Bands

| | | | | |

Bands

Danielia Cotton with Special Guests The Color Truth - June 11

As with her multi-ethnic background, Danielia Cotton’s music is a compelling mix of elements: soul, folk, blues, jazz and a whole lot of emotionally powerful, no-nonsense rock and roll. The only way to describe it, really, is to say it’s all her – Cotton is channeling her extraordinary real life into her songs, her triumphs and her tribulations.

Cotton was raised in the small western New Jersey town of Hopewell, population 2010. She never met her Puerto Rican father and was raised, along with three siblings, by her African American/Native American/Caucasian mother. A jazz singer by avocation, her single mom supported the family doing accounting work. They didn’t have much, but Cotton’s mother made sure her children were well-educated and nurtured through books and music. Cotton clearly inherited the music gene: “I can remember the first time I heard my mom playing Nancy Wilson’s ‘Guess Who I Saw Today.’ My mom says I was the littlest kid with adult contemporary taste. I loved Bing Crosby; it was the craziest thing – this little black-Puerto Rican girl obsessed with Bing.

However, it wasn't only jazz that was firing up the young Cotton's ears. The Cotton household seemingly had more going on music-wise than the most free-thinking radio station. Along with the jazz sides she played, Cotton's mom collected LPs by Johnny Winter, Bonnie Raitt and Jimi Hendrix and, she recalls, "my brother would be upstairs listening to Todd Rundgren, Chicago, Foreigner, Yes, Led Zeppelin. It was like, where am I? And my aunts were on the road with Southside Johnny. That’s why I can’t reduce my work to one little thing, I want it to reflect my life, and what sews an album together is you – as long as you’re running through each and every song, as long as you’re in it, your life and your body. A great album is one that keeps surprising me, that takes me for a little bit of a ride.”

Cotton didn’t come to music simply by listening to everything in her house or by mimicking the songs she liked. At the age of 12 her mom gave her an acoustic guitar, a prescient move designed to help a daughter find an emotional and creative outlet. She also started harmonizing with her mom and her aunts in a gospel group, the Brookes Ensemble Plus. Cotton wound up at the top of her high school class, the first to graduate from the New Jersey School of Performing Arts. Her vocal skills earned her a full scholarship to Bennington College, a storied – and costly – school where the arts were emphasized. Cotton chose to pursue acting there, eventually spending most of her senior year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. But she doubled up on credits, so she still could study music, taking tutorials with avant garde jazz trumpeter-professor Bill Dixon, who, she says, “really trained my ear.”

Along the way, Cotton, now based in New York, married a restaurateur turned lawyer, a kindred spirit not averse to taking risks. After he’d opened a restaurant in Soho, her husband encouraged Cotton to pursue her music in the same way her mom had: “He bought me an electric guitar. The electric guitar is so different than an acoustic, it howls and screams, it’s intense – and it was the birth of another career. I started doing gigs at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village and my career took off from there. With her 2005 debut Small White Town (title inspired by Hopewell, NJ), her 2008 follow-up Rare Child, and now the live disk, Live Child, those many cultural and creative influences are exactly what you will find in Danielia Cotton's albums.

Dikki Du and The Zydeco Krewe with Special Guests Letter 8 - July 9

Dikki Du (Troy Carrier) was born in 1969 in Church Point, Louisiana and discovered his love for zydeco music at the tender age of nine. After school he would get together with his brother Chubby, sister Elaine and father Roy to play Zydeco music. At the age of twelve Troy moved to a little town called "Lawtell", where his father had owned the Offshore Lounge for over fifteen years. Troy played the washboard for Roy Carrier, his father, on local gigs; and subsequently joined forces with the great C.J. Chenier for two years. Troy's brother, Chubby Carrier then started a family band and offered Troy a job playing the drums. Troy toured with his brother from the late 80's until the 90's, when he returned home to pick up the accordion.

Not long after switching to the accordian Dikki Du formed his own band, Dikki Du and the Zydeco Krewe and they have been on the scene ever since. Dikki Du incorporates his musical heritage with his unique experiences to create one of the most innovative zydeco groups around. His original funky and hypnotic zydeco style announces that he has arrived, occupying a spot on par with the best. "Personally, the triple row is the sound that I like the best", says Dikki Du. He takes songs from classic zydeco and turns the inside out with fresh and funky renditions driving it to the next level. The Krewe’s innovations have revitalized zydeco for many years to come.

Intense and fascinating accordion action coupled to melodic vocals means Dikki Du and The Zydeco Krewe is guaranteed to entertain. You will not only enjoy the band's hard driving funky zydeco, but will also be amazed by the dance steps they perform on stage. The Krewe's extended songs are great to dance to, as well as to listen to. Hard driving and relentless is the theme all night. It's just funky as can be with polyrhythmic grooves going around the stage, and on the dance floor.

Not all zydeco bands put this kind of energy into their music, but Dikki Du!

Lynhurst with Special Guests Trapper Schoepp & The Shades - July 23

LYNHURST is the pop-rock trio from Minneapolis, MN of siblings Mari, Matt, and Jake Abdo. Younger sister Mari fronts the group from center stage on drums and lead vocals, flanked by her brothers on guitars, keyboards, and harmonies. The band’s upbeat original songs almost mask their thoughtful songwriting and storytelling. Mari’s captivating voice stands in beautiful contrast to her rocking drumming and the trio’s surprisingly full-bodied sound.

LYNHURST is named after the band’s childhood park. Growing up in a musical household with a basement full of instruments, the brothers began writing and recording as pre-teens. They performed retro-tinged garage rock at local festivals, rock clubs, and blues bars throughout junior and senior high school. About the time the boys secured their driver’s licenses, Mari, who had been more interested in visual art, picked-up a pair of drum sticks and joined the band as a percussionist and back-up singer. However, as Mari’s vocal prowess grew, it was obvious that her unique voice added a depth and beauty to the sound and she became the lead singer.

The band members left the University of Minnesota to chase a career in rock and roll. In pursuit of musical maturation, the band packed up the trailer and van and headed to Los Angeles in the fall of ’08. The time spent writing, recording, and performing in tinsel town was invaluable. Returning to Minneapolis, the siblings released their most recent album “Field Day,” in July ’09. After a summer of Midwest performances, the band embarked on their first national tour that took them from NYC to Hollywood, including shows with The Kin, Sick of Sarah, and Owl City.

LYNHURST returned to the road in the Spring of '10 with gigs that included an official showcase at SXSW, and performances at the NACA Mid-Atlantic and Northern Plains Conference Showcases. They also toured the west coast with the bands Pensive and 12 Track Radio and made a swing through Florida. Additional Summer touring plans will bring LYNHURST through Wisconsin for their Freeport Music show July 23.

Bill Kirchen with Special Guests Twang Dragons - August 6

Bill Kirchen has become widely known for the trademark big-rig guitar riffs that powered the Commander Cody hit “Hot Rod Lincoln” into the Top 10 in 1972. Since 1993, he has recorded seven critically acclaimed albums of his own that have made him one of the musical elder statesmen of today’s Americana music, which in truth was pioneered by acts like Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen back in the ‘70s.

For his 2006 album, Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods on Proper Records, Kirchen puts the accent on songwriting, a talent that is sometimes overshadowed by his dazzling instrumental virtuosity. “I felt it was time to write some songs that cut closer to the bone,” he says. And on such moving numbers as “Rocks Into Sand” and “One More Day,” he succeeds admirably. All told, Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods is the culmination of one very rich American musical life. On Hammer, the man known as “The King of Dieselbilly” and “A Titan of the Telecaster” visits most every sonic landmark along the proverbial Route 66 of American music that he’s traveled for decades now as a player, songwriter and singer, and serves up a blue-plate special of such tasty and nourishing stylistic flavors as rock ‘n’ roll, honky-tonk, soul, rockabilly, Western swing, country, blues, boogie-woogie and more. The set captures the essence of Kirchen as “a devastating culmination of the elegant and funky,” as he’s described by his longtime friend and compatriot Nick Lowe, one of the noted musicians who plays on Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods.

Kirchen has appeared on record and stage with a who’s who of musical talents that includes Lowe, Doug Sahm, Ralph Stanley, Gene Vincent, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Bruce Hornsby, Hoyt Axton and fellow six-string heroes Link Wray and Danny Gatton. At the recent Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, Bill played guitar with Elvis Costello, who named his band for the event the Hammer of the Honky-Tonk Gods after Bill’s upcoming release, and featured Bill singing the title song. Kirchen was nominated for a 2001 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance for his song “Poultry in Motion” and inducted the next year into the Washington (D.C.) Area Music Association Hall of Fame alongside John Phillip Sousa and Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters. He has lectured at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the 1998 International Conference on Elvis Presley in Memphis, and is featured in the TNN special Yesterday and Today: Honky-Tonk & Western Swing.

The Dieselbilly king is especially known for exhilarating live performances at festivals and venues across North America and Europe. The tour de force of every Kirchen show is his extended rendition of “Hot Rod Lincoln” on which “like an impassioned preacher in a souped-up convertible,” as Washington City Paper describes it, he cites the guitar styles of such six-string giants as Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins and Jimi Hendrix, while also referencing riffs by everyone from Merle Haggard to the Rolling Stones to Flatt & Scruggs to the Sex Pistols.

Kirchen began his musical journey in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended high school alongside Iggy Pop and Bob Seger. His first instrument was the classical trombone — which happens to share the same lowest note with the guitar — until a counselor at the esteemed Interlochen Arts Academy turned him on to folk music. “I said, this trombone has got to go,” Kirchen recalls. “I found a banjo in my mom’s attic and got the Pete Seeger how to play banjo book and 10-inch Folkways record and off I went.” He soon picked up the guitar, initially emulating the finger picking of Mississippi John Hurt. Attending the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and 1965, he received a master class tutelage in American roots music and, at the latter, witnessed Bob Dylan’s first appearance as an electric folk-rocker. “I was really lucky to hear many of the legends before they passed away,” he recalls, still reveling at the memories of seeing bluesmen like Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, Mance Lipscomb and Furry Lewis at Newport and such bluegrass greats as Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers and the Kentucky Colonels (with Clarence White) in Ann Arbor. To this day, Kirchen continues to consider himself a folk artist, albeit “one who plays too fast and too loud.”

After leading a hippie rock band called the Seventh Seal in Ann Arbor in the late ‘60s, Kirchen helped form Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, who revived and revitalized honky-tonk, boogie-woogie and Western swing for a rock audience. The group relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969, and recorded seven albums for Paramount and Warner Bros. Records before the original band broke up in 1975. Along the way, they became staples of FM radio and a popular concert attraction, cut a disc that was later named one of the best 100 albums of all time by Rolling Stone (Live From Deep in the Heart of Texas), and were the subject of one of the first and still among the finest books about the inner workings of the music business, Star-Making Machinery.

Kirchen carried on, forming a new band, the Moonlighters, and recorded two albums, the second in England with Nick Lowe producing. In 1986, Kirchen relocated to the Washington, D.C. area, where he formed a trio, Too Much Fun, that became the musical toast of the Capital town. Over two albums with Black Top Records and three with HighTone, Kirchen solidified his reputation as one of the most thrilling roots music six-stringers today, as well as a singer and songwriter capable of everything from keen wit to poignant depth and insight.

In recent years, Kirchen recorded with Lowe on the latter’s Impossible Bird album and played on the subsequent worldwide tour and live album, and toured and cut a live album with the Twangbangers (in which he joined forces with fellow Telecaster master Redd Volkaert, singer and songwriter Dallas Wayne and steel guitar savant Joe Goldmark). He also reunited with Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen for a 25th-anniversary performance on A Prairie Home Companion in 2001, and was tapped by the National Commission for the Traditional Arts to record an album, Dieselbilly Road Trip, for a Heritage Music Collection. Kirchen remains the consummate working musician, wowing audiences night after night at the scores of shows he plays every year.