The best tribute albums require no familiarity with the artist being honored, the group playing the tune or even the language in which the lyrics are being performed. Such details might enhance the listening experience, but if a band discovers a song’s strengths and promotes them with passion, the composition’s quality will speak for itself. Los Tres ranked among the…
Like Adaptation’s procrastinating protagonist, composer Carter Burwell starts with an outstanding source — in this case, a tense, haunting piano melody — and attempts to alter its form while preserving its essence. Tracing the film’s plot, Burwell’s variations on the theme incorporate ticking-clock drums and ominous alarm tones that convey deadline pressure; swirling countermelodies and claustrophobic crescendos that recreate a…
Nowadays, if you’d rather not be bothered with other people’s music, you don’t have to be. Just crank up your favorite cable, Internet or satellite radio station, and you can listen to all classic country all the time — or all rap or alt-rock or klezmer or whatever your favorite music might be. This is a development with obvious benefits,…
In this classic-rock-dominated city, the likelihood that a request for “Feel Like Making Love” will be honored on the air with Roberta Flack rather than Bad Company hovers around 1 percent. Neither song is any good, but at least Flack’s ting-ta-ta-ting-ing come-on is lightly sensual rather than a thundering cliché. Reviewing the 1975 album that takes its title from that…
Thank the late Ken Kesey, his Merry Pranksters and a ragged bunch of musical novices by the name of the Grateful Dead for attempting to transform the mundane into the mystical. “Can YOU pass the Acid Test?” taunted the handbills and posters plastered about San Francisco in the waning days of 1965. They were a direct dare to concertgoers, informing…
His-and-hers gifts can mean that well-matched partners have an uncanny ability to give each other the same item — or that an ostentatious couple makes a conscious decision to buy everything in tandem. The band name His and Her Vanities could refer to coed conceit or to handsome monogrammed dressing tables. Instead, it describes the group’s male/female vocal approach, with…
Lucero’s Tennessee is going to stir up a lot of Whiskeytown comparisons. They’re easy marks to hit: “Sounds like Strangers Almanac-era … “; “singer Ben Nichols sounds like a scruffier Ryan Adams,” etc. Lucero might even get stung by a bit of the anti-Adams backlash. It’s important to get that right out there — and then leave it. Produced by…
It’s hard to imagine many of today’s top performers maintaining their celebrity status, let alone actually mattering, even just a couple years down the road. Which just makes it all the more remarkable that George Strait remains a contender more than two decades after the hard honky-tonk of “Unwound” marked his country-chart debut. Strait can thank his perpetually youthful looks…
“Listening to some of the records by young guys is like drinking wine that was bottled yesterday,” alto-sax standout Greg Osby once told an interviewer. “It’s not seasoned. It’s not aged. It’s not ready.” Osby duly noted the most exciting exception to his rule, Jason Moran, the phenomenal pianist behind last year’s best jazz disc, Modernistic. Osby mentored Moran,…
The son of acclaimed jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, John Pizzarelli follows in his father’s footsteps by bringing the rich traditions of the Great American Songbook to a new generation of listeners. Far from being content merely to repackage nostalgia, the younger Pizzarelli broadens the scope of the jazz canon by drawing modern songwriters into his repertoire, a gentle reminder that…
A rocker of a bluesman, Jimmy Thackery ranks as one of the most electrifying guitarists on the scene today. Counting Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and Jimi Hendrix as the most profound influences on his gritty, tough-as-nails approach, Thackery pulls few punches onstage or in the studio. He can scream one moment and be subtly soothing the next, coloring his…
Aren’t you tired of big-time artists refusing to recognize Kansas City as a relevant tour stop? Everyone from Paul McCartney to Shakira routes right around us, rendering our town just another inessential highway exit between Chicago and Denver. Well, it’s payback time. This year, major names will beat a path to downtown KC and beg to play there regularly. And…
Bradford Hoopes got to Lawrence the hard way. The Yards’ frontman and organist was driving across the country from Seattle, returning home to his East Coast roots, when his truck bit the dust in Ellsworth, Kansas. Repairs cost Hoopes nearly all his savings, but at least he got back on the road. Broke and exhausted, the musician made a…
You will never make out with one of the Donnas. Sorry. You’re a chump. Chump clothes, chump lingo, chump taste in liquor. Ain’t no way you’ll get your hands on these four bombastic California lasses, who have somehow evolved from a cutesy indie-rock girl group to an ass-kickin’, name-takin’ arena-rock monstrosity that’s like Mötley Crüe with more sass, less hair…
Filmmaker Pat Mire feels like he’s racing the clock. The director of Against the Tide: The Story of the Cajun People and Dance for a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras has made it his mission to capture stories of Cajun culture even as it slowly disappears. Mire was born in Eunice, Louisiana, to parents who spoke French at home. He…
Although virtually no one in this country foresaw the American disaster in Vietnam, the late British writer Graham Greene glimpsed it with astonishing clarity a decade before the first U.S. “advisor” set foot on Vietnamese soil. Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American, which has now been made into a disturbing and provocative film by the Australian director Phillip Noyce,…
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. It’s hard to imagine any other reason to overlook this extraordinary film. Almodóvar’s female protagonists usually…
“A man without fear is a man without hope.” When a priest delivers that cruelly illogical line to Ben Affleck’s costumed avenger, it mostly just feels like the hopeless man is the one who sees Daredevil. From its first moments, Daredevil begs to be taken seriously. An injured Affleck lies semiconscious on the altar of a Catholic church —…
War and preach: Regarding C.J. Janovy’s “Count This” (Kansas City Strip, February 6): Thanks. It really made me feel good to know that there are actually more naïve, peace-at-any-cost individuals in Kansas City than the Star originally reported. I respect the freedom any American has to dissent and, like any thinking person, abhor the idea of war. War should only…
As would be expected now that scandal has rocked Kansas City’s largest company, stories are flying around town about Sprint and its (soon-to-be former) CEO, Bill Esrey. The best story has Esrey staving off lymphatic cancer, a disease that will kill more than 20,000 Americans this year. “The chemotherapy has been successful, and there is no evidence of lymphatic cancer…
On a chilly day in January 2002, Stefan Hughes’ phone rang. It was the man Hughes considered his political mentor — Mark Bryant, the president of the black political group Freedom Inc. and a former city councilman. Bryant told Hughes he wanted to meet for lunch to talk about the March 2003 City Council elections. Hughes had thought about going…
When Mary Kelly burst into tears on a Saturday morning late last June, she unwittingly set the stage for another venomous election season in Kansas City. With Election Day nine months away, Kelly didn’t care who would be running for City Council. The only things on her mind that morning were a string of broken promises and a dirty creek…
Among the many things Kansas City is not, it’s not much of a happy-hour town; it’s more of a let’s-go-out-at-11 type of place. In fact, one of the better things about KC is that some bars don’t close until 3 a.m., so we must take advantage of that whenever possible. However, we also love the concept of happy hour. Nothing…
There was a time, not all that long ago, when an enterprising cheapskate could eat out for free (or nearly free) just by hitting all the happy-hour buffets that local bars used to lay out for customers. The food usually wasn’t that great, but there was always a lot of it. This wasn’t a modern innovation. As far back as…
