Lisa Engelken’s singing possesses a distinctive clarity and a bold dynamism. A dash of funk and an abundance of attitude mark the opening number on her new album, Little Warrior, and her voice soars with a playful sass on the album’s second tune, her take of the Cars’ “You Wear Those Eyes.” A long way from her native Big Skies,…
In the middle of the small basement where Atlas holds its weekly Monday-night practice, the five band members cluster together, more or less facing one another. Cords crisscross in an impossible web, threatening to trap these five full-grown men as they rub elbows and somehow avoid bashing their instruments together. Atlas has been playing in basements since it formed, in…
It’s been a long time since I’ve worn a bib, but I think I’ve found the Kansas City restaurant where I wouldn’t be embarrassed to put one on. At Blvd Tavern, every order of chef Derek Nacey’s twice-fried chicken wings comes with two folded damp towels — but demands at least three times as many. I walked out of the…
Summer doesn’t get much better than an evening in the park, watching a great tragedy. The park is Southmoreland, on the eastern edge of the Plaza. The evening is courtesy of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, an expert party host in its 23rd season. And the tragedy is an unmissable King Lear, directed by Sidonie Garrett and starring John…
Eight years ago, Nicholas and Angela Snyder fell in love — not with each other but with Leotron, a robot that the couple had built from an old radio, some electrical plugs and a Polaroid camera. It sat on Angela’s desk at work. “Little did we know that we were both pretty enamored with robots,” Nicholas Snyder tells me. “People…
More casinos, more money. More money, more problems. It took less than a year for Wyandotte County’s Hollywood Casino Grant Fund to devolve into dispute. The grant program started as a fairly straightforward method to disburse a sliver of Hollywood Casino’s revenues toward local nonprofits, under the broad mandate of improving community health. In 2013 and 2014, the call for…
A Johnson County District Court judge has scheduled a two-day trial in February for Henderson Engineers’ lawsuit against the developer of the forever-stalled Mission Gateway project. Henderson Engineers last year brought suit against the Cameron Group, which for 10 years has been unable to develop anything out of the lucrative real estate it owns between Johnson Drive and Shawnee Mission…
Don’t go to the one-day-old Terra Mexican Cuisine at 6705 West 119th Street — in the La Paloma Plaza — if you’re looking for Tex-Mex favorites like fajitas, chimichangas and cheese-smothered burritos. This new venue, owned by Mexican-born Arturo and Maru De Luna. is not that kind of Mexican restaurant. Arturo De Luna is unapologetic about his sophisticated (and not…
Extra Virgin’s bar manager, Berto Santoro, is not a scholar of Aztec folklore, but he doesn’t believe that should stop him from finding inspiration in some of the ancient stories. When he was developing his most recent cocktail menu, there was one legend in particular that stood out to him: The fate of Mayahuel, the Aztec goddess of fertility, who…
Update: The owners of the Green Dirt Farm have just canceled previously announced plans to hold a one-day tour of the operation on Saturday, June 27. Events manager ReGina Cruse tells The Pitch that “there’s a lot going on at the farm right now — this is a working farm, after all — and our staff is just maxed out….
Concert announcements galore today as the Midland rolls out the red carpet for three buzzing acts, arriving on separate dates in October and November: Glass Animals, Passion Pit and X Ambassadors. Glass Animals stops at the Midland on Thursday, October 1. The Oxford, England band is no stranger to Kansas City, and continues its tour in support of its debut…
Novelist Jonathan Franzen (Freedom, The Corrections) has a new book coming out September 1. It’s called Purity, and it’s about, well, here is what it is about, from publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “Young Pip Tyler doesn’t know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she’s saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she’s squatting…
This evening, at 5 p.m., advocates of raising the minimum wage will gather in front of City Hall to “turn up the pressure on our Mayor and City Council make sure they do the right thing for working families and raise the wage to $15,” according to the event’s organizers. Public conversations among city leaders, business leaders and community advocates…
This time last year, we were mapping out the details of the 18th annual Pitch Music Awards, having instituted some big changes. We started with a different, more concentrated ballot — 15 categories — and a change in the showcase format. It was fun. It was awesome. We had a great time. But as we began planning the 2015 Pitch…
The Minneapolis-based American Dairy Queen Corp. celebrates the 75th anniversary of the legendary soft-serve ice-cream shops today. DQ founder Sherb Noble opened his first restaurant on June 22, 1940, in Joliet, Illinois. By the early 1950s, there were five DQ stores in the Kansas City metro. Of that original five, only one is still standing: the beloved building at 2535…
Last year, Melissa Etheridge released This Is M.E., her first album on her own label. It took her 26 years to get to the point in her career in which she felt like she could do that, and the result is an uplifting and honest collection of songs that capture the iconic singer’s spirit. Etheridge is many things – LGBTQ…
Sporting Innovations, which develops technological applications for professional sports teams and entertainment groups, fired its co-CEO, Asim Pasha, June 16 and then took him to court a day later. The company says he spent the last year there using its resources to prepare the launch of a competing business. The firm, affiliated with the owners of Major League Soccer’s Sporting…
%{}% Earlier this week, The Pitch published a story revealing strong ties between Herb Sih — a board member of the city’s Economic Development Corporation and founder of tech incubator Think Big Partners — and several online payday-lending companies. The story came on the heels of a recent public discussion about payday lending, during which Mayor Sly James said of…
Belle and Sebastian with Courtney Barnett Uptown Theater, Kansas City Thursday, June 18 The pairing of Courtney Barnett and Belle and Sebastian is not an obvious one. Barnett is an artist relatively fresh to the United States, having released her debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, to nearly universal acclaim in March. Belle and Sebastian are…
In support of Modest Mouse’s March-released Strangers To Ourselves — the band’s first album since 2007’s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank — the Washington State six-piece has announced a host of international concert dates. The band stops at Liberty Hall in Lawrence on Tuesday, September 1. Tickets go on sale Friday, June 19, at 10 a.m. Details…
The St. Louis Post Dispatch dropped a pretty big bomb late yesterday that paints Jefferson City nightlife like one big Friday-night bottomless-cup special for state politicos. The newspaper got its hands on a police report from April that lays out, in deep detail, an evening that resulted in Brittany Burke, a consultant and former aide to Gov. Jay Nixon, asking…
Onward Crispin Glover’s 2001 record, The Further and the Faster, is the perfect amalgamation of energetic debut release and punchy veteran talent. Before forming this band, frontman Byron Huhmann had been in Kansas City’s beloved power-pop rockers TV Fifty, and guitarist Marty Robertson and drummer Billy Johnson had both done time in Frogpond. Still, the whole was greater than the sum…
