Author: Michael Witthaus

All-woman showcase at Shaskeen

An upcoming Saturday afternoon of music will be an eclectic gathering of four women, each with a unique voice. Rachel Berlin echoes Ladies of the Canyon-era Joni Mitchell, Bri Bell writes and records lush folk pop as a solo artist and plays in a hardcore metal band on the side, Savoir Faire offers noir jazz with a sharp lyrical edge, and Fatma Salem’s songs are raw, spare and full of life experience.

The four will meet for the first time when each does a half-hour set at Shaskeen Pub on March 25. The common thread bringing them together is the WMNH-FM local music program Granite State of Mind. Each has appeared there recently.

“I went in search of more female performers … as a winter task for myself and the show,” host Rob Azevedo said recently.

As to why he chose these four performers, he said, “I found Savoir Faire to be symphonic almost. Fatma was refreshing, endearing, quietly captivating. Bri sounds like street love to me and her delivery is striking. Rachel was instantly next-level in her command and presence, and her voice melts into each song.”

Salem works as a mental health counselor in the same building as WMNH. Azevedo first met her in the hall there, then learned she was a musician. Her music often reflects her work.

“To have the background of life experiences adds another layer,” Salem said on her GSOM appearance. “You can track my journey through my songs.”

Berlin only recently made her first song public, but it is full of promise, and she has many more in waiting. “Wandering One Ways” has a verse/refrain structure and alternate tuning resembles Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree,” which is no accident. “I really wanted to write a song that is inspired by her,” she said in a recent phone interview. “Her ability to stay on one emotion and just really dig into it, lay it out there … I really wanted to be able to do that.”

Though both her parents are music teachers, Berlin’s journey to the stage wasn’t a given. “I’m definitely not a natural-born performer,” the 20-year old said. She’s battled stage fright since her childhood piano recital days. But after polishing up her guitar skills during the pandemic, she decided it was mind over matter and started hitting open mics.

When Lamont Smooth, a band from her hometown of Concord, invited her to sing with them at their Bank of NH Stage show last year, Berlin nervously agreed. “I couldn’t eat before I went on,” she said, “but … I turned off my feelings and just got into the music.”

Her songwriting heroes inspired Berlin to become a lyricist. “Anytime I thought I had a good line, I would write it down, and then I would try to mold all those lines into something,” she said. “Now, because I started doing it, it’s just an impulse; I can’t not do it. It feels wrong to hold it all in.”

Conversely, Bri Bell is a veteran of the Manchester scene. She started playing in 2013 at the Central Ale House open jam, an experience she remembers warmly. “

If you put yourself in a circle of other people who are creative and have similar goals, you almost feed off each other,” Bell said by phone recently. “It became like a family. We taught each other things, played together and just grew up as musicians.”

That led to playing out in local bars, but that didn’t last long for Bell. “I definitely did the grind, which a lot of my fellow musicians, peers in this area do,” she said. “Playing any show you can get … playing covers. Unfortunately, it’s something that I personally don’t like.”

These days, she plays fewer but more satisfying gigs. “I like to be in an environment where I can be heard … appreciated, if that makes sense.”

Bell released the all-acoustic Depressive Times in 2022, later fleshing out those songs and a few others into two EPs, Fall and Winter. Both were made in her home studio and came out in the past few months. She cites Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Power and Massive Attack as influences. Her friend Monica Grasso, who plays bass in the Graniteers, had an interesting response to the records.

“She told me, ‘I could never play the kind of music that you do, but I need to hear it’ — I appreciate that compliment,” Bell recalled. “It is very depressing music, but that’s my process. It’s very vulnerable. My music will make you sad, but the goal is to relate in those emotions that we’re not alone.”

Rising Star Series: Savoir Faire, Fatma Salem, Bri Bell & Rachel Berlin
When: Saturday, March 25, 4 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
More: facebook.com/rob.azevedo

Featured photo: top left: Savoir Faire, top right: Fatma Salem, bottom left: Bri Bell and bottom right: Rachel Berlin. Courtesy photos.

Family pub celebrates St. Patrick’s Day

After two years more or less on the sidelines, St. Patrick’s Day revelry returned to full flower in 2022, and the party only looks to get better with the big day landing on a Friday this year. Across New Hampshire, pub keepers are counting down. Early hours and Irish breakfasts are the rule, along with a bevy of traditional music.

Running a chain of Irish pubs, Salt hill, the Tuohy family exemplifies this celebratory spirit. Every year each pub kicks off with a traditional breakfast of bangers, mash and black pudding. Musicians like Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki and Concord band Rebel Collective start the day there and make their way back to bigger venues for evening sets.

This year, fiddler Tirrell-Wysocki will perform at noon in Lebanon, then head to Bedford for a private show. He’s also at LaBelle Winery on March 16, Claremont Opera House on March 18, and Stone Church on March 19. See jordantwmusic.com.

Rebel Collective will kick things off in Lebanon at 9:30 a.m., play the Shanty at 1:30 p.m. and head to Shaskeen for 8 p.m. See https://therebelcollectivemusic.com.

Other musicians making the rounds that day are O’Hanleigh, Atlantic Crossing, JD & the Stone Masons, and Celticladda. The Salt hill Celli Band will be in Newport and Sunapee, led by Anthony Santoro, a musician who’s led the weekly Irish session in Lebanon since Josh and Joe Tuohy opened it in 2003.

“He is so good that other really good musicians want to find him and play with him,” Josh Tuohy said while sitting at the original pub’s bar. “I’m not exactly sure who Anthony has with him this year, but I know it’s only high quality, because I don’t think he would play with less.”

Salt hill’s other locations are in Newport and at the foot of Mount Sunapee, a stone’s throw from the original site of The Shanty, a pub Tuohy’s mom and dad ran from 1968 to 1991. The famous and infamous have stopped there over the years.

In the ’70s, a pre-sobriety Steven Tyler pushed a cigarette machine down a flight of stairs, resulting in a lifetime ban from Mother Tuohy. A reformed Tyler has dropped by the new Shanty many times. Two summers ago he lingered long enough to take pictures with staff and even helped wash a few dishes.

New York subway shooter Bernie Goetz enjoyed a burger and a beer there while on the run from law enforcement and staying at a nearby hotel. “We didn’t know who he was until a couple of days later when the news hit,” Josh recalled.

March 17 is often the only time of the year many people go to an Irish bar, but Salt hill is a bit different.

“There’s people that come in a few times during the year,” Josh Tuohy said. “They’re always here on St. Patrick’s Day; it’s everybody’s go-to, and I like to think they wouldn’t consider going anywhere else. We always have a little extra for them that day.”

Those extras include a $500 cash prize at each location, along with plenty of Guinness, Jameson, Smithwick’s and other assorted bar swag. “We give away so many prizes,” Josh said. “We want everyone to feel like they got something.”

Pre-pandemic there were five pubs. One in Hanover was due for a lease renewal in mid-2020, as Dartmouth College went remote and events that filled the bar got canceled. “I don’t think we could have done anything else,” Josh said. “A lot of people said, ‘I’m sorry you went out of business,’ but we really just chose not to stay there.” Another in West Lebanon shut temporarily in September 2022 citing staffing shortages, and did not reopen.

Despite those setbacks, the Tuohys aren’t looking back.

“My brother and I are burger-flippers and bartenders by trade for our whole lives, and I love what we’ve accomplished,” Josh said. “The little victories, the challenges, the difficult things — it’s never the same day twice. I don’t think I’d know how to retire…. I’m wicked lucky to say we still love when we do.”

High on his list of reasons for that feeling is every Irish pub’s green letter day.

“Everyone, wherever they go for St. Patrick’s Day, I hope they’re safe and have a great time,” Josh said. “If they come to our places, they’re going to have more live music that they can shake a stick at and the best authentic traditional Irish food around, and everyone’s going to go home with a prize — if I could do it safely, I’d have a T-shirt cannon. I expect and hope to see all of our friends and family back, and anyone who’s new and hasn’t been here, give us a try. You’re going to have a good time, I promise that.”

St. Patrick’s Day at Salt hill starting at 9 a.m.
Salt hill Pub: 2 W. Park St., Lebanon; 448-4532
Salt hill Shanty: 1407 Route 103, Newbury; 763-2667
Salt hill Newport: 58 Main St., Newport; 863-7774
Full schedule at salthillpub.com

A dozen more New Hampshire Irish pubs with St. Patrick’s Day festivities
Barley House 132 N. Main St., Concord; 228-6363
Cara Irish Pub 11 Fourth St, Dover; 343-4390
Casey Magee’s 8 Temple St., Nashua; 484-7400
Fury’s Publick House 1 Washington St., Dover; 617-3633
Holy Grail 64 Main St., Epping; 679-9559
Kathleen’s Irish Pub 90 Lake St., Bristol; 744-6336
Kelley’s Row 417 Route 108, Somersworth; 692-2200
McGarvey’s 1097 Elm St., Manchester; 627-2721
Olde Kilkenny Pub 30 Middle St., Milford; 283-6631
Peddler’s Daughter 48 Main St., Nashua; 821-7535
Shaskeen Pub 909 Elm St., Manchester; 625-0246
Wild Rover Pub 21 Kosciuszko St., Manchester; 669-7722

Featured photo: Jordan Tirrell-Wysocki. Photo Credit: Mark Myers.

John McEuen traces a musical path

Along with his musical prowess, John McEuen could give a master class in networking. Fifty years ago he asked his new friend, bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, to work with his group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on what became Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a record that brought together American roots music’s leading lights.

McEuen used that promise to bring the equally iconic Doc Watson on board. “I told him, ‘We’re making an album with Earl Scruggs, and I want to know if you want to be part of it,’” he recalled by phone recently. “We weren’t making an album yet — he’d just said he would record with us.”

One by one, an all-star cast of bluegrass legends joined up.

Its success led to two follow-ups, one in 1989 featuring John Prine, Rosanne Cash, John Hiatt and other country-folk stars, and a third volume in 2002, which had Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson, the latter singing “Goodnight Irene” with Tom Petty.

The Willie and Tom duet came together when McEuen heard Petty recording in another studio and again chose to be bold.

“I walked in and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Petty, I’m John McEuen from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and I have one question: Have you ever wanted to sing with Willie Nelson?’ It took him off guard. He said, ‘Well, yeah, I wanna sing with Willie Nelson’ and I said, ‘We’re recording him down the hall.’ He came right then.”

There will be more stories like that when McEuen and his group The Circle Band appear March 18 at Manchester’s Rex Theatre. During the interview, he recalled getting a private serenade from Linda Ronstadt at her “When Will I Be Loved” session, capturing an early take of Gregg Allman’s “It’s Not My Cross To Bear” in a Los Angeles studio, and recording an 18-year-old Kenny Loggins in McEuen’s Laurel Canyon home, before Loggins joined Jim Messina.

A few years later, McEuen and bandmate John Hanna turned down Messina when he pitched him a tune; Hanna didn’t think it was a hit. “It’s a teeny-bopper song,” he recalled him saying. “Anybody can write, ‘Your mama don’t dance and your daddy don’t rock and roll.’ I called up Jimmy the next day and said no. He said, ‘That’s OK; Kenny and I decided to put that out together.’ Good decision, huh?”

The show commences with early hits like “Mr. Bojangles” — the Dirt Band was the first act to have a hit with that song — and winds through gems like “Voila, An American Dream” and “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream).” Along with McEuen are bassist (and Dirt Band cofounder) Les Thompson, and Nashville guitarist Danny Knicely.

The bulk of the evening is devoted to McEuen’s best-known project, a recording that so powerfully documented the many threads of American acoustic music that a copy of the 1972 triple disc could have been sent to the Library of Congress at the same time it shipped to record stores across the country.

It’s a multimedia show, much of it centered on that first Circle album.

“My brother Bill was manager of the group; he also produced the record, and he shot photographs, so behind us on a screen will be a projection of the studio sessions, with us in front, playing the music,” he said, adding, “it’s really exciting to see myself 50 years ago; it helps keep me young.”

There are occasional divergences, McEuen continued.

“We do things that aren’t reflected by what’s on the screen when we get into some other music,” he said, then began to muse. “This is a strange job; you travel all this time so you can go work for an hour and a half. Well, I try to make it … maybe two hours depending on the audience. I hear that this room is really nice and I’m looking forward to it.”

Asked what fans can expect from the evening, McEuen was expansive.

“People should come if they want to see a night of music that takes them to a pleasant space that exists from 1860 to 2018,” he said. “ I like to tell stories about what’s going on before and after the songs, and we have a good time. We play hot, fast, sweet, smooth and all that. I hope people come out to hear us.”

John McEuen & The Circle Band
When: Saturday, March 18, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 and up at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: John McEuen. Courtesy photo.

International guitar duo performs in Concord

The best guitar duos carry on a conversation with their instruments, but Nicola Cipriani and Brad Myrick engage in musical mind-melding, two sonic serpents swirling into a rope of notes. The Italian-born Cipriani and Concord native Myrick recall the similarly synchronistic Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, of the ’70s rock band Television.

Those two, though, had amplifiers. not to mention lyrics and a rhythm section. Cipriani and Myrick speak strictly through their fretboards — and they’re unplugged. On stage, they sit in angled chairs to play, with eyes moving fluidly between each other and an eavesdropping audience.

They also compose this way, a practice firmed up on the 2020 album Reflections. Released in the spring of that year, this fine effort disappeared in the pandemic’s fog. A canceled world tour was another costly problem, and even worse was the lockdown’s impact on their creative process.

“We tried to compose from a distance,” Myrick recalled in a recent joint interview with Cipriani. “For the kind of music that we do, it ended up being impossible…. We need to be in the room together, have the interplay, the visual connection. We just found that it wasn’t working out, so basically we were on pause for almost three years.”

Finally, the two have new a new album, Silver Lining, and are back on tour. They spoke during a pause on a Southern run that wrapped up in Asheville. It resumes with a show at Bank of NH Stage on March 5, and another the next day at UNH’s Paul Creative Arts Center. In April they’re in Italy, and they hope to book a few South American dates later in the year.

The cover of the new album is a monochrome Noemi Trazzi photo of Myrick and Cipriani facing each other in a terminal. This theme is explored in the opening track, “Ritrovarsi.” The Italian word translates to “find again,” and for Cipriani, the joyous, playful track has “a double meaning … to find ourselves again as artists and composers, and find each other.”

“Like reunite,” Myrick added.

With all the talk of Covid silver linings in the world of music like extra time to reflect and write, there weren’t many for the duo. That’s reflected on the new album. With titles like “Ode To Solitude” and “Remember To Breathe,” many of its songs came from “the experience that we had all been through,” Myrick said. “There was a lot of darkness in there, some tension, some melancholy.”

The seemingly ironic title was chosen, Myrick explained, because “we found that there was still so much good that we were able to pull out, even in this really challenging time — for me particularly.” That said, Silver Lining isn’t intentionally a pandemic album. “A lot of artists made those,” Cipriani said, while allowing that “it was a perfect photography of where we were at the time, actually.”

A suite in three stages, “Dragonfly Ritual” is one of the record’s celebratory moments. “I think that speaks to silver linings,” said Myrick, who wrote it as he watched the regal insects mating from his back window. “They’re attached as they’re flying, then they detach. I think they’re the only animal that does that; it’s this really incredible kind of ritual.”

Though a tonic, quiet contemplation doesn’t compare to the feeling Cipriani and Myrick had walking on stage and leaving with a standing ovation a few weeks ago at Coastal Carolina University, where they once recorded a live album.

“It was rewarding and it was inspiring,” Myrick said. “It is just totally propelling us forward. For me at least, and Nicola can tell me if this is true for him, it’s confirming that this is exactly what I should be doing artistically right now.”

“It is a huge privilege, what we are able to do…. I never get the sensation that I’m doing a kind of a normal job,” Cipriani agreed. “When we go to places like the university, and get the chance to meet a lot of people, especially young students that are really passionate and searching for their own artistic way, it’s so inspiring.”

One big benefit of live performance is it gives their instrumental music a narrative.

“We get to tell the stories and share the ideas behind it, so we can give people a little bit more information before they listen,” Myrick said. “Here’s what we were feeling, this is what sparked the idea; now maybe you have an idea in your head, and you can take it into a place, follow on the journey, and make it your own with us.”

Nicola Cipriani and Brad Myrick
When: Sunday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 44 S Main St., Concord
Tickets: $23.75 at ccanh.com
Also Monday, March 6, 8 p.m., Paul Creative Arts Center (Verrette Recital Hall), 30 Academic Way, Durham

Featured photo: Nicola Cipriani & Brad Myrick. Courtesy photo.

Teddy Thompson plays solo in Manchester

At the end of a benefit show in New Jersey last month, Richard Thompson invited his son Teddy onstage to perform with him. The elder Thompson is folk music royalty, while Teddy Thompson is a singer-songwriter who over two decades has dipped his toes in many musical ponds including country, pop and, on his 2020 LP Heartbreaker Please, Muscle Shoals soul.

The song they led off with that night, however, wasn’t one of those genres. Instead, they covered Eddie Cochran’s “Cut Across Shorty,” a rousing rave-up from rock ’n’ roll’s early days.

This suited Teddy Thompson perfectly. When he was twelve and his friends were hooked on MTV fare like Madonna, he was time traveling. “1955 to 1959 … that’s all I listened to,” he said by phone recently. “I thought, this is my first taste of what music is, and if it’s this good, I can’t wait to hear more. It turns out actually that’s as good as it got … everything I’ve heard since then has been a sort of slight letdown.”

He eventually learned to embrace artists of his own era like Culture Club and Crowded House. This was a reflection of what his mother, Linda Thompson, termed a “catholic” music taste that ran in his family. “It doesn’t matter where it comes from,” he said. “If you like it, you like it.”

For his own material, which he’ll perform solo at an upcoming show in Manchester, Thompson remains committed to just one thing, which in his telling is, well, everything.

“When it comes down to it, I’m really mostly enamored and focused on the song itself, hopefully something that is a strong suit,” he said. “I write the songs with just me and the guitar and then, depending on the album, sometimes it leans one way or the other.”

On Thompson’s latest project he collaborated with Jenni Muldaur, another child of a famous musician, to cover classic country duet partners. Three songs each from Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, they recorded it mostly to pass time during the pandemic, then put it out online. “We sort of half-ass released it,” he said.

“Our mutual friend David Mansfield, who is a real autodidactic and renaissance man, really put the whole thing together,” Thomson continued. “By the time we finished it, we sort of realized, ‘Oh, this should be a record.’ So we’re in the process now of getting a deal together to put it out … hopefully next year.”

Thompson’s worked with a lot of musicians over the years, both as musician and producer. His production began with his mother’s 2002 return Fashionably Late. Since then he’s helmed Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer’s haunting Not Dark Yet, three LPs from Dori Freeman, and Roseanne Reid’s 2019 Trails.

When asked what draws him behind the console, Thompson is a bit self-deprecating.

“I think it’s a little bit to do with not being very disciplined in my own writing and direction,” he said. “I’m not somebody who’s terribly focused and ambitious and has a real long-term view of what my career should be, when my next album should come out, all that stuff. So I think I’ve turned to collaborations in between things. When I don’t feel like I’m ready to make another record of my own, it’s a musical project to do in the meantime.”

This logic didn’t apply on 2014’s Family, a record Thompson conceived, produced and played on. He was joined by his mother and father, a once-acclaimed musical duo who divorced when he was young, his sister Kami, nephew Zak Hobbs, half-brother Jack Thompson, and a few other relations. The New York Times wrote brilliantly about the often fraught effort.

“Even if you’re not a musician, you can just imagine trying to do any kind of project with your entire family; there’s gonna be difficult moments,” he said. “There were a lot of emotions involved, mostly just for me. Because it was my idea, I was in charge, it was all on my head … it was pathetic in a way, as it really was enjoyable once it all came together.”

Heartbreaker Please was a breakup album, and Thompson thinks the best songs come from pain in relationships.

“That’s just what we feel the most and it’s the subject that everybody’s drawn to,” he said. “I guess some people are writing songs about other things but it’s tough for me to do anything really heartfelt when it’s not about the heart, if you see what I mean. I tend to write more songs about me and my woes, but it never seems boring or old to me … it’s endlessly interesting and fascinating and moving.”

Teddy Thompson
When: Saturday, Feb. 25, 8 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Teddy Thompson. Courtesy photo.