Author: Michael Witthaus

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.

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.