WIN TIX TO GARAGE A TROIS

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FT. STANTON MOORE, SKERIK, MARCO BENEVENTO & MIKE DILLON

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Hold onto your pint glasses, it’s gonna be a WILD night. That is, when mind-blowingly reckless, unapologetic jam-masters Garage A Trois throw down at the Bowl this Saturday night. The New Orleans-based band is prepared to blow your mind with flip-of-the-switch changes between punk-rock and freak-jazz and everything in between. They’ve been called “a transformative, punkalectic, pornographic seizure of sight and sound,” and who doesn’t wanna get down with that?

Garage A Trois = Stanton Moore, Skerik, Marco Benevento and Mike Dillon. ‘Nuff said.

You’re in luck–we’re giving away 2 FREE TICKETS to see Garage A Trois. See below for details.

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NY Times Review: Garage a Trois

A Jam Band Counting on a Style of Its Invention

By NATE CHINEN

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The terminology can’t be trusted when it comes to Garage a Trois, a band consisting of the drummer Stanton Moore, the saxophonist known as Skerik, the percussionist Mike Dillon and the keyboardist Marco Benevento. That’s four people, not three, despite the group’s chosen name; it doesn’t have much stake in garage rock, either. And while Garage a Trois fits the profile of a jam band, its music feels more focused and less freewheeling than that particular pigeonhole might suggest.

Garage a Trois formed just over a decade ago, originally with Mr. Moore, Skerik and the guitarist Charlie Hunter. Its sensibilities have skewed grittier and more psychedelic with the current lineup, largely because of the fuzz-tone output of Mr. Benevento. On Thursday night at Maxwell’s here, the band played a shrewdly overdriven show, combining heavy-riff distortion with a rough-and-tumble funk delirium.

Almost all the songs were from its most recent release, “Power Patriot” (Royal Potato Family), a respectable album but only a faint intimation of what Garage a Trois can do live. (That may ultimately be the strongest link the group shares with its jam-circuit brethren.)

The band’s life force is rhythm, both at a subterranean level and on the surface. Mr. Moore is also a founding member of Galactic, which has evolved into an all-purpose New Orleans house band equally at home with bounce music or Mardi Gras funk. He has a knack for disarming bombast with elasticity, sounding sly and adaptable even when jackhammering at his toms. And he had a ready sidekick in Mr. Dillon, who began the set on vibraphone before turning to congas, tablas and effects.

There was mathematical complexity in some of the tunes, like “Rescue Spreaders,” which involved a whorl of superimposed meters, in groupings of four and five. (During a vibraphone solo by Mr. Dillon the rest of the band shifted neatly into swing.) But it was no less satisfying to hear the album’s relatively simple title track rendered tougher and wilder, with Mr. Dillon socking a pair of cowbells and Skerik howling through his horn. One tumultuous stretch of the tune recalled the Brecker Brothers at their fusioneering peak, when their sound was best described by the title of a live album: “Heavy Metal Be-Bop.”

Skerik and Mr. Dillon also played an opening set as two-thirds of the Dead Kenny G’s. (The other third is Brad Houser, on bass and baritone saxophone.) Their rapport in this setting was a bit more feverish than in Garage a Trois, and their tone a lot more juvenile. Skerik was freer and more impulsive with his improvising as the trio pinballed between styles: Afro-pop, Balkan klezmer, pocket funk lashed to Middle Eastern modality.

The jumpiness felt a little dated and obvious — very 1990s Knitting Factory — as did the ostensible target of the band’s fury. There are few easier marks than Kenny G, the living symbol of simpering instrumental pop. Skerik and crew know this, but why would they let that stop them? What’s in a name, anyway?

Tonight: Garage a Trois Snowstorm Jam @ Brooklyn Bowl

December 20th

THE SNOWSTORM JAM

with

// GARAGE A TROIS //

FREE

with Special Guests TBA @brooklynbowl

Show 9:00pm 21+

Garage A Trois is a collaboration between four of the most visionary improvisers of the time: Skerik on saxophones, Mike Dillon on vibes, Marco Benevento on keys and Stanton Moore on drums.

And while improvisation is at the heart of what the quartet has staked its reputation upon at their legendary New Orleans Jazzfest sets and rare, but in demand, club tours, it's the intricate sonic tapestries, tightly orchestrated arrangements, refined melodies and positively modern approach to instrumental songwriting that's at the heart of their upcoming long-player, Power Patriot.

NolaFunk Lagniappe

Allen Toussaint throws a star-studded soiree in honor of Dave Bartholomew

In Allen Toussaint’s view, Dave Bartholomew deserves much more.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Bartholomew produced and co-wrote most of Fats Domino’s hits, making theirs the most fruitful creative partnership in New Orleans music history. Bartholomew largely shaped the New Orleans big beat, part of the alchemy that rendered rock ’n’ roll out of rhythm & blues.

Toussaint modeled his own fertile career as a songwriter and producer on Bartholomew’s. But despite Bartholomew’s induction in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, Toussaint believes he has not received his due.

Dr. JOHN - Goin' Back to New Orleans 1992

Dr.JOHN - Goin' Back to New Orleans 1992
Recorded at Ultrasonic Studios, New Orleans, Louisiana.

MarchFourth Marching Band

They might not have 76 trombones but Portland, Oregon's MarchFourth Marching Band generate a hullabaloo that'd make The Music Man skip with joy. With a 12-piece horn line, battery powered electric bass, and a 10 strong percussion core, M4 lustily engages big band tradition, happily swirling New Orleans jazz with Brazilian batucada, Italian exuberance, Eastern European folk, and dance floor fury. Like some great stomping brass-covered mastodon, they literally march fourth, rarely respecting stage boundaries and playing on fire trucks, ferries and more. Their latest, Rise Up (released October 13 on MarchFourth Music), is hearty spirituals for those no church can contain. Individuality lies at the core of this DIY unit, whose members sport unique outfits reflective of their diverse "real" world backgrounds as lawyers, stonemasons, metal workers, etc. Born on a Fat Tuesday, MarchFourth is a Fellini-esque block party for your ears, a ragtag circus hopping with sly, rabblerousing energy. Listen!

Garage A Trois creates instrumental avant-pop

Formed about seven years after Galactic, Garage A Trois made its stage debut in 2000. Following a few shows with the original lineup, the trio format got shelved after percussionist Dillon accepted an invitation to sit in.

“We loved having the vibes and tabla and the different percussion that Mike does,” Moore said. “It added a lot to the band and now, especially, it’s become its own type of thing.”

The Prehistory of New Orleans: Treasures from the Hogan

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This program tells the story of how jazz emerged in the context of all the other African American musics that proliferated in late 19th and early 20th century New Orleans: blues, ragtime, Mardi Gras Indian music, vaudeville and minstrelsy, spiritual church music, and more. With our guides Bruce Boyd Raeburn and Lynn Abbott, we'll comb through a vast world of interviews, recorded music, photographs, ephemera, and curatorial knowledge at one of the great American music collections, the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University.

New Orleans Music in the Early Days of Recording

A photo-feature to accompany the Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep episode
"The Prehistory of New Orleans Music: Treasures from the Hogan Jazz Archive"
Photos and captions supplied by Lynn Abbott, Assistant Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.

New Orleans Gets Wired: David Simon Turns His Sights on the Big Easy

The chronological series will explore life in New Orleans starting three months after Katrina devastated the city. If HBO orders more seasons, they’ll pick up a year after the first left off. Much like Simon’s previous shows, Treme is an exploration into American urban dystopia—but he hopes to one-up his earlier work while celebrating New Orleans’ virtues with the fervor of a high-stepping brass-band parade.

Treme is named after, but not based in, the city’s most historically significant and musically influential neighborhood (pronounced “truh-MAY”), home to the legendary Congo Square and the Rebirth Brass Brand, among others. Through the eyes of the people that live within its signature milieu of parades, jazz funerals, brass bands, Mardi Gras Indian tribes, bars and restaurants, the show will trace the city’s collective efforts to get back on its feet. “You’re going to watch the city being rebuilt, or not being rebuilt, year by year,” Simon says. “The whole thing is thematic to what New Orleans is, to what it represents in the American psyche. It’s an affirmation of why cities matter.”

Newman mines Big Easy music for 'Frog'

New Orleans in the early part of the 20th century - the setting of Disney's animated "The Princess and the Frog" - is territory that composer Randy Newman has trod before.

"I've been dredging those 30 months I spent in New Orleans for all I could in my life," he quips, referring to the summers of his youth. Songs on Newman's "Good Old Boys" and "Land of Dreams" albums feature the Big Easy as a backdrop, and Newman has long expressed admiration for New Orleans-born artists Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino.

So when producer John Lasseter asked Newman to compose seven songs and the score for "The Princess and the Frog," Newman didn't have to think twice. (After all, Newman's Oscar is for one of Lasseter's Pixar films, "Monsters, Inc." and six of his other 16 nominations are for Pixar songs or scores.)

Kermit Ruffins - Have A Crazy Cool Christmas

Basin Street jazz trumpeter Kermit Ruffins is celebrating the yuletide season with his November 10th release of Have A Crazy Cool Christmas featuring Christmas favorites such as "Silent Night", "Winter Wonderland" and several originals. With a style and sophistication that exemplifies New Orleans, Ruffins album will undoubtedly put you in a wondrous holiday spirit.

Fresh off the success of Livin’ a Treme´ Life, Kermit Ruffins is ready to add a little Bourbon Street jazz to the upcoming holiday season. Produced by Grammy Winner Tracey Freeman, Have A Crazy Cool Christmas is Kermit Ruffins’ bold foray into Christmas music. The album runs the gamut from yuletide classics like “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells” to Kermit’s own rollicking originals like “A Saints Christmas” and “Crazy Cool Christmas.” Kermit is joined once again by former bandmates from the Rebirth Brass Band, as well as fellow Basin Street Records recording artist Irvin Mayfield and New Orleans hotshot trombonist Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews.

Evan Christopher: New Orleans music without the nostalgia

MP: You’re called “the Ambassador of the Clarinet.” What does that mean to you?

EC: It depends on who’s calling me that. ... Anytime you choose to advocate for a music that is tied to a specific culture, and you take that music other places, you have a responsibility to represent the culture through the music. I think that’s something ambassadors do. There’s a shortage of musicians doing that, in my opinion, especially on my instrument.

I’m benefiting from the fact that the clarinet was a very prominent instrument in early jazz. We’ve got hotels down here with murals of clarinets six stories high. In a way, it’s symbolic of New Orleans music, even more than

see also: Bebopified: Evan Christopher at the Dakota, 10/25/09: Concert review



Remembering the Riverboat President music club

It has been almost 25 years since the Riverboat President left New Orleans. The boat did weekend dance and concert cruises here from the end of World War II until the mid-1980s. Capt. Clarke “Doc” Hawley, who earned his New Orleans harbor license on the President in the mid 1960s, remembers that a band called the Crawford-Ferguson Night Owls played back then.

I’m thinking about the Prez – we always called it the Prez — because Mari Landy recently moved back to town after 20 years. She was one of the bow bartenders, along with Denise Berthiaume, who now owns LeMieux Galleries on Julia Street. They were also 20-somethings back then. A few weeks ago we had dinner on Frenchmen Street. Mari said that when the economy in Portland petered out, she and her husband found the lure of New Orleans too great to resist.

Arcade picks: THE REVIVALISTS

A brigade as diverse as the music they produce, these five Tulane and Loyola grads make up local band The Revivalists. Zach Feinberg (guitar) and Rob Ingraham (sax) both graduated from Tulane last spring. Dave Shaw (guitar/vocals), George Grekas (bass) and Andrew Campanelli (drums) studied at Loyola. Ed Williams, another Tulane grad, is not officially in the band but accompanies them on pedal steel occasionally. The members aren’t originally from New Orleans, but they now call the city home and draw inspiration from what they say is the “best live music city in the country, hands down.” They learn from the city’s jazz sounds and adapt them into their own styles.

New Orleans street performer “Grandpa” Elliott first artist signed to 'Playing for Change Records'

Grandpa Elliott Small, singing on the streets of New Orleans since he was a six year old, can capture a crowd with a single note. His mellow baritone makes the sounds of a busy New Orleans street fall away with its warm sincerity and while the blues may inform his lyrical harmonica playing, he has his own unique sound. Sugar Sweet, produced by Playing For Change founder Mark Johnson and Reggie McBride, was recorded in New Orleans with the Playing For Change Band. Grandpa Elliott has been singing with the PFC Band for the past year and they have developed an uncanny rapport. Their enthusiasm and ability to lay down sturdy, elastic grooves is evident throughout the album, adding sympathetic backing to Elliott’s soulful vocals and sinuous harmonica.

NolaFunky Album Reviews c/o Offbeat Magazine

Bonerama, Hard Times (High Steppin’) By Alex Rawls Hard Times is Bonerama’s first studio recording after three live albums, and moving the band to the studio poses a number of challenges beyond maintaining the groove and vibe that comes with performing live. In concert, Bonerama’s as loud and physical as many guitar-based rock bands, partially because of similarities between the range of the trombone and the electric guitar, and because Bonerama plays loud. At Jazz Fest, the band’s music frequently bleeds over to adjoining stages, particularly when it’s windy. How do you capture something that intense in the studio? To their credit, they don’t try. Instead, the five-song EP is an introduction of the things Bonerama does—a Mark Mullins song, a Craig Klein song, a funky instrumental, and two covers. One represents the sort of thing they’re known for—”When the Levee Breaks”—and one’s a broadening of their repertoire— Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light.” They only roll out their piledriver weight for the Led Zep cover; otherwise, they’re content to be a solid funk band and are exactly that. Mullins’ title cut is a bit poppier, Klein’s “Lost My House” has a bit of a Neville groove, but those tracks move more nimbly than you’d expect after one of their classic rock covers. Lyrically, Hard Times catches what seems like a transitional moment. Because of Klein’s association with the Arabi Wrecking Krewe and his own loss in the post-Katrina flood, the band has been heavily associated with the hurricane, and “When the Levee Breaks” certainly reinforces that connection. Mullins and Klein’s songs both reference hard times and loss, but both seem to be looking for where to go from here. Both lyrics get a little hazy, either in their vagueness or privacy, but Bonerama is one band that really has remained in development since conception, even though it found its sound fairly early. Hard Times hints at where a band in constant transition might go next.

Garage a Trois, Power Patriot (Royal Potato Family) By Alex Rawls Part of what has set Garage a Trois apart from other jam/jazz/ funk aggregations is its intelligence and ability to follow through on a concept. 2005’s Outre Mer presented itself as a soundtrack to a French movie that didn’t exist, but it was done well enough to make the charade seem possible. On the new Power Patriot, the sound has changed a bit—Marco Benevento’s keyboards have replaced Charlie Hunter’s guitar—but the same governing intelligence remains. Enough attention is paid to the sound of each instrument in each song that each remains discrete, unified by a musical sensibility, not by the sameness of the instrumentation. As the title implies, Power Patriot is often a muscular record. “Fragile” is anything but, and “Rescue Spreaders” is as disorientingly distorted as anything on the Flaming Lips’ Embryonic. It’s also often a very melodic album thanks to Mike Dillon’s vibes-based compositions. The highlight is “Dory’s Day Out,” a rather sweet piece that recalls the work of a number of Brian Wilson- influenced bands (the High Llamas come to mind). On occasion, the album toes the waters of prog rock and Zappa-esque jazz, minus the Zappa, but its beauty is that the compositions rarely sound like set-ups for solos. Even at six minutes on the album, there’s a clear purpose for each piece that rarely includes lengthy solos. If anything, a few of these tracks could use someone to step out and burn for a bit.

Paul Sanchez, Farewell to Storyville (Threadhead) By John Swenson The Threadhead Records phenomenon has reshaped the profile of the local recording industry, allowing veteran musicians to make albums that might otherwise not have happened, giving deserving new artists a jump start on their careers and even producing such delightful one shots as this year’s Christmas release. No musician has benefited from this breakthrough more than Paul Sanchez, who has established himself as an important solo artist since leaving Cowboy Mouth with no small help from the label. This is the third Threadhead-financed album Sanchez has made, and each has been remarkably different. Sanchez has been preparing to make Farewell to Storyville his whole career. It’s an impromptu, mostly solo session in which Sanchez tells stories about each song before singing it, a standard folk music format that he’s perfectly suited to. When Sanchez left his New Orleans home for New York City in the 1980s to make his mark as a songwriter at the height of the fast folk and anti-folk movements that emerged out of the city’s post-punk club ethos, he played numerous gigs that resembled this session. In fact, one of the songs here, “Breaking My Back Up Front for You Baby” was written during that period. Toward the end of his run with Cowboy Mouth, he began playing acoustic house parties that also mirrored the shape of these performances. Folk music of this type is often autobiographical and there’s no shortage of such material here. “Gonna play you some songs and tell you some stories,” he begins by way of introducing “Knives to Grind,” a reminiscence from his childhood in the Irish Channel. “I Dreamed I Saw My Father,” a song with the feel of a Fred Neil ballad, is a bittersweet rumination on a man Sanchez says he really didn’t know. He explains how Lillian Boutté introduced him to “Farewell to Storyville,” a song about days gone by that Sanchez gives a languid reading with vocal support from Debbie Davis. The song is poignant in New Orleans today, a point Sanchez brings home by following it with “Falling with Nowhere to Land,” a post- Katrina lament. “It’s my story,” he says. “It’s our story, it’s anybody’s story that’s lived here in the last few years.” Sanchez brightens the mood with the merry Spanish language tune “Mota Mota Mota,” a reflection of his time spent in Central America after the storm. Themes of displacement, grief and plain old mental maladjustment continue to float through the album, taking different shapes. He lightens the mood, though, with the comic “Walked in the Club with Twenties” and sends everyone home smiling with the dark humor of “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think.” When a record like this works, you leave it feeling you’ve learned something intimate about the singer’s life, like a good conversation with a friend. Sanchez will have a lot of new friends after they listen to Farewell to Storyville.