Author: Michael Witthaus

Snarky Puppy arrives at Capitol Center

Jazz fusion collective Snarky Puppy is hot on the heels of winning its fifth Grammy, for the double album Empire Central. Bass player and primary composer Michael League spoke with the Hippo by phone from Minnesota, as a tour that stops in Concord on April 12 kicked off. League discussed moving to Catalonia, Spain, in 2020, the nature of his ever-changing band and its influences, and what all that Grammy love really means.

What led the decision to relocate to Spain?

I was looking to focus more on production rather than playing live, and I had gone through a lot of drama with recording studios in New York; there was always an issue in the spaces I was in… I was just like, I want to have my own studio in my own house, where I can bring artists to me, a place that I enjoy living that’s calm and tranquil … half of my family is Greek, so I always felt really at home in the Mediterranean … it’s one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

Has the evolution of technology helped your creative process?

Everyone’s using technology, my bass plugs into an amp, that’s technology, but I wouldn’t say that we focus on being revolutionary or cutting edge with it. At the risk of sounding like an old kerfuffle, I think that we’re very analog. We’re very about getting in the room together and playing, and seeing what happens from the beginning … playing live is the essence of Snarky Puppy. Our thing is not making slick videos; we play music together, we’re like a family, and the chemistry between the members is what makes the music so special, I think.

What are your influences?

Oh my god, I listen to a lot of music, like everybody in the band does. I mean, I listen to a lot of music from different parts of the world, but I mean Snarky Puppy above all has been greatly influenced by Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Steely Dan, yeah sure, Tower of Power, you know and Parliament; Jaco Pastorius. I feel like a lot of the groups that sit in the cracks of genres, they are our biggest influences.

How does Grammy validation matter to you?

What the awards have done is vastly improve our quality of life on the road. We get paid better, treated better, and there’s more respect, which means our touring life is more sustainable. It used to be really rough, very intense and very hard on our bodies and bank accounts… people may not say [it] because we’ve been nominated five times and we’ve won five times, but the nature of Snarky Puppy is being underdogs. We started when we were too jazz for rock and too rock for jazz, and no one would book us. Festivals hated us because we were too electric, and rock clubs didn’t like us because we weren’t rock enough, and we somehow figured out a way to make it work.

What are your thoughts on working with David Crosby, on his passing, and his legacy?

He was one of my closest friends … he was like family. He changed so much about how I think about music, and I’m very grateful to have been able to spend time with him in the last part of his life. He had a reputation for being a difficult person, and I wouldn’t say that’s untrue, but … I will say that I experienced that very little in the years that I knew him. He was nothing but beautiful to me and all of my friends and everyone in my community. Just one the most generous people with his time and his resources…. When people talk about him, they talk about relationships that were destroyed [and] the more outlandish stuff that happened in his life, but if you’re going to talk about that, you have to talk about how he was so full of joy and generosity, and above all, so full of wonder about music. He was like a little kid with music, he always used to say it was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. It was just beautiful. The main thing that I learned from him is that it doesn’t matter how old you are, or famous or rich, just music brings joy. You get rid of all the superficial stuff, and you can reduce it down as much as you like and the core of it is just joy, and he had that at 81 years old. He was still so juiced and excited about playing, recording and creating.

You have many side projects — when you go on stage for this show, are you basically sticking to Snarky Puppy?

What I love about having so many projects is when you enter into one of them, you’re going into an entire world of music, with its own rules and natural laws and all this kind of stuff. It’s beautiful, because it exposes all kinds of parts of your personality. Actually, I don’t even like the thought of playing one of the songs from one band with another band, it doesn’t inspire me at all. I love going out with Snarky Puppy and just being in Snarky Puppy land, and then going out with Bokanté and being in that world. It’s fun, it’s like putting on a new pair of pants.

Snarky Puppy
When: Wednesday, April 12, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35.25 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Snarky Puppy. Michael League is in the foreground, left. Courtesy photo.

Music and food benefit Ukraine

A charity focused on humanitarian aid for a war-besieged country is the beneficiary at an event that includes traditional food and a variety of music. Voices United For Ukraine began as a way for local musician Val Blachly to do something, even from a distance, to help.

“I thought a musical event would be a really nice way of going about raising money, so that’s how I got involved,” she said. “The country’s in need with what’s been going on and we really wanted to give back, and give to the people there.”

Hot Skillet Club will headline the show. They’re a newly formed trio that includes Blachly on upright bass and a pair of musicians she’s played with in other groups: guitarist Liza Constable, part of retro-swing group Swing A Cat, and Ellen Carlson, a fiddler she began working with in Sweet, Hot & Sassy, which had a 12-year run starting in the early 1990s.

A pair of Ukrainian accordion players will serenade during dinner, followed by Northern Lights, a vocal group organized by Concord musician Peggo Hodes. Acoustic quintet Wholly Rollers follows with old-time bluegrass and gospel, and what their website dubs “sea shanties and land shanties.” Folk singer Andriy Zharkov, another native of Ukraine, will perform between sets and speak about his journey of how he came to the United States.

After looking at some venues that didn’t fit the benefit’s modest budget, Blachly approached Concord’s Unitarian Church and found a perfect match. After a sit-down meeting, “I said, ‘this is my vision, I’d love to do something for the Ukraine, incorporate music and some people from there,’” she recalled. “They both looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what we want to do … we’ve been talking about doing something like this.’”

Ukrainian native and activist Natalia Karaulova connected Blachly to Sunflower Network, an organization that directs donations to where they’ll do the most good. Karaulova found out about them while visiting Ukraine a few months ago, after a chance meeting with an old high school friend who was working with them to bring aid to the ravaged country.

“Everybody’s trying to help each other, to help displaced people and the army, because they are fighting the fight and making sure that the rest of the country is safe,” Karaulova said from her home in Warner. “That’s how I learned about Sunflower Network, just having that personal connection.”

Asked about the dinner preceding the concert, she said, “If somebody asked me to describe Ukrainian cuisine, I’d say it’s very earthy. People still grow most of their food…. It’s very hearty.” The evening menu will include staples like borscht and cabbage wraps, along with dumplings and a special dessert.

For their set, Northern Lights will perform “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” and a Ukrainian folk song picked by Hodes with help from Karaulova. “She had Natalia assist her and the women in the group with pronouncing the lyrics,” Blachly explained. “This particular song was written by a Russian, so the pronunciation was a little different. Peggo called her in and said she really wanted to do it with a Ukrainian accent.”

Closing the show, Hot Skillet Club will draw from an array of selections. Their set will have throwbacks from the Boswell Sisters, a proto-swing vocal group at the center of Blachly and Constable’s band Honest Millie, along with Bob Wills and Asleep at the Wheel-flavored material delivered with a feminine touch.

“We’ve been listening to Swing Sisters and women that came into Western swing, the music that they came out singing, and picking up ideas,” Blachly said. “Ellen has that down on the violin, so it’s kind of a combination of the two.” They’ve also worked up a great version of Merle Haggard’s “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down,” now up on Blachly’s Facebook page.

More recently, the trio started rehearsing gypsy jazz pioneer Django Reinhart’s song “Limehouse Blues.” The best part is the honey-sweet three-part harmonies that come easy for the old friends. “We’re all stepping up to the plate,” Blachly said.

Beyond the benefit show, there’s more on the way from Hot Skillet Club.

“It’s amazing that in the little time we’ve had together we have a fair amount of tunes,” Blachly said. “We’re so new we don’t even have our website up yet. And we already have 10 gigs.”

Voices United For Ukraine
When: Saturday, April 1, dinner at 5:30 p.m., concert 7:15 p.m.
Where: UU Church, 274 Pleasant St., Concord
Tickets: dinner $15, concert $20 per person (under 5 free)

Featured photo: Hot Skillet Club. Courtesy photo.

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.