Author: Michael Witthaus

Revamped, Jason Spooner Band hits Concord

The Music in the Park concert series sponsored by Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts in nearby Fletcher-Murphy Park continues on June 13 with Jason Spooner Band. The quartet rose to prominence in the mid-2000s and became a fixture on the New England festival circuit with five studio albums, most recently Chemical in 2014 and 2019’s Wide Eyed.

Dan Boyden took over on drums a few years back, but the band’s lineup remained constant otherwise, until original bass player Adam Frederick and keyboardist Warren McPherson left for family reasons in the days just prior to the pandemic. London Souls bassist Stu Mahan and Dawson Hill, a keyboard player with a perfect swampy touch, joined in early 2020.

“We had this tectonic shift … but it’s led to really good things,” Spooner said in a recent phone interview. “It was very, very nerve-wracking when it happened because it was like two pillars of the table coming off.”

The new crew made for “a re-energized band,” Spooner said. “Everyone’s equally fired up [and] rowing in the same direction; it’s amazing how far that goes. You get into a rehearsal and feel like everybody’s pumped to be there, to work on stuff and grow. Coming out of last year, we’re playing a lot more theater shows, bigger venues and cool openers.”

The fresh start included revisiting tracks initially done one to two years ago to give them an extra sheen; Spooner hopes to release them as singles. The process was refreshingly unrushed.

“This latest effort feels like it’s a little more marinated, we had time to make it … the songs feel comfortable in their own skin,” he said. “We did it in such a relaxed, unfettered way, there were just no limitations.”

One standout is the slow burner breakup song “Wanted to Say,” evoking Aja-era Steely Dan with help from horn players Phil Rodriguez and Brian Graham, who’ve toured with Sister Sparrow and The Dirty Birds.

“They just came in and we all wrote the lines on the spot,” Spooner said. “It was a super collaborative effort; I love the vibe they contributed.”

The new members joined organically. Boyden and Mahan are longtime friends.

“He’s kind of the alpha bass player around Portland,” Spooner said. “Stu also played and toured with Eric Krasnow, who of course is kind of royalty in the jazz, funk and jam scene, so he’s a monster.”

Finding Hill was pure serendipity.

“We were down at Sun Tiki Studios in Portland, a cool little studio with neighboring rooms where bands play simultaneously” — and the walls aren’t super-soundproofed, Spooner recalled. “We were packing up after a three-hour rehearsal, and all of a sudden we heard this other band. Dan looked at me with this stank face he’s pretty famous for and said, ‘Who the hell is that over there?’ We heard this real nice Little Feat, Dr. John playing — just, you know, a guy who had done his homework.”

Along with lineup changes, Spooner is taking a fresh approach to recording. “I’m hopefully getting a little wiser in terms of how records are made, what my best practices are, and how to do things effectively,” he said. “I’ve been known to be OCD from time to time. I’m the eldest child; I’ve always been kind of the point person on things.”

Lately, writing in the studio has replaced Spooner’s old habit of bringing the band well-formed songs, forging a fraternal bond and shared purpose.

“Skin in the game is big with bands,” he said. “A lot of the rifts happen if two guys are on one page and the other two are on another … whatever the dissonance may be, it’s never a good thing. It can lead to like bigger rifts and breakups and things like that. So now it’s feeling really good. Everybody contributes and has a role.”

Jason Spooner Band
When: Sunday, June 13, 2 p.m.
Where: Fletcher-Murphy Park, 28 Fayette St., Concord
Tickets: $12 at ccanh.com ($8 livestream available)

Featured photo: Jason Spooner Band. Courtesy photo.

Jay Chanoine returns with pair of headlining shows

When Jay Chanoine steps on stage these days, the Manchester comic’s audiences are well-behaved, sometimes eerily so.

“For the last year and a half they’ve been watching livestreams and cat videos, and they don’t remember how to act when a person is 10 feet in front of them,” Chanoine said in a recent phone interview. “Even a crowd doesn’t quite know how to do this anymore … but everyone is just smiling at you.”

Chanoine has another theory about these newly polite audiences too.

“We were all yelling at each other before this, then we got locked in our houses and we all just kept yelling. … It’s like the world put all its misbehaved children in timeout,” he said. “We had tantrums for a year and half, and now it’s like, ‘OK, did you think about how you were behaving? Because now I’m going to let you out.’”

In October 2019, Chanoine released his first album on Standup Records, The Texas Chanoinesaw Massacre. A week after it came out, he’d already developed nearly enough new material for a follow-up. The new record was rising on iTunes, he had a gig writing for satirical website Hard Times, and “I was like, ‘2020’s going to rule … then Covid hit.”

Though it stopped his momentum, he looks at the lost year as shared misery.

“Everybody else had to step back too. It’s not like the industry kept moving without any of us,” he said.

Festivals in the Midwest, Canada and Texas — the annual Altercation Fest in Austin — all were casualties of 2020. This year, touring is still on hold, as Chanoine isn’t eager to roll the dice in a lot of cities that may or may not be ready for full-scale shows, whatever local politicians say.

That’s less concerning, as he’s enjoying doing shows with other local comics, like Comedy Out Of The Box on June 5 at Hatbox Theatre, and a local showcase at Manchester’s Yankee Lanes, whose recently launched midweek open mic was successful enough to spawn occasional booked events.

“This is my scene and my comedy community, and it’s more important to me to see it get up and running again than to hit the road as soon as possible,” he said, adding that polishing new material for an album that’s now likely delayed to 2022 is also a priority. “It’s smarter to take my time … getting it where I want it to be. They took the last year from us — I’m willing to give one more just to make sure I can put out the best product that I’m able to do.”

He’s excited for the Manchester show in particular, which includes Liz Lora, a relative newcomer to standup who made a splash at an early open mic at the bowling alley bar. Seeing young comics find their feet reminds him of how he first started doing comedy in 2009.

“I was part of the New Hampshire open mic scene, I was trying to get spots on booked shows and everything,” he said. “So it’s not only cool for me to now be the headliner, but it’s cool to see that’s still going in the new crop of comics.”

Asked if he got any good bits out of the pandemic, Chanoine replied, “If you got no material out of Covid you weren’t trying,” but added he wasn’t eager to use any of it, comparing the exercise to telling jokes about the last president.

“Nobody wanted to talk about it; that’s what you were trying to escape,” he said. “But occasionally it got so awful and ridiculous. It would be, ‘I’m sorry, everybody, we need to talk about it.’ That’s kind of how I feel about Covid. I absolutely don’t want to focus on it.”

When he touches on the subject in his act, Chanoine tries not to raise anyone’s hackles.

“I’ve been opening my sets by talking about how the supermarket became an absolute war zone [during the pandemic] because people only had two places to go, their house and the supermarket,” he said. “It’s not making you pick a side, and I think that’s the key; trying to find things everyone can agree with, rather than what made them fight on social media for the last year and a half.”

On the other hand, he questions the efficacy of not talking about it at all.

“It would seem so odd if you just got on stage and started doing a comedy show like it was 2018,” he said. “It would be so dismissive, like you’re trying to give everyone tunnel vision, and deny the existence of everything.”

Jay Chanoine
When: Saturday, June 5, 7:30 p.m. (18+)
Where: Hatbox Theatre, 270 Loudon Road, Concord
Tickets: $16 to $22 at hatboxnh.com
More: Jaylene Tran, feature comic
Also: Friday, June 11, 8 p.m., Yankee Lanes, 216 Maple St., Manchester, with Dominique Pascoal, Liz Lora & Michael Millett (free)

Featured photo: Jay Chanoine. Courtesy photo.

Texan guitar ace Chris Duarte returns

Born in San Antonio and a fixture in Austin’s music scene, Chris Duarte is thoroughly Texan — but he’s always called New Hampshire his other home state. In the early 1990s he lived here for a year after moving north at his brother’s behest to battle drug addiction.

Before relocating, Duarte was a rising star with glowing press, the lead guitarist of Junior Medlow & the Bad Boys. He arrived in Plymouth near broke.

“All I had was my guitar, one amp and my briefcase, which had a couple of pedals and stuff,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I lost everything to the pawn shop.”

After stocking shelves at a summer camp for a bit, he edged back into playing, first at the Down Under in Plymouth, then an open mic at Manchester’s now-defunct Boston Trading Co.

“I started to jam there, and they liked me so much they gave me a night; I would host the jam,” he said. “Then … this club out of Concord called Thumbs started booking me [and] it got to the point where I was selling out that place.”

The experience “revitalized my career and got it back moving again,” Duarte said.

Still reeling from native son Stevie Ray Vaughan’s death in 1990, Austin was hungry for guitar heroes when Duarte came back. In short order he signed with Silvertone Records and released Texas Sugar/Strat Magik in 1994. The album earned him Best New Talent honors in the Guitar Player magazine readers poll.

Though Duarte is passionate about the blues — he remembers seeing Vaughan perform at Austin’s storied Continental Club in 1981 as a “hair-raising, jaw-dropping phenomenal” experience — he mixes the tone of that genre with the discipline of jazz. His unique alchemy is bringing a rock edge to those two diverse elements as he races up and down the neck of his Fender Stratocaster.

Early mentor Bobby Mack pointed him toward the “Three Kings” — B.B., Albert and Freddie — to learn the elusive blues sound. When he joined Mack’s Night Train Band, Duarte “knew nothing about tone. I just had these naive notions of what that music shouldn’t sound like. I was so condescending to it at the beginning.”

Duarte soon found his playing lacked “any type of emotion … so I really went to school,” as Mack fed him masters’ licks to learn note for note.

“It took a while, but I finally got in the groove of trying to really be like these guys,” he said. “Bobby made me love the music.”

Though inspired by guitarists like Mahavishnu John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola, Duarte is quick to point out he’s not trying to emulate them.

“I am not like those guys; I’ve got, like, three or four jazz licks, and I play them in the first two songs,” he said, calling his approach more aggressive and emotional, “with dynamics and, I hope, some kind of musical integrity, so somebody would hear me and say, obviously this guy’s studied and knows more than just the old pentatonic box patterns.”

After more than a year of isolation, Duarte is back on the road, and after a spate of Texas dates, he’s more than excited to return to the Granite State, a stop on every East Coast tour since his star rose in the mid-1990s. He first played KC’s Rib Shack in the late ’90s and will return on May 30 for an intimate outdoor show.

“I truly consider New Hampshire my second home,” Duarte said. “I love New Hampshire right now, and I will love New Hampshire till the day I die.”

Chris Duarte Group
When: Sunday, May 30, 7:30 p.m.
Where: KC’s Rib Shack, 837 Second St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Chris Duarte. Courtesy photo.