Author: Michael Witthaus

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.

Shaskeen comedy returns with Shane Torres

Comedian Shane Torres avoids politics in his act, even though the native Texan has strong personal opinions about, say, Ted Cruz (“I think he’s the biggest POS on the face of the planet”).

“I don’t think I’m good enough, and knowledgeable enough, to pull it off,” Torres said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t even care if I upset people that much, but I don’t know if it’ll be that funny.”

Torres is, however, a big advocate for the Mayor of Flavortown, Guy Fieri. He went viral in 2017 defending the shock-haired star against a tide of what he viewed as undeserved derision.

“All he ever did was follow his dreams,” Torres said on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, as he provided a list of the celebrity chef’s good deeds. “But because he has flames on his shirt, everybody s**ts on him like he’s a member of Nickelback.”

His bit became comedy’s version of “Uptown Funk.” Likes, shares and retweets blew up the internet, and Patton Oswalt declared it to be the one joke he wished he’d written.

For Torres, though, being known as the Fieri guy is a double-edged sword.

“I’m worried I might be a one-hit wonder,” he said. “I think I’m good enough not to be, but I’m afraid I’ll end up like … one of those YouTube stars, who does one thing and people freak out, and they never hear from them again.”

That’s unlikely. Torres’s stories about weird baby names, the mystery of why everything bagels cost the same as regular ones, or his clumsiness at sexting are as relatable as the hint of a drawl in the voice he tells them with. His talent landed him on Comedy Central, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Last Comic Standing — the latter “just barely,” he notes with self-deprecation.

“I don’t want that to be the only thing I’m known for,” Torres said finally of his famous Conan set. “But I also did do something that most people haven’t done, which is cool.”

Stellar standup instincts coupled with a rigorous work ethic — one reason he moved to Brooklyn a few years back was to be able to perform at multiple comedy clubs in one night — point to a solid future for Torres. After a pandemic that slowed everything down, he’s back to his old pace, and not a moment too soon.

“I was afraid I was going to have to start bartending again or something,” Torres said. “I think I have three spots tonight and four spots tomorrow, which was about what I was doing before everything shut down, and that feels nice. The only thing I do is work, and drink beer.”

Torres likes to represent the downtrodden; during his Fieri bit, he also wondered about all the Nickelback hate.

“They made 40 million bros happy,” he noted. “You don’t want them pissed off. That’s how we wound up in this mess.”

It’s an instinct he extends to his profession.

“I think people look at comedy and don’t give it the credit it deserves as an art form — it’s really f-ing hard, but for whatever reason, it’s a little dismissed,” he said, agreeing that what starts as funny ultimately should speak to the human condition in some way. “I do want it to be art, I just don’t know if it is. That’s what I want to do; I am still trying. … [It] does seem to be pretentious, but I think it does deserve to be called [art].”

Shane Torres
When: Wednesday, May 26, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $30/2 seats, $60/4 seats, $90/6 seats at brownpapertickets.com

Featured photo: Shane Torres. Courtesy photo.

Blues trio goes way back

When James Montgomery arrived at Boston University in 1967 his mind was on more than the English degree he hoped to earn. Steeped in the music of his native Detroit and keenly aware of his new home’s burgeoning scene, he set out for Kenmore Square with a harmonica tucked in his pocket.

There he found guitarist Bob McCarthy playing 12-bar blues. Montgomery offered to jam; an instant friendship formed.

“Within two or three hours,” Montgomery said in a recent phone interview, “I had already found someone to play music with, and I continue to play with him to this day.”

McCarthy went on to make many Boston “best of” lists while appearing with Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Jonathan Edwards and others.

For his part, Montgomery kicked off a 50-year career by being the first Northern artist signed to Capricorn Records, label of the Allman Brothers and Marshall Tucker Band. The irony of the pairing wasn’t lost on him. “Grew up in Detroit, out of Boston, but somehow we were called Southern rock,” he told one interviewer. “Go figure.”

On May 21, Montgomery and McCarthy continue the bond formed that day at an acoustic show in Laconia, performing as a trio rounded out by bass player Billy Martin — who also shares a connection with Montgomery from those days.

“He was in my first college band,” he said. “We opened up for Paul Butterfield, and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells in upstate New York.”

It will truly be a BU reunion, Montgomery added. “I mean, we all did really go to school together and everything.”

After the pandemic canceled his 2020 shows, Montgomery, whom Peter Wolf once called “the John Mayall of New England,” is eager to get back on stage.

“I’m bringing the whole band, and we’ve all been vaccinated,” he said. “I’ve got a bunch of outdoor shows. … My July and August look like any other year.”

Their first gig back was April 23 in Franklin, Mass.

“We had a ball,” Montgomery said, though “some of the songs we couldn’t remember; it was like, ‘Does the bass solo come before or after that?’ There were some arrangement changes we made spontaneously on stage.”

For anyone on the fence about getting a shot, Montgomery had an answer with “Get Vaccinated,” a redo of “Intoxicated,” which originally appeared on his From Detroit to the Delta album.

“We made it multicultural, people from across the spectrum getting vaccinated,” he said of the video, released in late April. “One of the main reasons for putting it out was to try and encourage people to hasten that process so we can get back to full-capacity live music.”

Montgomery has been involved in several film projects over the past two decades, contributing the title song for Delta Rising: A Blues Documentary in 2007, a project that included narrator Morgan Freeman and musicians Mose Allison, Charlie Musselwhite and Willie Nelson. With partner Judy Laster, who runs the Woods Hole Film Festival, he co-founded the Reel Blues Festival in 2001.

Currently he’s nearing completion of a documentary that’s close to his heart: Bonnie Blue — James Cotton’s Life in the Blues. Cotton, a harmonica legend, shared a familial bond with Montgomery.

“When I’d call his manager, Jack would say, ‘Oh, your father wants to say hello,’” he said. “I met him when I was in my teens, and we were lifelong friends. Of course, we’d done a ton of work together.”

Most of the filming is complete, with post-production and song rights the remaining tasks. The latter is currently the focus of a fundraising effort.

“It’s a music film, so there’s going to be a lot of licensing stuff,” Montgomery said.

The finished product will be a star-studded affair.

“We got Steve Miller, Jimmy Vaughan, Buddy Guy, and I think we’ll get Charlie Musselwhite next,” Montgomery said.

A two-day shoot had harp players from across the country reminiscing, as both Cotton’s and Montgomery’s bands joined in.

“It was completely spontaneous playing, and chatting about him, which I’ve never seen in a documentary before,” he said. “It’s really cool footage.”

Acoustic Trio – Bob McCarthy, Billy Martin and James Montgomery
When: Friday, May 21, 6 p.m.
Where: Belknap Mill, 25 Beacon St. E., Laconia
More: belknapmill.org

Featured photo: Bob McCarthy and James Montgomery. Courtesy photo.