But we’re firm believers.” The band’s latest release, a collection of seven-inchers and outtakes called GREATASSTITS, wasn’t named at random; Nobody and his cohorts (drummer Justin Disease…
Long before he could play a lick, Robert Earl Keen was penning songs. He just didn’t know it at the time. “I’ve always written rhyming poetry well, from when I was five years old,” says Keen, who’s in his early forties. “I’d just grab words out of the air. I…
Kenny Wayne Shepherd, the opening act at the Van Halen show on July 16 at Fiddler’s Green, set the tenor for the evening early on. A student at the School of Hot Licks whose flowing blond hair gives him the look of a lost Hanson brother, Shepherd can play, and…
Beastie Boys Hello Nasty (Grand Royal/Capitol) The key development in the life of this great American band came in 1989, when Mike Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch followed up their crunchy goof of a breakthrough platter, 1986’s Licensed to Ill, with Paul’s Boutique, an infinitely more forward-looking melange of…
Listen carefully to Flu Shot, the latest offering by Tucson’s Weird Lovemakers, and you’ll discover that bandmembers Greg Petix, Hector Jaime, Jason Willis and Gerard Schumacher have included a “super secret” bonus track that in the liner notes is attributed to an obscure new-wave outfit known as the Clone Rays…
For the past decade or so, Steve Poltz has enjoyed indie-label-sized celebrity and a healthy level of musical notoriety as the leader of the Rugburns, a group of satirical semi-twangers from San Diego. But after years of whiskey-soaked tours to small clubs across America, he’s now marking time in the…
Alex Desert isn’t really a swinger; he just played one in the movies. Many fans know the 28-year-old singer less for fronting the first-rate Los Angeles ska band called Hepcat than for his role in Swingers, actor/director Jon Favreau’s 1996 cult hit about the L.A. swing scene. But Desert (pronounced…
Area musicians understand all too well that getting publicity in this burg ain’t easy. What with the daily newspapers and the majority of the city’s commercial radio stations apparently under the illusion that there are no bands based in Colorado, acts are left to find other ways to get their…
The next time you read an interview in which the mother, father, brother, sister or child of a star claims that reflected fame didn’t help him or her land a new record deal/publishing contract/etc., you have permission to burst out laughing. While the heightened expectations that the kin of luminaries…
“I just think we’re all pretty positive people,” says guitarist John Hill of Denver’s Dressy Bessy. “We’re upbeat, but we’re not trying to be sickeningly happy.” Like Hill, the other members of Dressy Bessy–singer/guitarist Tamee Ealom, bassist Rob Greene and drummer Darren Albert–argue that bubble gum and ice cream aren’t…
Anyone who’s ever appreciated the disturbances beneath the surface in the writings of Southern authors such as Peter Taylor and Flannery O’Connor will understand Freakwater. The band’s pretty country music harbors the same kind of compelling, complex imagery. Appropriately, principal songwriter and singer Catherine Ann Irwin–a Louisville, Kentucky, resident who…
“There’s no place to play” is among the most common laments offered by local musicians who specialize in originals, and while this is something of an exaggeration, it reflects a real problem on the Denver scene. What follows is a tale of three area clubs–one that’s stopped booking bands entirely,…
Rancid Life Won’t Wait (Epitaph) Back in 1978, when this band was called the Clash and this album was named Give ’em Enough Rope, reviewers noted that the musicians (Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon, today known as Tim Armstrong, Lars Frederiksen, Matt Freeman and Brett Reed)…
The goth movement of the Eighties introduced or incorporated some now-familiar fashion touches: body piercing, tattoos, and the teased hair and black eyeliner favored by groups like the Sisters of Mercy. But 23-year-old Chad Boltz, half of the Denver industrial duo called Phenylketonurics (PKU for short), has taken things much…
The next time you find yourself complaining about the state of the local music scene, consider the plight of Axel Praefcke, guitarist for rockabilly practitioners Ike and the Capers. Praefcke and his bandmates (vocalist/rhythm guitarist Ike Stoye, stand-up bassist Maurice Hagler and drummer Tina Hohne) hail from East Berlin, a…
