Chris Young with Cassadee Pope Chris Young has come a long way since his 2006 Nashville Star win. In November, the singer released I’m Comin’ Over — and if such a thing as a slow jam exists in country music, well, this album is full of ’em. Young delivers one smoldering ballad after another, and Thursday night at the Midland,…
Listen to the last track on Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning To Pimp a Butterfly and you’ll hear a trumpet ascend and then soar under the song’s rap. That’s Ambrose Akinmusire, a rising star of the Blue Note label. Akinmusire has won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and the Doris Duke Impact Award, which recognizes artists for their work to advance…
At one point in our interview, Nicholas St. James calls his singing “aggressive.” If you’ve had the good fortune of seeing the Lawrence folk singer live, you’d have no problem agreeing with him. St. James’ expansive voice is its own tremendously versatile instrument, and he works it with a flair that borders on vaudevillian. The full exuberance of his singing…
Next year will mark two decades since the American Jazz Museum opened. And 2017 contains plenty of other milestones, as the museum’s new executive director, Cheptoo Kositany-Buckner notes. “It’s the hundredth birthday of Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie,” she says. “One hundred years ago next year, Scott Joplin died. Can you imagine programming exhibits around that?…
There are now more sushi restaurants in the Kansas City metro than traditional, independently operated steakhouses. That shouldn’t be a surprise. I can grill a pretty decent steak at home — and yours is probably at least as good — but sushi is a delicacy best prepared by other hands (give or take some of those at seemingly every supermarket…
If there were zero supernatural forces in The Witch (subtitled A New-England folktale), then writer and director Robert Eggers might have stirred a discussion about the human toll of religious zealotry. But there are evil things afoot in the forest outside of a newly built homestead, and they have come to roost. So discussion about this movie, which sustains most…
Those early teenage years you’ve safely filed away in your brain’s hard drive? Spinning Tree Theatre’s production of 13 calls them up for you. The good news: The play lets you watch others work their way through those socially awkward and painful years in an astute and funny musical — the entertainment enhanced by that remove. It doesn’t hurt, either,…
To evade capture, jackalopes are said to mimic human speech and timbre — when, that is, they don’t go on the offensive, goring the tender groins of gullible hunters. Such are the contradictions that inform Chris Weaver’s “Over Burdened Jackalope,” a witty ceramic ode to this elusive, apocryphal creature. Part of the solo exhibition Searching for Meaning, Searching for Form,…
Every third Saturday in August, the smells of sizzling Polish sausage and pilsner permeate Strawberry Hill. Thousands of parishioners pile onto the grounds and amble up and down the hallways of the gothic, red-brick St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Kansas City, Kansas. Everyone in this polygenerational mass knows the sound of the tamburicas and the clacking of the…
Sam Brownback sympathizes with financial struggle, the feeling of coming up short in the bank account and looking to a helping hand from the government to get by. That’s why the Kansas governor told reporters Tuesday that he supports handouts. Handouts, in this case, being millions of dollars in sales taxes to benefit an organization whose board of directors includes…
The fragrance of freshly milled pine – 26,000 pounds of it – is the first thing you sense as you walk through the tinted-glass front entrance at 3951 Broadway, the space last occupied by Open Fire Wood Burning Pizza. The boards are going into 21 private booths and the exhibition kitchen in the front room of the 6,000-square-foot space, which…
The towering bowling pin at 1370 Grand Boulevard is gone. On a crisp Thursday morning in early February, workers are affixing the sign for No Other Pub, the sports bar and game emporium about to replace the failed Z-Strike. It marks another collaboration among the Sporting Kansas City soccer club, Power & Light developer Cordish Companies, and Entertainment Consulting International….
M83’s last album, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, came out in 2011, but founder and mastermind Anthony Gonzalez says the wait will be over soon. There will be a new M83 album this year, and the band has a new tour to support it. On Wednesday, June 1, M83 stops at the Midland. And, FYI, if you’re interested in being a part…
The Kansas City Chorale celebrated its continued streak of excellence last night at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards. The group — along with the Phoenix Chorale and their shared artistic director Charles Bruffy — won the Grammy for “Best Choral Performance” for their new album, Rachmaninoff: All Night Vigil. This marks the fifth Grammy award for the KC Chorale. Rachmaninoff: All…
The political prestige of being a board member for the evermore troubled Kansas City Public Schools has waxed and waned over the years. There have been many elections in the past where no one filed to run, leaving seats up for grabs to write-in candidates, some with a measure of qualification to do the job and others without. And then…
It’s likely that you know the Buhs because you’re familiar with the supergroup’s individual members: Diverse Jazz trumpeter Hermon Mehari, rapper Reach, Hearts of Darkness drummer Brad Williams, singer Lee Langston, singer Julia Haile, drummer Ryan J. Lee, keyboardist Kinyon Price, guitarist Tim Braun, bass player Ben Leifer, singer Anthony Saunders and rapper Les Izmore. Since 2013, these seven players —…
The matchup of the 2015-16 college basketball season is happening again. The Kansas Jayhawks and Oklahoma Sooners teamed up for arguably the best game of the year in early January, one that culminated in a triple-overtime win for the Jayhawks. Roughly a month later, the former No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the nation are still in the top-six…
Ever since Leawood payday-loan mogul Scott Tucker got arrested by authorities Wednesday, folks in political circles have been buzzing about which local politicians had connections to the indicted multimillionaire. Some rumors seem more promising than others. One that hit my inbox today made no bones about it. It came from Teresa Hensley, the Democratic candidate for Missouri attorney general. The blast…
It’s been nearly four long years since the Lumineers released their infectious, inescapable debut self-titled album. If you’re still haunted by the memories of “Ho Hey” playing throughout the summer of 2012, well, steel yourself for what could be another Lumineers-filled summer. The band has just announced its plans to release a new album called Cleopatra on April 8, and will…
