Dennis Brennan Quatro at Atwoods, 11.7.09

I first saw Dennis Brennan soon after moving to Boston in 1996. A friend had recommended that we go check out The Iodine Brothers at the Behan, and I was quite taken with what I found -- both the dark, narrow, bar and the band. In the Iodine Brothers guise, as I recall, Brennan played as many covers as originals. It was maybe that first night that I first heard such essential songs as Allen Touissaint's Fortuneteller and Steve Earle's Devil's Right Hand.

I don't remember who made up the Iodine Bros that night but in those days I remember Paul Bryan ("boss man," Dennis called him, which seemed a funny appelation for a much younger, silent, bass player) or Richard Gates on bass, Ian Kennedy on Telecaster and fiddle and/or the great Kevin Barry on guitar, and I think Jerome Deupree, who frequent readers (ha!) will remember from this post , on drums.

The Behan was a wonderful place for music then -- it later lost its live music license in dispute with a neighbor -- with seisuns on Saturdays and roots and rockabilly a couple nights a week. Brennan's mix of rock and soul and country (he's quoted here as saying that he's still just trying to make Beggar's Banquet) was both muscular and soulful, and in that pre-smoking ban wedge of a room it sounded just right.

While he was briefly overshadowed by his singer son Jake a few years back, Brennan is a Boston music-scene stalwart who seldom seems to play futher away than Worcester. Someone told me he has a day job at a Cambridge hardware store, cutting keys. And the mighty Dennis Brennan Band -- for years, he's had the incredible twin guitars of Duke Levine and Keven Barry, Andrew Mazzone on bass and Billy Beard on drums -- keeps on keeping on. (Though I wonder if this lineup is still current - his one posted November show with the DBB features a different lineup.) He also keeps busy with the White Owls, a blues outfit with horns that I keep meaning to go see, the occasional solo show, and lately, the Quatro.

It was the Dennis Brennan Quatro that I saw at Atwoods on Saturday. Lefty Dennis was backed by Kennedy, Gates, and Mike Piehl on drums. I stayed for just the first set, which was all Brennan originals, I'm pretty sure, except Fortuneteller: Mighty Long Time, Lies, Brokenhearted I Will Wander, I Got My Own, This Kind of Love, and a number of others that I'm not remembering now.

While the Levine-and-Barry band features tasteful and sometime incendiary back-and-forth on the guitars, the Quatro had a stripped-down feel with a muscular rhythm section and Kennedy's often understated leads on guitar and fiddle, all of it supporting Brennan's stellar voice. If you live in the Boston area and haven't, what are you waiting for? Go check him out. He's probably playing tonight. Beggars Banquet will be there when you get back.

Elastic Waste Band

I wrote back in June about going to see Dana Colley and Dub Apocalypse at Atwood's in Cambridge. Last week on Wednesday, I ventured to Atwoods again, again to see a Colley project. The goofily-named Elastic Waste Band (aka 'Members of Morphine') is in residency on Wednesdays "until further notice," said Colley from the stage. The crowd on Wednesday for the first set was relatively small, but it seems to me that word gets out about what's going on there, this won't remain the case.














(photo from Atwood's Facebook page)

The EWB is Colley, original Morphine drummer Jerome Deupree, and post-Katrina New Orleans transplant slide guitarist and singer Jeremy Lyons. The first half of the set featured what I think were mostly Lyons originals, and it sounded good. He's a fine slide guitarist and singer who played electric, amplified acoustic and at one point something he described as an "electric bouzouki... almost." Colley's processed baritone sax and Deupree's unique drum sound made this something other than the solid set of blues and blues-inflected rock it would've been, something a little edgier and dreamier.


And then Lyon's strapped on a certain two string bass as Colley mumbled something about some songs they'd been rehearsing lately, and we were suddenly and convincingly in Morphine territory - languid and sharp, subterranean and explosive, funny and dark. Lyons' voice has a certain similar quality to the late Mark Sandman's, and he was all over that odd bass, slippery and muscular and sly, as Colley and Deupree shifted into another gear and played the hell out of these songs: Head With Wings, All Wrong, Pull Over the Car, Let's Take a Trip Together, something about a Fur Bikini.

I've seen Colley and Deupree each play a few times in different settings, and part of what's made that exciting for me is knowing their history with Morphine -- seeing EWB was as close as I'll get to the real deal.

Surprise Me Mr. Davis & The Low Anthem

Surprise Me Mr Davis/The Low Anthem
8.27.09, Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River, MA

I was thrilled to hear about this double bill coming again to the Narrows, one of my favorite area venues. The same bill played there in April ’08, a great night of music that was my first seeing either band. I’d been listening to The Slip for years (and seen them in this room before) and I’d seen Nathan Moore fronting the late great (ThaLateGreat?) ThaMuseMeant many times in 1995 and 1996, and was so thrilled to finally be seeing the brothers Barr, Marc Friedman and Moore together. I was not let down that night, to say the least, so expectations were high for this show.

The Low Anthem opened with a spare, textured, and often quite beautiful set of songs, with fewer amped-up rough edges than when I saw them last year. I know these guys have gotten a lot of notice since I first saw them when they opened for Davis at the Narrows in April 08, and with good reason. Unique instrumentation – at this show, the basic trio seemed to be guitar, upright bass, and crotales, with clarinet, drums, electric guitar, some kind of horn, bass and cell phone electromagnetic field trickery adding to the sound -- and moments of striking vocal harmony brought interesting songs to life, and for the most part the band’s instrument-swapping didn’t feel like schtick.

I was intrigued to hear that Marco Benevento’s presence at SSMD West Coast shows earlier in the summer may have indicated not just a guest turn but a newly expanded band line-up, and judging from this set (and a recent band shot posted to Facebook) this does seem to be the case. After opening with a bit of theatrical a capella -- ‘Tombstone’ from Nathan’s recent ‘Folk Singer’ album, mixed with a little of Nathan’s magic – the band found their places and came out of the gate strong. The set’s first several songs were wonderful, and it was clear that Marco was a great addition, though he was not always easy to hear. (I understand there was no time for an adequate soundcheck due to the band arriving very late to the venue, among other challenges on the sound front.) This wrinkle aside, Marco seemed to add a lot to the rhythm end and his soloing fit right in, amplified a sometimes bluesy edge that’s part of the band’s sound, and really seemed to egg Brad on in a very good way. I noticed this before, seeing Davis with Jim Hobbs sitting in on sax last August at Great Scott – when Brad has another soloist to spar and banter with, he gets even hotter; bassist Marc Friedman has been that guy for Brad for years in the Slip, but seems to do a lot less soloing in this context.

The first 7 or 8 songs would alone have been just a great show, a left-end honky tonk with killer improvisational chops, a goofy grin and a serious delight in making music. Everyone sounding at once loose and focused and the larger organism displaying great communication and rapport, humor and high energy.

The rest of the night was kind of a hootenanny with a shifting lineup up to including all eight members of SMMD and the Low Anthem, many instrument trades – Brad on drums and piano, Andrew on guitar and voice, Marco on drums and melodica at various points – on a mix of Davis and Low Anthem songs, including old songs that may or may not have been on LA’s regular setlist.

It was a damn good time, a good-natured and unkempt jam session that had moments of greatness but in the end left me wishing for more – more of the better-and-better SMMD, more of the sparse landscape of the Low Anthem.

Dub Apocalypse

Caught this band's first set in the very quiet Atwoods last Tuesday night, and have been listening ever since to a live show from last fall that I found on archive.org. Good stuff. I've loved Dana Colley's baritone sax sound since I first heard Morphine in the mid '90s, and this project, while quite a different context, is no exception. The band the other night was Colley on bari, Johnny Trama and Geoff Scott on guitars, the rhythm section from John Brown's Body (Tommy Benedetti on drums and Nate Edgar on bass) and some guy whose name I didn't catch on vocals on some tunes. The sax and guitars played on top of long, deep reggae grooves, utilizing but not overusing dub effects. Hypnotic and energizing porch painting music last Wednesday... if the rain ever stops, it'll no doubt power me through the rest of the job.

Steve Earle at Berklee Performance Center, 5.29.09

I first heard Steve Earle on a Minneapolis rock radio station circa 1988. The title track from his Copperhead Road was promoted in efforts to introduce Earle -- a couple years after overdue debut Guitar Town lead many to believe they'd found an upstart savior of country music -- to a wider audience, and it worked, in the fickle way popular music does. It's probably safe to say that the tale of a Vietnam-scarred bootlegger's grandson determined to protect his backwoods crop from the DEA was an unlikely top 10 hit, but it happened.

I next ran into Earle's music in 1996/97, when Boston roots icon Dennis Brennan, then playing with the likes of Kevin Barry, Ian Kennedy, Paul Bryan and maybe Jerome Duepree as the Iodine Brothers, regularly included great Earle song Devil's Right Hand in his sets at the Brendan Behan in Jamaica Plain.

I had no idea that at that time master storyteller Earle was experiencing a kind of rebirth -- it would still be a couple years before I'd starting paying attention to his incredible body of work and eagerly following his career.

His 1996 post-jail, post-sobriety gem Train A-Comin' traded in the twangy muscle of the Dukes for a top-shelf acoustic band consisting of Norman Blake, Peter Rowan, and Roy Huskey and heralded the start of the shockingly productive dozen plus years since. Stylistically, Earle has ranged widely and resisted easy categorization -- he's as likely these days to accompany himself with loops and samples as play with a bluegrass band, and apparently more likely to do either than to play with the Dukes, though I read someplace that the next album may see a reunion.

All of this brings me to last night's wonderful solo acoustic set at the Berklee Performance Center. This was the second night on the road following the release of Townes, as the name would suggest an homage to his mentor, the late broken genius Townes Van Zandt.

It was just Steve and his guitar (and, briefly, bouzouki and mandolin) and he played a generous set of Townes covers and originals from across his career. No surprise, he's a great storyteller between songs as well as within songs. His between song patter was often very funny and drew candidly on his rocky past -- "When Townes Van Zandt shows up to give a temperance talk, you know you're in trouble." One long story had him seeking the origins of a song taught to him by Van Zandt, finally learning he'd written it himself.

Earle's best songs are firmly rooted in story, populated by characters proudly and mournfully detailing history and longing for something just out of grasp. It was a thrill to hear many of these songs live. Van Zandt's stories reach right past this sense of weary possibility and head straight for thick, gooey despair, wrought with terrible beauty. I don't think I've heard a song as abjectly bleak as Marie, which opened the encore last night. Yow. Earle followed it with Sparkle & Shine, about as far from Marie on some spectrum as one could get, an almost embarrassingly earnest love song to his wife, country singer Alison Moorer. That was a jarring transition.

Anyhow, if you've read this far, you may be interested in the setlist:

Where I Lead Me (TVZ)
Colorado Girl (TVZ)
?? Unknown
Fort Worth Blues
Pancho & Lefty (TVZ)
Brand New Companion (TVZ)
Tom Ames' Prayer
More Than I Can Do
Valentines' Day
Hometown Blues
My Old Friend the Blues
Someday
Mr Mudd and Mr Gold (TVZ)
City of Immigrants
Soldiers' Joy (instrumental)
Dixieland
The Mountain
Lungs (TVZ)
To Live is to Fly (TVZ)

Encore:
Marie (TVZ)
Sparkle & Shine
Copperhead Road

Throw Down Your Heart

I wrote in October about seeing Jayme Stone & Manso Sissoko, and more broadly about the trend towards exploration of the banjo's African roots. Finally today I am listening to the great Bela Fleck's contribution to the conversation, his new Throw Down Your Heart. A couple tracks in it seems fair to say this is a weighty statement. Thus far, Bela's quite low in the mix, coming across as a careful visitor to these foreign musical lands rather than a virtuoso seeking exotic spice. The bluegrass fundamentalists wrote off Bela long ago -- this will not bring him back to the fold.

upcoming: Fly

Looking forward to seeing Fly, the great trio of saxophonist Mark Turner, drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Larry Grenadier, coming up at Cafe 939. They play this small room on April 15 and 16, and then a spendier pair of shows at the larger Regattabar on the 17th. This band's been around a while but seems to be enjoying a burst of publicity around their new record on ECM.

The dates at 939 are part of the interesting new Marsalis Jams program at Berklee -- sounds like they'll be part performance, part band-directed jam with current Berklee students.