Author: Michael Witthaus

Gift ideas for music fans

Books, box sets, baubles, even bespoke action figures are all good ways to make the music fan in your life feel special — and if those don’t do it, there’s always concert tickets. Here are some gifts that are sure to provoke a positive response.

Keep the holiday spirit alive all year with singer, songwriter and artist Dan Blakeslee & the Calabash Club’s joyful album, Christmasland Jubilee, available in a deluxe green and gold accented splattered vinyl edition that includes a silkscreened jacket, lyric book and original sketches from the New England treasure, who frequently performs in the Granite State.

Celebrate multiple New England Music Award nominee Liz Bills by purchasing her latest CD, Liz Bills & The Change, or grabbing a ’60s themed poster marking the same release.

Sepsiss took home their second NEMA in October, for Hard Rock/Metal Act of the Year. The New Hampshire rockers are ace branders as well, with a merch store offering puzzles, dog tags, red starred socks, stickers and even a signed Polaroid, along with T-shirts and caps. One of the best items is a fleece blanket with the image of lead singer Melissa Wolfe.

Not content with doing standup comedy and performing power pop with his band Donaher, Nick Lavallee began crafting made-to-order action figures of cultural icons a while back, including a dual set with Chance the Rapper and Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Tom Hanks in his Castaway role, Tenacious D and the priceless Mahket Basket clerk (actually $65). See pics on Instagram @wickedjoyful or purchase at wickedjoyful.bigcartel.com.

Peter Jackson’s mammoth documentary Get Back had Beatles fans atwitter over Thanksgiving; some loved it, others were put off by its eight-hour length. For fans, there’s a deluxe vinyl box set of the Let It Be album that includes all the superior Glyn Johns mixes, or a Get Back coffee table book. For brevity lovers, it’s perhaps a better idea to grab a pair of tickets to watch Ringo Starr & His All-Starr band open Bank of NH Pavilion’s 2022 concert season on June 4.

For the concert fan who can’t decide, there’s always the gift card option. Many area venues offer them, including Tupelo Music Hall. The Derry venue has upcoming shows from Marc Cohn, The Alarm, Rick Springfield, Tower of Power and ex-Eagle Don Felder, along with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, so it will surely get spent.

Supply chain problems preclude anyone from having the 30th-anniversary box set of Nirvana’s earth-shattering Nevermind on vinyl until next May, so if preordering won’t work, there’s a five-CD version with the remastered album and complete recordings of four concerts, as well as a Blu-ray disc of the HD Live in Amsterdam video, and a 40-page hardcover book.

Speaking of books, several fine reads for the rock fan were published this year, including Rock Concert by Marc Myers, an oral history with memories from artists, fans and industry figures. It’s packed with fun facts, such as that the first stadium concert was promoted by Kay Wheeler, the teenage president of Elvis Presley’s fan club. Her letter writing campaign in 1956 managed to fill the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

For the classic rock fan, Hollywood Eden by Joel Selvin traces the roots of the 1960s California Sound to University High School in Los Angeles, where teens like Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean spent their days in classes and their nights making hit records. It includes the bizarre story of a plot to kidnap Frank Sinatra Jr. to revive a flagging career.

At the intersection of rock and fantasy, Z2 Comics offers graphic novels based on music from artists from All Time Low to Yungblud. Among the best are one that combines the I Love Rock and Roll and Bad Reputation albums by Joan Jett into one book, and another based on Judas Priest’s Screaming for Vengeance. The latter comes in a $500 deluxe version.

Featured photo: Dan Blakeslee vinyl. Courtesy image.

Black Violin transcends genres

Black Violin earned a Grammy nomination for its 2020 album, Take The Stairs — a fitting title, given the band’s challenging journey to success.

Led by Kev Marcus on violin and Wil Baptiste on viola, the group mashes up classical music and hip-hop. They invented their innovative genre years before YouTube, Twitter and TikTok virality existed, when making it in the world of music came from wearing out shoe leather, not web clicks.

Their first big break came as the new millennium was unfolding, and it’s illustrative. Hoping to perform at basketball star Allen Iverson’s birthday bash, they got a meeting with the promoter of Teasers nightclub in Miami.

“He laughed us out the door,” Marcus said in a recent phone interview. “He said, ‘What am I gonna do with violins?’”

Their irate manager responded by opening the back of his Ford Expedition, cranking up the sound system, and instructing the pair to play on the sidewalk in front of the club. A crowd quickly formed that soon included the shocked promoter. He got it, and agreed to hire them — as long as they promised to stay in flow.

“We needed to create a set for the DJ to mix in [so] our music didn’t stop everyone dancing,” Marcus said. “It’s the same kind of hip-hop music, except now you’re hearing violins, and you’re like, where is that? Then once they see us, they start crowding around. That was sort of the beginning.”

A couple of years later, they earned a spot on Showtime At The Apollo, a talent contest famous for unforgiving audiences.

“They boo you off the stage if they don’t like you,” Marcus said. “I mean, they are legendarily ruthless.”

The two waited in the green room as four acts went out ahead of them and were quickly dispensed by the crowd.

“A guy called the Sandman jumps from his box, hits the stage, and starts tap dancing you off,” Marcus said. “I remember being underneath … and just seeing the dust fall from the green room ceiling.”

Staring down at their violins, the two feared they’d been set up. But that feeling soon vanished.

“We walk on stage and we never lose,” Marcus said. “We won four straight competitions, we got standing ovations. It was the ‘we call home and quit our jobs’ moment. … If this crowd is gonna take us, then any crowd is gonna take us.”

The spark for their unique sound came when Marcus and Baptiste were in high school together — via a Sony Ericsson cell phone.

“Before ringtones, you could program notes,” Marcus said. “Busta Rhymes took the theme from Psycho and made a hip-hop beat, and it was the No. 1 song in the country…. I thought that was cool, so I created the notes for it and put it in my phone.”

When it rang in orchestra class, Marcus’s teacher predictably confiscated it, but not before his intrigued fellow musicians started replicating the digital sounds on their own instruments.

“The violinist next to me started playing the notes from my phone, and he went, ‘What if the violinist played?’ The next thing you know, the whole orchestra is playing,” he said.

Although Black Violin’s first Grammy nomination came for Best Instrumental Album, there’s an uplifting lyrical message throughout Take The Stairs, particularly on “Impossible Is Possible” and “One Step.” The latter song was made into a hard-hitting video, reminiscent of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.”

C&I Studio CEO Joshua Miller wrote a short film that touched on racial profiling, the immigration crisis, and the scourge of gun violence in schools.

“We wanted it to be really controversial,” Miller said in a ‘making of’ video. “Our whole pitch was really telling the story of what’s happening in America right now.”

“One Step” had been written two years earlier, with a different message in mind, Marcus explained, but they also felt a need to update it for the present moment.

“Everything you see in the video … we’re dealing with directly,” he said. “We wanted to show our reality, and if we can’t do that within our own art then we’re in the wrong business.”

Black Violin

When: Sunday, Dec. 12, at 7 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Black Violin. Courtesy photo.

Christmas at The Rex with Morgan James

From her debut album, a live tribute to Nina Simone, to recreating Joni Mitchell’s iconic Blue track by track a few years back, Morgan James relishes a challenge. Her guiding lights are interpreters like Simone and Aretha Franklin, who “get a hold of a song, and the original goes out the window,” she said in a recent phone interview.

In 2019 James set out to make a throwback soul record with vintage equipment, backing from a rhythm section used by Al Green, and a bevy of veteran session players. Named for the studio where it was recorded, Memphis Magnetic is an R&B celebration. Alas, it came out weeks before the pandemic hit, so a planned supporting tour had to be scrapped.

She responded by returning to Memphis to make the live-in-the-studio A Very Magnetic Christmas. Incredibly, it’s even more soulful than its predecessor, with skillfully curated nuggets like William Bell’s “Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday” and “Backdoor Santa,” the latter unearthed from the 1968 Atco Records holiday compilation Soul Christmas, along with some seasonal standards and a few winning originals.

The Clarence Carter track about a Santa with more on his mind than gift-giving — “I make all the little girls happy while the boys are out to play” goes the chorus — was memorably sampled in 1987 by Run-DMC for its “Christmas in Hollis” and is a standout track on an album already packed with them.

“I do straight-up classics like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘O Holy Night,’ of course,” James said, “but I wanted to do a couple that people might not expect me to sing. I think that song turned out so great. It’s so fun to sing, and it’s so funky; we had the best time making that.”

James and husband guitarist-producer Doug Wamble co-wrote “Long As I Got You,” which she called “a little love song about winter,” adding, “when people are complaining about the weather, we’re not … we love being cozy.” Another delight from the couple is the bouncy “I Wanna Know,” which echoes Natalie Cole’s hit “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love).”

Idaho-born and California-raised, James set her sights on New York City after high school. She applied to Juilliard and was initially declined, but kept at it, eventually persuading the prestigious school to open up an extra vocalist slot for her.

“It tells you all you need to know about my personality,” James said with a laugh. “I’m very stubborn, and if I have a vision for something I don’t really take no for an answer.”

Later she performed on Broadway, notably playing Teena Marie in The Motown Show, where she caught the attention of Berry Gordy Jr. He became her mentor and helped guide her to a major-label deal with Epic Records.

“He really encouraged me to write and have a stake in my own music,” James said. “The best advice he ever gave was he reminded me to always do my best work and always go with my vision, whether or not I’m reaping benefits from it. One day he said to me, ‘You know, Morgan, a star is a star even when it’s light out. When the sun goes down, we can see the stars, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there in the daytime. You are a star all the time, so act like a star.’”

James’s Magnetic Christmas tour stops in Manchester on Dec. 4 for a show at the Rex Theatre. How does she feel about being back on the road after a two-year break?

“We are getting all our ducks in a row, and there’s a lot to think about,” James said. “We’re going to have to get used to the lifestyle again [but] we’re so excited to see everybody, and play music, and be in a different city every day. We start the day after Thanksgiving, and go all the way up until Christmas. It’s going to be so joyful and celebratory; that’s what we want from the shows.”

Morgan James – A Very Magnetic Christmas

When: Saturday, Dec. 4, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $25 and up at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Morgan James. Courtesy photo.