By day, Billy Sheets teaches special education to middle-schoolers in Los Angeles. But by night, he offers a different brand of instruction to swing dancers across Southern California. In a musical environment in which most combos make hep-cat Forties jazz and frenetic Western swing for the growing legion of loose-jointed…
Various Artists Lounge-A-Palooza (Hollywood) Various Artists Paint It Blue: Songs of the Rolling Stones (House of Blues) London Philharmonic Kashmir: Symphonic Led Zeppelin (Point) A hundred years ago, the creative landscape fostered outrageous acts of art by Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec and Munch. Approaching 2000, our own fin de siecle is marked…
“I would’ve loved to be a pitcher in baseball,” says Robert Bradley. “When I was younger, I was a big Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals fan. And I liked the Yankees, too, because being from Alabama, those were the teams you could get on the radio. Basically, it was…
Virtuosic guitarist/singer-songwriter Adrian Romero grew up as a classical-music prodigy. So why has he placed this style on the back burner in order to roam the pastures of pop music alongside his band, Love Supreme? He shrugs off the question with a caustic comment: “Denver isn’t really concerned with that…
When I learned that Kool Keith was coming to town, I reacted with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. As a founding member of Ultramagnetic MC’s, a mysterious but influential Eighties/Nineties rap act, and the voice behind Dr. Octagon’s Dr. Octagonecologyst, a terrifically twisted opus issued in 1997, Keith had…
Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do concert promoters–which is why the Denver live-music market has been weaving like Charles Bukowski on a bender ever since Barry Fey announced that he had sold the remaining shares of his Fey Concerts firm to Los Angeles-based Universal Concerts last August. Just two…
To most stateside music lovers, the idea of a road show starring three accordion players conjures up images of Geritol-chugging seniors playing polkas to nodding retirement-home residents. Even here in Denver, where the instrument stars in the rousing local acts 16 Horsepower and Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, such a bill…
Say goodbye to the Hectics as you knew them. The group, a Westword profile subject (“Getting Pretty Hectic,” April 25, 1996), called it quits shortly after a December 19 performance at the 15th Street Tavern and just before this very publication placed its debut full-length, Everything I Need (released by…
Carla Madison has probably been skin-to-skin with more famous musicians than anyone in Denver. But while most women would be reluctant to reveal such a fact, Madison takes pride in discussing the hefty number of stage-stomping idols she’s had her hands on. “Lou Reed, Eddie Vedder, George Clinton–I’ve worked on…
Bjork Homogenic (Elektra) There’s no shortage of acts that have mingled ancient music with new technology, and although some of the results have been interesting (Dead Can Dance), plenty of others have inspired only yawns (Enigma). None, however, have been as successful as Bjork, who attacks the music on Homogenic…
Guitarist Dave Brylawski, one of the principal architects behind Polvo, is an adamantly regular guy. So eager is he to make a personal connection with the Coloradan on the other end of the telephone wire that he is soon noting that his brother lives in Snowmass and that guitarist Ash…
Today’s hardcore rappers are in a difficult position. Many of them achieved success via exciting accounts of drinking, drugging, dealing, whoring and homicide that they defended by claiming that the tales were simply reflections of the hard realities in America’s inner cities. But following the murders of Tupac Shakur and…
At the risk of stating the obvious, Barry Fey was the single most powerful figure in Denver concert promotions from 1967 until last August 11, when he publicly divulged that he was selling the remaining shares of his signature firm, Fey Concerts, to California-based Universal Concerts, a rival outfit that…
Shania Twain Come On Over (Mercury) First time around, producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange went through the motions of trying to make Twain, who’s the object of his Svengalism, sound somewhat like a country artist. But even though she’s still being marketed as a C&W chanteuse, her latest release is…
Denver music fans are well aware of Ron Miles’s growing national reputation. But even they may be surprised to learn that the instrumentalist’s presence in the area was a primary reason that Nate Wooley, one of the freshest young voices in jazz, moved to Colorado this past August. Wooley–who, like…
Denver’s Perry Weissman 3, a five-piece combo featuring no one named Perry, is, by default, a jazz machine. However, none of its members are wholly comfortable with this definition. “We started out doing jazz standards, so we always have ended up calling ourselves a jazz band, but we would rather…
In last week’s issue, Westword celebrated 1997’s finest albums by national acts. Now it’s Denver’s turn in the spotlight. What follows is an alphabetical roster of the finest discs released during the last calendar year by locals or recent graduates of the scene. They make always buying Colorado seem like…
Anyone who’s ever talked to members of the Apples knows that they are among the most modest musicians to ever have walked upright–which is why bandleader Robert Schneider’s description of the group’s new licensing agreement with Sire Records as “not a super-big deal” needs to be put into context. Short…
Readers angry at me for giving negative reviews to their favorite bands regularly accuse me of not liking anything. This charge is amusing in part because each year since 1991, I have assembled a massive roster of recordings that I do like–the largest, most wide-ranging list of its kind that…
Concerts get called off all the time, for a variety of reasons: illness, poor ticket sales, freaks of nature like the blizzard that hit the region this fall. But the circumstances surrounding the postponing of a bash starring Puff Daddy & the Family that was to have taken place on…
Metallica Reload (Elektra) To put it as plainly as possible, the last Metallica album, 1996’s Load, made me angry: To see a band that I had always valued for its integrity change its music for what appeared to be commercial reasons was deeply frustrating. But after catching the quartet in…
It’s not all that uncommon for musicians and/or fans to found their own independent labels. But Owned & Operated, a new imprint out of Fort Collins, has a couple of marked advantages over most such startups–specifically, name recognition and connections. The principals in the label bring with them loads of…
