In new-age music’s cast of characters, Mark Isham plays the part of the Seducer. The trumpeter has made a career of following increasingly darker musical directions, slowly luring the crystal crowd into the shadows with him. His latest release Mark Isham is such a heavy, overcast effort, it seems as…
It used to be that people would joke with Julie Renn about her winning ways on Star Search. “What, are you having an affair with someone on the show? Are you buying your way in?” they would say. Since 1984, when she began training dancers to perform on the now-eight-year-old…
Genetic duplicates are the latest rage in pop music. Groups like Nelson and the Triplets have effortlessly parlayed freak cell division into hugely successful careers. But things weren’t so easy for the Cuff twins of Britain’s Soho. The early days of this group played like a particularly poorly scripted episode…
Steve Winwood relaxes in a hotel room in New York City, talking by telephone to reporters in every city he’s about to hit on his current U.S. tour. The 43-year-old rock ‘n’ roll survivor has quietly endured a slew of critical jabs during the last few years for the highly…
Despite some past attitude and present whining, the Arizona music scene continues to spin. There still aren’t enough places to play, and the musicians might cooperate with each other more, but these nine Arizona releases are proof that music of every shape and sound is happening in this state. And…
Trumpeter Clark Terry and saxophonist James Moody could hang up their horns and retire to swatting porch flies. After all, these two jazz patriarchs have racked up more than ninety years between them, playing with the greatest. Terry appeared with Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Thelonious Monk, and…
A mystery is the only way to describe what’s happened to the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir. Two short years ago, these sturdy Eastern European women with babushkas on their heads and red onions on their breath exploded onto the world-music scene with their evocatively titled debut…
The night before our Saturday-afternoon talk with the Kentucky HeadHunters, the boys played a gig in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the kind of show their growing cadre of fans has come to expect: energy to rival or best any hormone-driven thrash punktet; massive doses of homemade, hot-from-the-barbecue Southern rock; plus…
If all the peeling Bauhaus stickers you see in cars’ rear windshields prove anything, there are still a few die-hard goth-rock fans out there. Brooding goth bands will probably always have an audience as long as there are pallid, chronically mopey, black-clad teens around. But for most listeners, self-consciously gloomy…
When they first hear it, folks with a high degree of prissiness in their blood tend to cringe and blink. “Bone Mama?” The term has the ring of a sordid nocturnal adventure down on Van Buren, or the chick who took on the frat house. It refers to deejay Mary…
Napalm Death has been called the end of music. The English band has gone to the lead in taking music to its furthest illogical extreme. The group was among the first to add voltage and thundering rhythms to speed in order to create monstrous sixty-second bursts of sound. With all…
The Feelies really care about their public. Lead vocalist-guitarist Glenn Mercer swears it’s true. So what if they only record when they are good and ready, or that they only gig in the flesh every three years or so? The Feelies care deeply about having an audience. According to Mercer,…
It’s Saturday night at downtown’s Silver Dollar Club, which, this particular evening, is hosting a Fish Dance. The club’s been given a cool aquarium motif, with slides and film loops of fishy images projected on the gray walls and a makeshift screen. The music isn’t bad either–if hard-edged Eurodisco is…
Nestled deep in the Mercedes jungle of north Scottsdale sits a little-bitty ol’ piss-ant country place that has not only survived the region’s creeping hoity-toityism, but has thrived. And so has one of its favorite sons. The Handlebar-J and its previous incarnations have held country court at the same location…
Chick Corea is a certifiable musical multiple personality. The 49-year-old pianist is a jazz Sybil bouncing from one distinct character to another with nearly every album. There’s Chick the Fusion Whiz, Chick the Latin Romantic, Chick the Avant-Gardist and most recently, Chick the Conservative Standard Bearer. Jazzbos of every bias…
Four months have passed since Billboard dropped the bomb in its 1990 year-end issue announcing that rock, for seventeen years the dominant genre on the top album charts, had lost its title to rap and danceable pop. So far, the music biz is still waiting for the other dancing shoe…
They are a loud, crude, Jack Daniel’s-guzzling band, with a lead singer that looks like Meat Loaf on steroids. In their home base of Seattle, Washington, they host a public-access porn show, reviewing slasher films a la Siskel and Ebert. They are serial-killer trivia buffs who adopted notorious necrophile-cannibal Edward…
On the cover of a video documenting Todd Rundgren’s latest recording session is a photo of his hands, each waving a symphony conductor’s baton. It is an appropriate symbol for a man who for twenty years has been his own maestro, conducting one of rock music’s most varied careers with…
When Living Colour steps out onto the stage these days and launches into “Elvis Is Dead,” the lyrics and the attitude answer a lot of stupid questions. The band members aren’t freaks. Rock ‘n’ roll is black. Chuck Berry invented it. And Elvis Presley was never the king. “That `King…
A couple of years back, Sonic Youth singer-bassist Kim Gordon interviewed L.L. Cool J for Spin magazine in an attempt to get a feminist/hard-core perspective on rap’s estimable MC. Early in the interview, it became obvious that the two shared little common ground. Their clashes were sometimes comic, as when…
Anyone with a record collection more than a foot wide probably owns a piece of David Sanborn’s unmistakable sound but doesn’t know it. The Stones’ Undercover, Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and David Bowie’s Young Americans all benefit from Sanborn’s wailing alto sax. He’s backed up James Brown, Stevie Wonder,…
Yellow ribbons whip down city streets on the pinned-back antennae of imported Sentras, Camrys, and Accords, wrapping the USA in patriotism like the loosely woven fabric of a giant Ace bandage. On the radio, the premier pop diva of the day belts out the national anthem as if the centuries-old…
