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Peter Rowan & Tony Rice with Slaid Cleaves
Friday · Southgate House
The individual Bluegrass credentials of Peter Rowan and Tony Rice are formidable, impressive and voluminous. Rowan launched his musical career in the ’60s as an integral part of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, which he departed to form Earth Opera with Bluegrass legend-in-waiting, David Grisman. After two releases with Earth Opera, Rowan joined Richard Greene in his Jazz/Rock outfit, Seatrain, and then rejoined Grisman along with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and violinist Vassar Clements to form Old & In the Way. After a handful of solo and collaborative albums, Rowan released a number of albums with his equally talented siblings Lorin and Christopher as, naturally enough, the Rowan Brothers. Over the years, Rowan has continued to shape and rejuvenate the Bluegrass genre, even experimenting in Reggae with members of Burning Spear and Peter Tosh’s bands as Peter Rowan and Crucial Reggae. Rice’s résumé is similarly stacked with incredible entries. Widely considered one of the finest Bluegrass guitarists of all time, Rice formed the much beloved Bluegrass Alliance before joining J.D. Crowe and the New South, one of the most evolutionary and expansive groups in the history of Bluegrass. Rice left Crowe to join the David Grisman Quintet, where he explored a hybrid of Bluegrass, Jazz and Classical forms, before settling into an influential solo career marked by his experiments with Blues, Jazz, Swing, Folk and other acoustic elements which he fashioned into a genre subset that came to be known as “Spacegrass,” inspiring Bela Fleck and a host of others along similar lines. Although Rowan and Rice eventually gravitated toward each other and have found time to tour together over the years, this year marked the first time the pair entered the studio to officially document their collaboration, resulting in the stunning and predictably wonderful You Were There For Me. Whether in the studio or live onstage, when Rowan and Rice join forces in any capacity, it’s a Bluegrass summit of the highest order.
This local show is being presented by Magus Productions, who have announced that they will collect canned good for the needy at all of their concerts in December. For a run-down of the food-drive shows, go to magus-music.com. (Brian Baker)
Juliana Hatfield
Tuesday · Alchemize
Back in 1994, I was a broke college freshman in a one-horse, one-record store, tiny college town in eastern Kentucky. I walked three miles (one way) to that sole record store to buy one album — Become What You Are by the Juliana Hatfield Three — on the day it came out. I soon became the most popular girl on my dorm floor, because all the other girls wouldn’t make the hike, but still wanted to hear the record. Juliana Hatfield (both solo and with the Blake Babies) was the voice that girls like me and my friends turned to in the early ’90s when we got lost amongst the boy-centric Grunge. She was less scary than PJ Harvey, less preachy than Natalie Merchant and way more edgy than Lisa Loeb. She had our problems. I mean, what girl couldn’t relate to “Everybody Loves Me But You” at least once in her young dating life? And who among us didn’t have someone we couldn’t reach, as in “My Sister”? Hatfield was as cute as we wished we were, she was smart and, best of all, she knew the importance of a hook. Ten years later, she’s still cute, still smart and still writing songs that are relevant to my girlfriends and me. We’ve grown up, and so has she. Over the last decade she’s continued to make music, with projects like Some Girls as well as her own solo records. On Tuesday she brings her current tour in support of her latest effort, In Exile Deo (Rounder Records), to the Downtown club, alchemize. From the disc’s punchy opener, “Get In Line,” to the affecting closing track, “My Enemy,” and everything in between, Deo is a 13-track gem that I would gladly walk miles to get. Only now I don’t have to. These days, I have a car. (Ericka McIntyre)
Travis Morrison with Beauty Pill and The Chocolate Horse
Tuesday · Southgate House
When Travis Morrison spoke to CityBeat last summer about the demise of the Dismemberment Plan, he was very much at peace with the decision to disband the popular Punk band after an acclaimed 10-year run. He was satisfied with the band’s musical and influential legacy, adamant about their resolve to remain broken up after the end of their 2003 farewell tour and eager to move on to his next adventure. At the time, he was knee deep in a solo project that he would describe only as being produced by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie and a departure from his noisy Plan output. With the recent release of Travistan, we finally have the chance to hear just how right he was. Morrison’s first post-Plan solo work is an incredibly diverse pastiche of everything that’s influenced him over the years but might have been less than obvious in the Punk tumult of the Dismemberment Plan. From Delta Blues to Electronica to Folk to Pop, Morrison filters it all through his unique Indie/Punk sensibility. The problem so far is that critics have almost universally trashed Travistan for Morrison’s folksy and often arrhythmic lyrics, his reedy vocal tone and, it seems, for not being the Dismemberment Plan. Travistan is like a strange hybrid of They Might Be Giants’ adult juvenilia, G. Love’s funky/groovy/goofy street busking, Death Cab’s stripped down Indie Pop and David Byrne’s mature hyperactivity, all of which winds up pushed through the funnel of Morrison’s basement demo mindset. Travistan is wildly different than the kinetic presentation that distinguished the Dismemberment Plan, but it is clearly not the monumental collapse of creativity that many critics have claimed it to be. In any event, it will be interesting to see how Morrison displays this work in the live setting. Will it be fleshed out and more fully formed with a band, or even more naked and vulnerable with just Morrison at the helm? We shall see. (BB)
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2004.