Found Sounds and Such...

Photo: Brantley Gutierrez

The release of the economically titled Phish box set “Hampton/Winston-Salem ‘97” provided a chance to review the release by way of my memory banks of the original shows. Part review, part essay, full-on musing. It’s nice to have an excuse to write about Phish, which doesn’t happen very often nowadays.

“‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution. ‘But to be young was very heaven!’

Allow me to hyperbolically apply the same equation to the act of seeing Phish play at the Hampton Coliseum in 1997.”

Kid Koala has been up at MASS MoCA developing a project based on his (as yet unpublished) graphic novel Space Cadet and its accompanying soundtrack. I popped up and chatted with him on his second day in town. Here’s the advance feature, published in today’s Berkshire Eagle. (I got DJ Spooky to chime in as well.)

“Kid Koala pulls out a black-covered journal with ‘Space Cadet’ written in white lettering on its front, and flips through pages of a hand-drawn piano score to find a blank space. Sketching out the planned layout for the gallery of drawings and the performance space, he talks about his efforts to create an immersive experience that reinforces the storyline of the book, which he says is essentially about loneliness, family, and human connection.

‘I can’t play guitar and sing very well, I don’t write good poetry, but I can go lock myself in a room and read all these manuals about turntables and master all these crazy 5,000-knob mixing desks,’ he says.

Phish is playing UMASS Amherst’s Mullins Center twice this weekend, and the Berkshire Eagle wanted an advance feature. I wasn’t offered an interview with a band member, so I wrote a bit of an essay on the band and where I seem them today. (I’ll share some more thoughts about the angle I took, and why, later on.) It was published in today’s paper. A review of Saturday night’s show will follow early next week.

“When Phish takes the stage at this relatively small venue on Saturday and again Sunday, it does so not as a subversive cult band on the rise but as a group of elder statesmen whose list of key achievements on its eventual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame display is, for better or worse, already written...

Smaller venues, an autumnal chill in the air, fall tour in the Northeast—in some ways, it can’t help but feel nostalgic. And indeed, while the band released a new album upon its comeback last year and has worked a handful of even newer songs into the live rotation in 2010, the bulk of the shows are taken up by relatively straightforward versions of the old musical warhorses of yesteryear.”

In today’s Berkshire Eagle, I reviewed Crosby, Stills and Nash’s show this week at Tanglewood—here’s the piece.

“Stephen Stills seemed the most at home, particularly when wandering away from the band for one of his many solos on electric guitar. Graham Nash seemed vaguely cranky, and David Crosby, his hair blowing from an onstage fan, maintained his placid, beatific expression whether watching his bandmates sing the verses of “Southern Cross” or digging into the lead vocals for his own “Almost Cut My Hair,” a minor classic from the band’s great Deja Vu album.”

Above photo of CSN at Tanglewood by Hillary Scott

Tower of Power, the Ambassador of Brass, is playing the Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barrington, Mass. on Sunday, and I spoke in advance with founder and tenor saxist Emilio Castillo. Here’s the feature story, published in today’s Berkshire Eagle.

“Combining soul music roots with the propulsive beats and the crackling energy of the then-emerging funk scene, Tower of Power grew into its signature sound early, and became a dependable source of that style ever since. The only exception came in the late ’70s, when Tower of Power dabbled in some disco textures (an experiment practiced at the time by everyone from The Rolling Stones to Herbie Hancock), without success.

‘We’ve never been a band that chases trends,” Castillo says. “We tried chasing trends in the late ’70s and it was a dismal failure and it almost killed us, and we’ve never done it again.’”