Someone taking ten years to complete an album is either a magician slowly unfurling a trick silk handkerchief — or a gasbag sitting on an impossibly big turd. Anyone startled by Peter Gabriel’s stillborn recent single, the numbingly mediocre (and passé) Jerry Springer bash “The Barry Williams Show,” would be forgiven for assuming the MIA artist had locked himself in…
After hearing how Cato Salsa Experience takes care of business in the studio on A Good Tip for a Good Time, all potential spectators should be forewarned — an audience might incite the Oslo, Norway-based quartet to unleash a freak-out of unprecedented proportions. Like its garage-revival peers, CSE brings the rock like it’s inventing the wheel, invoking the music’s sexually…
While artists such as Norah Jones and Jane Monheit have attracted a fresh fanbase to vocal jazz, few other performers have been as readily and wholeheartedly accepted as newcomer René Marie. Though the fortysomething singer embarked on a serious music career only six years ago at the urging of one of her two sons, Marie has already attracted the attention…
It can be dangerous when indie rockers in ironic cowboy shirts convince themselves, wow, we really are cowboys. First they’ll steal their grandparents’ records. Then they’ll try to make the acoustic porch-strumming country album that “has always been waiting to come out” of them. Usually at this point we’re subjected to lame, played-out tales of whiskey, women, workin’ and…
Store shelves are full of DVDs and live albums that belie the phrase you had to be there, but sometimes a tour comes along for which attendance really does seem mandatory. The quality unlikely stagefellows Beck (pictured) and the Flaming Lips obviously share is showmanship. Each act has built its following largely on a reputation for performances that unabashedly embrace…
As a quietly simmering melting pot for American music’s best elements, Southern California plays a unique and crucial role. Agua Dulce takes this tradition to fresh places, making its own persuasive argument for the unifying nature of Chicano music. With lead vocals generally in English and additional vocals in Spanish and Portuguese, Agua Dulce performs an unusually accessible blend of…
Perhaps music’s most loyal fans, jam-band connoisseurs will eagerly accept nearly any music style from the groups they’ve chosen to follow. The Maryland-based quintet O.A.R. (Of a Revolution) updates the Latin/reggae aesthetic that permeated the early work of Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, seeming approachable even in comparison with its more prolific and popular predecessors. Building on the omnipresent…
With few exceptions, battles of the bands offer all the charm of a cockfight and enough musical ineptitude to make tinnitus tempting. Competitive rock has a long, sordid history in Kansas City, filled with stiffed winners, dubious decisions and onstage animosity. Such events reached an all-time low in 2001 with rogue promoter Terry Nelson’s 64-group Tournament of Rock, which…
As the product of Southern Baptist music ministers from Christian County, Missouri, Mark Bilyeu was groomed to live life more like devout Royal Mike Sweeney than like one of the hard-partying Chiefs (4W-4L-2DUI). But not all those kernels of knowledge took root with the guitarist, so even though he learned his early performance lessons at the altar, he soon moved…
Beyoncé and her bootylicious sisterhood might claim survivor status, but time will tell. Twenty years down the line, when Ms. Knowles is Aimee Mann’s age, will she even have a career in show business? The odds are against it. Mann, on the other hand, actually has survived the slings and arrows of major-label mishandling, and she’s thriving as an…
The question “All right?” is asked repeatedly of every character throughout Mike Leigh’s latest film, All or Nothing. In working-class London, it seems, it’s the preferred substitute for “Hello” or “What’s up?” That no one ever seems to answer the question in any meaningful way is at the heart of this portrait of three neighboring families in a low-income apartment…
So, you wish to know if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is as good as the first Harry Potter movie. Is it as charming, visually gratifying, faithful to author J.K. Rowling’s inescapable books? Well, that’d be yep times four. It’s definitely an enchanting spectacular for Potter fans. But at 161 protracted minutes, Chamber of Secrets is a…
Millay meter: Thank you for C.J. Janovy’s article (“Lost Souls,” October 31)! Tamara Millay worked as hard as — if not harder than — any candidate the Missouri Libertarian Party has ever put on the ballot. And it paid off in certain ways — more media coverage and acknowledgments like Janovy’s that “third party” candidates don’t get the depth of…
During an intermission at the November 7 City Hall budget meeting, Kansas City council member Becky Nace pulled mayoral candidate Paul Danaher aside and asked, “Doesn’t anyone here know what it feels like to be a real person anymore?” Nace was frustrated with the council’s refusal to spend more money on the city’s billion-dollar backlog of unfinished maintenance. “I’m going…
Chuck Weber didn’t like what he heard. In September, the former Kansas City councilman listened as Northland developer Tim Harris told Weber his troubles. A small group of citizens was threatening to kill Harris’ proposed Lowry Meadows and Lowry Hills, a 250-acre housing-and-shopping hodgepodge off Interstate 435. The idea and the area mean a great deal to Weber. As a…
Annabeth Surbaugh presides over her coronation as the queen of Johnson County. She beams out over a hundred of her most loyal subjects, who’ve gathered at the newest First Watch restaurant at 119th and Metcalf in Overland Park. Speaking into a CB-style microphone normally used by a hostess to call out the names of the hungry, Surbaugh thanks the…
When Tom Johnson left Hallmark’s Culinary Concepts unit to start his own little restaurant empire, he opened the Sushi House (5041 West 117th Street in Leawood) and bought the five-year-old La Dolce Vita (see review). He revamped the latter restaurant’s menu but kept the name and the culinary style intact. That’s not typically the case when a new owner buys…
A year ago, I was sitting in a bustling restaurant in Rome, drinking an espresso and smoking a cigarette. The food wasn’t particularly good, but the people watching was: The place was on the popular Via Veneto, where Federico Fellini filmed scenes for his movie La Dolce Vita more than forty years ago. The movie was considered erotic and…
The term living legend gets thrown around cavalierly, so it’s soothing to know there are people the title actually fits. Barbara Cook is among these rarities. Although her name probably evokes a “Who?” from even culturally savvy crowds, Cook (who is 75 but looks 60) ranks beside Chita Rivera and Elaine Stritch as a golden name in any theatrical hall…
Luci Harper, the one-woman committee in charge of this weekend’s Lucid Underground Media Arts Festival, isn’t showing limited-distribution films on an off night at a regular movie theater. She’s showing zero-distribution films in a former speakeasy in the West Bottoms. When Harper was a student at the University of Iowa, she enjoyed working on a film festival there. “I kept…
The best thing about turning 80, insists the maestro who has been making music for movies for half of the medium’s lifetime, is that you no longer have to lie about anything to anyone. It’s too late for lies; the clock will no longer forgive deception. So you may feel free to ask of this man anything you like,…
“I’m here to tell you that I think will get buried by the San Francisco 49ers. They still have the worst defense in the National Football League. I don’t think this team turned a corner.” — Soren Petro, KMBZ 980 “Johnny Morton has been the biggest jerk to me of any player. He has hands down been the biggest A-hole…
Mel Tjeerdsma, head football coach of the Northwest Missouri State Bearcats, wandered through the postgame mob at midfield looking for his kids. Mixed in the November 2 melee of fans, family and friends were his “children” — all 100 or so of them still dressed in grimy green game jerseys and smelling of success. Tjeerdsma’s Bearcats had just handed the…
Regular visitors to Quality Hill Playhouse are in for a shock with the venue’s latest musical revue, Jerry’s Girls. Out of the wings and to the piano walks not artistic director and bon vivant J. Kent Barnhart but Molly Jessup. This is a show by a man, with songs written for both genders but swaddled with feminine wiles —…
