The Independent Weekly’s words+ on music
Big news from California and for Carolina today: Local orchestral indie band has signed to Lost in the Trees for a re-recorded take on last year’s All Alone in an Empty House. We’ll bring you an interview with the band about the deal tomorrow, and look for the full story in Wednesday’s print edition of the Independent Weekly.
Broad Street Cafe, keeping the world safe for Pipe (Credit: Jeremy M. Lange)
In a packed Durham City Hall Committee Room early this morning, the Durham County Board of Adjustment voted unanimously in favor of issuing a special-use permit to The Broad Street Cafe.
For the past four years, Broad Street has operated as a nightclub in a district that is zoned so that such a special-use permit is necessary to host music after 10 p.m. Less than one year after the first noise complaint was filed by Clarendon Street neighbor Waldo Fenner, who was not present at this morning’s hearing, Broad Street officially received the green light on amping up their regional music bookings in a space that musicians and business owners says is vital to Durham’s art scene.
“Broad Street Cafe is important for more than just music,” says Melissa Thomas, founder of the Durham-based indie label 307 Knox Records. “It provides a great venue space for music, festivals and family events, as well as a place to eat for locals and visitors. This hearing just showed us today how much we all have built in Durham over the past five-plus years.”
Paul Brock, one of four Broad Street owners, says he’s relieved to finally get the permit. “I was very impressed with the board. They were gracious to us, and they asked very smart questions and got a feel for what we are doing,” explains Brock.
“The applicants came back to the board with evidence for the record addressing certain issues the board had questions about,” says Michael Stock, Durham City-County Planning Department’s senior planner. The evidence presented to the board indicated Broad Street’s continued commitment to ironing out the details surrounding concerns over noise and parking.
This special-use permit allows Broad Street to operate as a nightclub, but it doesn’t allow for adult entertainment, something Stock says people often confuse. Broad Street’s special-use permit, which outlines that distinction, will be finalized at the next Durham County Board of Adjustment meeting.
“Years down the road the ownership could change,” says Stock, “and the board’s conditions for the allowing the permit will take into account those kinds of issues so that whoever operates a nightclub at that venue will follow the specific permit conditions.”
First of all, if there were courses like this when I was in college, I would have been a much better scholar. Duke’s “Sampling Soul,” a spring semester offering co-taught by African and African American Studies professor and author Mark Anthony Neal and producer/ hip-hop artist 9th Wonder, examines soul music’s continued relevance and resonance in popular culture. The closest I came as a student at the State University of New York at Albany in the early ‘80s was a music class where we discussed the pop-jazz significance of “Just the Way You Are.” That’s a couple worlds away from digging into “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”—although it is worth noting that Hugh McCracken, who contributed acoustic guitar to “Just the Way You Are,” played on records by Aretha Franklin and other soul stars. (See? I was paying attention.)
Anyway, this week’s “Sampling Soul” class is subtitled “Sampling Motown,” and it features guest speaker Harry Weinger, vice president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises. It’s also open to the public. So clear your calendar on tonight and hit the lecture hall at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art at 6:30 p.m. to get a good seat for Weinger’s 7 p.m. talk.
In his 30 years in the entertainment business, Weinger has tackled a lot, but you could argue that his greatest accomplishment is documenting every single released during Motown’s glory days for the 12-volume Complete Motown Singles series. (Among his other projects: the Star Time James Brown box set—for which Weinger won a Grammy for his liner notes—and the Hitsville USA box, a warm-up of sorts for the Complete Singles effort.) So, yes, this is a gentleman with some insight into the output of Berry Gordy’s hit factory. Want to earn brownie points? Sit in the front and ask why Marvin Gaye’s version of “Grapevine” was released after Gladys Knight’s even though Gaye’s take was recorded first.
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Good news for Schooner a few hours ahead of their release party behind the Duck Kee Sessions: Despite only mailing the minimum of 150 promo copies of the EP to radio stations nationwide, the disc has broken the CMJ Top 200. Landing at No. 99, just behind Merge’s Shout Out Louds and 10 spots ahead of the new Xiu Xiu record, this is the EP’s first week on the charts. The big show starts tonight at The Pinhook at 10 p.m. For more, see our review of Duck Kee Sessions this week.
"Fraggle rock your four-figure watch/ I clock ninety-nine cent wristbands/ And still know the time when your record flops"
Way back in August 2008, just when Raleigh’s The Rosebuds were about to released their fourth album, Life Like, Chicago mash-up duo The Hood Internet pitted “Get Up, Get Out,” the hit from The Rosebuds’ prior album, against “None Shall Pass,” the title track from the fifth album by mechanical-mouthed rap slayer Aesop Rock. (That album also featured Durham dude John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats.)
The Internet seems to have mostly missed that mash-up, though, and paid more attention to the subsequent Hood Internet take on The Rosebuds, which put the duo up against, uhh, T-Pain. But “None Shall Get Up Get Out” is, in the end, the winning take of the two, washing Aesop’s strings of syllables—”To my people who keep an impressive wingspan/ Even when the cubicle shrink/ You gotta pull up the intruder by the root of the weed”–against Kelly Crisp’s waves of synthesizers. And when Aesop crawls into his diorama of a chorus, Ivan Howard is right there with him, singing his song’s title just as the rapper repeats his.
On Monday, the blog Earmilk posted the old mix with about a dozen others, and, surprisingly, “None Shall Get Up Get Out” has taken a new life: This morning, the song climbed to No. 4 on the Hype Machine’s weekly charts, alongside a bunch of remixes and well ahead of “Odessa,” the new tune from Merge labelmates Caribou. It’s odd but appropriate, given that, you know, it’s a pretty good look for both songs.
As for new material from either The Rosebuds or Aesop Rock, that’s all up in the air: The Rosebuds are, indeed, working on new songs, and we’ve heard talk of a release later this year. Kelly Crisp mentioned it via Twitter earlier this week: “My horoscope= Feb 27 biggest day in 10 years for career. Ivan’s= Feb 27 “crowning jewel” for his career. Make a record right now?!?!?” Meanwhile, Aesop Rock seems to be an ace without a label. Def Jux closed its shop doors earlier this month, and he’s yet to announce future plans. Again, to your source for news, Twitter: “HUGE thanks to everyone inquiring about future Aesop Rock releases. The ifs, whens, whats, and wheres, are difficult to answer at this time.”
Show me a better band photo this year, and I won't kill your parents.
This afternoon, big-time Indiana indie label Jagjaguwar finally dropped the official word on Gayngs, the psychedelic soul collaboration between all of Megafaun, Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds, Justin Vernon and Mike Noyce of Bon Iver and a slew of Minnesota and Wisconsin musicians culled from bands like P.O.S., Solid Gold and Andrew Bird’s touring unit. And that was a long sentence. We mentioned the project last summer, and Megafaun and Howard even unveiled the album’s sublime, surreal closer, “The Last Prom on Earth,” at last year’s TRKFest. But the band’s debut LP, Relayted, now has a release date of May 11 and a cover of, uhh, an intertwined pot leaf and vagina.
Helmed by Twin Cities beat man Ryan Olson, Relayted’s 11 tracks—all set at 69 beats per minute—cum flooded with stacked keyboards, thick bass and at least one shocking sax solo. There’s soul-singing, spectral harmonies and a Bone Thugs rap from Vernon. Meanwhile, the interludes that link the tracks lift all of it to a sort of rarefied Miles Davis Get Up With It space. It’s a project without a lot of precedents, especially given the music on which most of those involved have built their reputations. And as silly and preposterous as it might sound, it somehow works, thanks in large part to the excellent playing and surprising singing and its consistent, slowly unfurling aesthetic.
At any rate, it should be interesting to see the public’s response to Gayngs: Can what began mostly as a joke become one of the weird successes of music this year? Maybe.
After playing a few games of basketball in Raleigh last night, I climbed in the car, turned on the radio and headed to a meeting across town. Sirius XMU, billed as being “like hearing college radio but never having to go to class,” was spinning Hot Chip’s “One Life Stand,” a college station standard of late. But when the DJ followed with “Lazy Lessons,” a track from the not-yet-released The Limbs EP by Chapel Hill’s Organos, I wondered if I’d actually switched the dial to WKNC 88.1 FM. After all, bandleader Maria Albani did all the press and radio mailing for her solo project’s new EP, and unlike Hot Chip or the next band, The National, an act like Organos and a label like Pox World Empire don’t have sizable PR budgets to pursue national DJs.
But it was indeed Sirius XMU, and, indeed, the non-traditional charms of the songwriting on The Limbs EP, described here, seem to be sticking. Pox officially releases the EP Tuesday, Feb. 23, though you can pick it up at the band’s CD release party tomorrow night at The Pinhook. To hear the song, and read the story behind the set, see this week’s newspaper.
Grammy Family (From Phonte Coleman's Twitter: www.twitter.com/phontigallo)
Given our (sometimes controversial) familiarity with Phonte Coleman and Nicolay Rook’s run over the past year as they supported their second LP as The Foreign Exchange, Leave It All Behind, we’re, of course, a tad disappointed that North Carolina’s newest R&B resource didn’t walk away with this year’s Grammy in the Urban/Alternative Performance category for the song “Daykeeper,” a joint effort with D.C. vocalist Muhsinah. Rather, neo-soul benefeciary India.Arie won the award for a song called “Pearls”—a tougher-than-tofu number dedicated to caring about people and the rainbow and stuff, which doesn’t sound too different from the other 30 songs she’s made over the years about such ethical quandaries. Oh, well…
Sure, while the Grammy Award remains the highest mark of musical achievement in the land, listeners should at least take comfort in the fact that you can’t put much stock in a process that can nominate a sketch from Saturday Night Live (“I’m on a Boat”) as Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. So, what have we learned from tonight’s events other than the fact that Quentin Tarantino snorts 5 Hour Energy Drinks? Even if FE didn’t walk away with the award, they did walk away with some awesome memories and photos with some of their musical heroes—Quincy Jones, Charlie Wilson, Ludacris, Roberta Flack and, of course, Bishop Don Magic Juan. With a third Foreign Exchange album coming out later this year, the FE “Grammy Family” pledges that they’ll be returning to the Staples Center for another go. Sounds like a plan.
Beach music and the Carolina Shag dance phenom still carry a lot of weight in North Carolina. It was evidenced when Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, an avid shag dancer, established Beach Music Day in 2004, coinciding with a concert celebration in Downtown Raleigh.
Now, UNC Women’s Basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell has invited shaggers to perform their footwork in front of the halftime crowd in Friday’s game against Clemson.
Hatchell is a member of the Eno Shag Club, and an old friend of beach & oldies DJ Charlie Brown, one of the primary voices for the scene from the mid-60s in Raleigh, now on WPCM 920 AM in Burlington, and in syndication “On the Beach with Charlie Brown.”
So, this Friday at halftime in the newly-renovated Carmichael arena, dancers from Burlington, Eno, Bass Lake, and Chatham shag clubs will perform an exhibition. Look for some junior shaggers, too, some vying for national level competition. Continue reading »
Pastor Paul Adefarasin of House on the Rock church led The Experience, and Lagos, Nigeria certainly shook the night of December 4. Lasting from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., the fourth annual interdenominational gospel concert drew over 450,000 people. Local guitarist and minister Will McFarlane traveled over the Atlantic to be one of the many. McFarlane has spent the past decade in the area, but he spent years before backing up Bonnie Raitt and as part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Even with his solid résumé, McFarlane was surprised to be invited to the concert. “They called me out of nowhere, just a week in advance. I drove to Washington, D.C, to get my visa in a day, which was a miracle in itself.” He was recruited into a band that was half Nigerian and half American, including the likes of Phil Driscoll and Chester Thompson. With a little bit of time to practice, the group tackled the stage for an hour, starting around 1 in the morning. “The approach in Nigeria was just grab a hold and hang on. [laughter]” So what’s it like to play in front of almost half a million people? “It changes your body chemistry. [laughter] I mean, you could only see about the first quarter of a million. People were jumping and moving. It was just unbelievable.” Continue reading »
