Born a poor peasant in 1412, Joan d’Arc never made it to her twentieth birthday. But she made true the adage that it’s not the years of your life that count but the life in your years. One of the first Protestant martyrs — she was canonized in 1920 and later became a feminist role model — Joan was a…
Secret Games: Wendy Ewald Collaborative Works With Children, 1969-1999 is a collection of photographs, stories and videos created by the grown-up artist Wendy Ewald and the young students she has worked with over the past thirty years. But the photographs on the walls of the Kemper Museum aren’t the sort of images our society has come to associate with children….
Mushroomhead, with its radio-friendly riffs and Freaker’s Ball theatrics, might seem like an odd billmate for sluggish-paced sonic-assault trio High on Fire (pictured), but neither group can be judged on first impressions. Some accuse Mushroomhead of riding Slipknot’s coattails into the discount bin of history, but for the record, the Cleveland group did the whole masked-rocker thing first. High…
Teetotalers beware: It’s time to get Loaded in Lawrence once again. The fourth disc in the ongoing series that documents the region’s musical talent will be unveiled at a release party starring five of the disc’s eighteen bands: Full Feature (pictured), Be/Non, Ghosty, Truth Cell and Jumbo’s Killcrane. It’s a well-rounded lineup. Ghosty’s “Henry Green” is one of Loaded’s…
Slewfoot Records packages its bands ingeniously, tossing a handful of its acts onto bills and combining the steady drawing power of each group. This evening starts with Brian Capps, former bass player and tenor crooner for Domino Kings. Next up is Kristie Stremel (pictured), the label’s hardest-rocking heartstring player, whose songs of longing have fans swaying in the aisles midway…
There’s a long list of Kansas City songwriters who, for various reasons — making a living, for instance — have headed out into the world and made things happen. Jeff Black’s dream was to move to Nashville and have people (including himself) sing his songs, and it came true. The late Waylon Jennings, mandolin miracle Sam Bush and Blackhawk have…
Usually, to call living artists legendary is to overvalue their past creative efforts while subjecting recent material to unfair and dismissive comparisons. Pianist Ramsey Lewis and vocalist Nancy Wilson avoid such pitfalls thanks to a shared sense of artistry that not only endures but also continues to grow. Meant to Be, the duo’s first release since its 1984 collaboration…
MC Paul Barman’s musical credentials stray far from the beaten path. After all, few could’ve predicted that a white, Jewish graduate of Brown University would issue one of 2002’s best hip-hop albums. But Paullelujah, a polychromatic tour through Barman’s cracked cranium, is just that. Too smart for his own good and too horny for anyone else’s, Barman raps like…
Few artists epitomize a style as perfectly as Al Jarreau. For more than 25 years, Jarreau has stood as the definitive R&B artist, spanning the gap between jazz and pop while embracing the mellower sides of funk, soul and gospel. The 62-year-old Jarreau’s voice sounds as supple now as it did on his 1975 debut, We Got By. His latest…
In a recent Entertainment Weekly, Avril Lavigne, the alleged anti-Britney, convincingly pleaded ignorance to a wide-ranging variety of subjects, drawing her biggest blank on the puzzling phrase inferiority complex. Unlike Lavigne, whose omnipresent neckties have strangled her already feeble flow of oxygen to the brain, Kansas Citians completely comprehend this concept. In fact, they not only know it but…
Stylistic definitions in music are typically more concrete in their exceptions than in their rules. Attempts to characterize a genre, especially one as diverse and colorful as jazz, are usually met with an endless stream of addendums or derision. Taking this semantic argument a step further, guitar pioneer Pat Metheny is hesitant to go too far in classifying his own…
You can tell from the rumble in Chali 2na’s voice that the no-nonsense MC has had enough of the “alternative” talk. He knows damn well what’s truly alternative when it comes to hip-hop. “That bling-bling shit,” he fumes. That’s alternative. In the past decade, rappers and rockers have reacted similarly to the alternative tag. In both camps, the word…
With Frida — the story of the profoundly passionate and uncompromising Mexican painter Frida Kahlo — it’s evident that a few folks in marketing know how to work the demographics (it’ll be extremely PC, possibly mandatory, to gush in adoration of it), but that’s the first and last cynical comment of this review. Frida is sensational. Masses of people…
The repellent Casanova portrayed by Campbell Scott in Roger Dodger has an instinct for looking up skirts and down blouses but no capacity for looking in the mirror. Part salesman, part caveman, Madison Avenue copywriter Roger Swanson is, deep in his cynical heart, as loathsome to himself as he is to us, but he disguises that with a torrent…
You don’t know Dick: Once again, Greg Hall seems to be jumping the gun. But I guess when your job is to get uninformed and impressionable sports fans riled up at the local teams, you have to pull out some Jerry Springer-like tactics. Last year, he wrote a column about Quin Snyder and Gary Pinkel not getting the job done…
Kansas City Manager Bob Collins postponed the inevitable bad headlines when he canceled the October 25 meeting of the Public Improvement Advisory Committee, a panel of citizens that tells City Hall which craggy streets, clogged sewers and crumbling sidewalks to fix first. Collins had been all set to unload some foul news on PIAC members: Thanks to City Hall’s budget…
Two months ago, Mayor Kay Barnes called a press conference at Barney Allis Plaza to identify a downtown enemy: skateboarders. Joined by representatives from the police department and Parks and Recreation personnel, Barnes reminded citizens that illegal skateboarders were chipping away at the city’s infrastructure. “I can’t imagine any one of us allowing this area to deteriorate,” she said…
James Rickerson hates Derek McQuinn’s guts. His entire body stiffens when “Dangerous” Derek emerges from the locker room dressed in sparkly gold lamé, his fists raised high above his head. James bolts upright from his ringside seat at the Eldon Community Center, shakes a fist in the air and screams, “You go home, Derek! We don’t need you here!”…
