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2/12: Dropping In, with Chocolates
February 12, 2012
Everything old is new again — and so’s the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the new lineup of which (Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Hubby Jenkins, with guest cellist Leyla McCalla absent on picture day) visits the Pollak Theatre at Monmouth U on February 17.
Carolina Chocolate Drops, you had us with the spoons. Or was it the bones? The jugs? The quills?
Whatever. Just because a band gets period-precise (or rummages the kitchen junk drawer) in pursuit of an authentic “old timey” sound doesn’t make them any less than hypercurrent — provided the music is purveyed in the raucous spirit of a fruitjar corn-squeezins barndance shivaree, rather than a sleepy sermon or a fusty lecture.
Rest assured that the Chocolate Drops are THAT old-timey, thanks to their collective scholarly specialty — the black string band/ jug band music that began to capture the nation’s fancy right around the time that scratchy radios and 78 rpm Victrola records started replacing battered pianos and sheet music in American homes. Call it “dirt floor music” — but reckon that a dirt floor can be a firm foundation on which to construct a happy house made up of field-recording folk, crossroads blues, hayride bluegrass and speakeasy jazz, with a permit posted for new additions like hipster alt-country and houseparty hip-hop.
And yeah, the Chocolate Drops are THAT new-fangled, thanks to a deft mastery of social media and post-musicbiz meltdown marketing — a DIY savvy that’s allowed the Piedmont-spawned combo to top the Billboards, play the Grand Old Opry (first black string band EVER to do so, if you can believe that) and win a Grammy for their 2010 major label debut Genuine Negro Jig, nary five years from the time that founders Dom Flemons, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson first made each other’s acquaintance via a Yahoo group.
They’ve even got a new lineup — with NYC-based multi-instrumentalizer Hubby Jenkins replacing Robinson in the core trio — and it’s this troupe of troubadors (augmented by cellist Leyla McCalla) that visits the Upper Wet Side for the first time on Friday night, February 17, for a concert at Monmouth University‘s Pollak Theatre.
The 8pm show — for which the opening act is the hot ‘n spicy bluegrass blueplate specialties of the Brooklyn-bred M Shanghai String Band (look here for our past interview with Monmouth County mandolin master Richard Morris) — occurs just under two weeks in front of the “drop date” for Leaving Eden, the band’s followup release on the Nonesuch label and the first recorded evidence of the current CCD configuration.
Recorded in the home studio of lately legendary Americana-man Buddy Miller — producer of Solomon Burke’s Nashville and some seminal sessions by Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant — Leaving Eden finds the Carolina Chocolate Drops fortified by McCalla plus human beatbox (and occasional tourmate) Adam Matta for a set of fifteen chestnuts and original seedlings that run a gamut and a gauntlet between instrumental and a capella; mournful plaints of loss and gleeful declarations of independence; barndance breakdowns and rocking-chair reveries.
We got an advance listen to this warm and inviting (but still playfully boundary-busting) platter, and we dug especially the band’s driving rip through the high-mileage hillbilly chestnut “Ruby Are You Mad at Your Man;” the jaunty bee-sting twang of “Mahalla” (we swear it sounds like one of Jonathan Richman’s friendly folk instros) and the ominous back-country detour through “West End Blues.” Taking the majority of the vocal leads, singer-fiddler-banjobelle Rhiannon Giddens is in awesome form, as evidenced on the trilling Ethel Waters strutter “No Man’s Mama” and her self-penned “Country Girl,” a hiphop-infused spotlight track that stakes a claim to new corners of the band’s stylistic turf.
Flemons, the Arizona-born banjo expert and former National Poetry Slam competitor whose multi-faceted contributions also include vocals, African gourd and the aforementioned quills (think of an Irish tin whistle’s African cousin), stopped to chat for a spell somewhere on the road between the Piedmont and Eden.
1/12: Lighting Up January’s Lulldrums
January 12, 2012
Light of Day luminary Bob Benjamin — pictured with beaming Boss at a way-long ago benefit show at Starland Ballroom — is the subject of JUST AROUND THE CORNER, the doc feature that screens at Asbury’s Showroom this Thursday through Sunday (and goes on sale at select events in the extended LOD weekend).
“Michael J. Fox has no Elvis in him.”
That was punk folkie Mojo Nixon in his 1987 hit “Elvis is everywhere,” citing the clean-cut young star of TV’s Family Ties as “the evil opposite of Elvis, the Anti-Elvis” — even though Fox as Marty McFly had technically already invented rock and roll in the first Back to the Future movie.
Michael J. Fox had also by that time starred (with Joan Jett!) in the film Light of Day, a story about an un-Partridgelike musical family with a title song penned by Bruce Springsteen. That film has gone on to lend its name to an annual series of benefit concerts dedicated to Parkinson’s Disease research, while Fox — who of course since that time has become one of the most publicly profiled victims of the disease, in addition to the most dynamic advocate for its cure — joined Jakob Dylan, Southside Johnny, Lucinda Williams, Gary US Bonds, Goo Goo Doll John Rzeznik, Live-wire Ed Kowalczyk, Smithereen Pat DiNizio, basso Soprano Vincent Pastore and Th’ Boss in the parade of performers who’ve stepped on stage in support of the Light of Day Foundation.
Somewhere, Mojo Nixon is sorry; as sorry as he is for inferring that Debbie Gibson was pregnant with his two-headed love child.
If anybody paces Michael J. Fox in the drive toward a Parkinson’s cure, it’s NJ music promoter, artist manager (and fellow Parkinson’s patient) Bob Benjamin, who teamed with Tony Pallagrosi of Concerts East to assemble the first Light of Day event in 2000 — itself a more organized version of a loose jam session birthday party/ fundraiser for Benjamin at Red Bank’s Downtown Cafe in 1998.
And, if anyone can lay claim to representing the public face of the concerts, it would hands-down have to be Joe Grushecky, the original Iron City Houserocker (and honorary Shoreguy) whose friendship and intermittent professional partnership with Springsteen has been the real deal for a generation. The Pittsburgh-based client of Benjamin’s hasn’t missed a Light of Day benefit in Jersey since its inception — and as the 12th annual edition of LOD returns to Asbury Park beginning today, January 12, it’ll take the form of an ever-expanding, de facto festival that encompasses some 20 separate events over 95 hours, ten varied venues, one big sold-out flagship fundraiser, a country ramble, a Boardwalk Crawl trifecta, a morning-after brunch, a kiddie koncert, and, right TONIGHT, a way-out Rock ‘N Bowl-a-Thon that promises the participation of everyone from WCW champ Diamond Dallas Page to political scandal celeb Ashley Dupre.
1/6: Linda Chorney, Public Nominee No. 1
January 6, 2012 — 1 Comment
It doesn’t get any more stars ‘n stripes than Linda Chorney — seen here strumming “Say No to Sarah” in a vid capture that does NOT refer to Sarah Jarosz — as the AmeriControversial musician preps to storm the gates of Grammy-lot with an intimate gig at Asbury’s Wonder Bar this very night.
She stands accused of “gaming the system;” a heinous offense that puts her on a par with any banned-from-Bally’s casino card counter — although we prefer to picture Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment, slinking under the laser alarms while doing a human hack into some hitherto impermeable layers of security.
She’s been placed in the middle of conspiracy theories involving the most shadowy Star Chambers of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) — in the same breath that she’s been cast as a carpetbagging, not-one-of-us interloper; a distaff Professor Harold Hill with a folding merch table and a smaller horn section.
She’s been called manipulating, fake, a player of house parties (?) — even, Helen Help Us, a “Poster Child for a Paradigm Shift.”
She’s also got a lot of people out there — including past Grammy winners and biz bigwigs — reaching for the phrase “You Go, Girl” in her defense. NARAS awards VP Bill Freimuth even went on record in Variety to point out that she’s played it strictly by the rules, and that she was “very diligent in her pursuit of attention by the Grammy voters, and it evidently paid off. Enough of the voters received her communications, listened to her music, thought it was worthwhile and voted for it.”
But Jeez Loweezy, you’d think that Linda Chorney was some kind of Carmen Sandiego villainess, the way that folks in certain rustic corners of the music industry have their polkadot bloomers in a bindle over her continued existence.
What the 51 year old, Beantown-bred, Sea Bright-seasoned singer and songwriter is at this moment is HOT — not just hotter than anything else born during the Ike administration or reliably flush with talent, but a hot topic of conversation; blazing with controversy and studio-tanning in the spotlight of public scrutiny.
Yeah, we’re well aware that we just did a feature on LaChorn a few weeks ago, but the circumstances surrounding the “local, Shore based” musician’s appearance on the national stage — including this oft-quoted story in Variety and some coast-to-coast radio guestings — are simply too tantalizing to ignore. Especially in the numbing lull of a Jersey Shore January.
To refresh your memory: Chorney — like any Upper Wet Side artist worth her salt water taffy, a relentlessly DIY self promoter with the scary skills to back up any blip of bluster — released last year her sixth and by far most ambitious album of her 30 year career, a doublewide sensation called Emotional Jukebox. An epic yet intimate moodswing sonata that traced its way home past territories controlled by pop, folk, country, R&B, classic rock covers and a fully arranged chamber symphony, the album boasted well known musicians, groovy graphics, playful sneetches of humor and a boundary-busting worldview born of an era in which recording artists — with the help of seemingly unlimited studio budgets (Chorney’s project was financed in full by a single philanthropic phan) — aimed for the stars and pushed the envelope of studio time ‘n space.
So smitten was Chorney herself over the quality of her labor-intensive babydrop — and so disheartened over the prospect of its disappearing into the black hole where “local records” go to die — that she decided to get it nominated for a Grammy. Which, while laughably improbable, is at least theoretically possible given the increasingly heightened presence of Grammy 365, the peer-to-peer social network via which NARAS members can hep each other to new sounds in an increasingly fragmented, post-everything industrial landscape.
Long story short, when the dust cleared for the announcement of the 54th Grammy Award nominations, there was Emotional Jukebox, nominated (in the company of several serial Grammy winners) as Best Americana Album — a development that didn’t exactly inspire the Nashville-based Americana Music Association to send her a congratulatory Edible Arrangement. But, not to put too hyperbolic a spin on it, it was a pretty history-making moment — the first time by our reckoning that such an uber-indie, DIY, far-from-mainstream recording had cracked the Grammy circle. We’re willing to wager that it won’t be the last.
UpperWETside managed to corral this 30-year music biz underdog for a phone interview before having to take a number behind Vanity Fair, and found her busily shopping for a gown with which to make a grand entrance — a little above and beyond the call of duty just for talking to our little blog, if you ask us, but then Linda Chorney never does anything halfway. Read on, pilgrim…
An AmeriControversy for Linda Chorney
December 14, 2011
Linda Chorney scored herself a well-earned Grammy nomination, in what could prove to be the award ceremony’s biggest kerfuffle since Milli met Vanilli. (Photos by Danny Sanchez)
“I am Occupying the Grammys — I am the 99%,” Linda Chorney told Christopher Morris in a story that currently appears on Variety.com. “I’m the middle-class that got a friggin’ shot, and I got in there.”
Last we looked in on Chorney, the Beantown-bred, Sea Bright-seasoned singer and songwriter was conducting a public-welcome video shoot at the now-defunct NovelTeas in Red Bank — a call keyed to her playfully provocative tune “Tea Bag Party People,” and a happening that drew a spirited response from the redder banks of the greater Green.
Although it’s posted for perusal online, the finished track would fail to be stocked inside Emotional Jukebox, Chorney’s self-released, self-distributed release of 2011, and a project that, as its title suggests, mood-swings its way through pop, folk, country, R&B, a fully arranged chamber symphony, classic rock covers — and Americana.
Which is a good thing, too, because when the 54th Grammy Award nominations were announced recently by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Emotional Jukebox was right there on the list alongside Kanye, Katy and Kid Cudi.
How the “local” record — which, despite the contributions of people like Letterman bassist Will Lee remains an obscurity with no in-store distribution — came to be a candidate for Best Americana Album is one of the most fascinating stories ever to emerge from Grammyland, even as it continues to put a bee in the bonnet of many in the Americana music establishment.
