Author: Michael Witthaus

Playing through, and past, the pandemic

If a Concord bar is offering live music, there’s always the possibility that Andy Laliotis will get involved. He’s a member of several groups, and a regular presence at open mic nights. If a friend is playing, he’s always ready to jump on stage and jam.

The guitarist is a Capital City native and musical mainstay, dating back to his early days with Lamont Smooth, a band that marked its 25^th anniversary this year. He’s part of several other acts; currently, they include Grateful Dead channeling Blue Light Rain, the roots acoustic Diamond Joe and Menthol Rain, which formed, then folded, at the end of 2020.

“Covid lasted longer than that band did,” Laliotis said in a recent phone interview. “It’s too bad, man; we were sounding good. Mostly, we were playing a lot of covers. It didn’t work out, but I’ll be playing with some of those guys again soon, so maybe we can talk about getting together again.”

A hunger to play defines Laliotis, and it’s managed to keep him busy during the pandemic. Between Penuche’s Ale House, Area 23, and the occasional Manchester show, there were gigs enough to keep him sane — but just barely.

“It’s been a core group of guys getting together,” he said. “With weather hopefully getting nice and the vaccine happening, there’s hope we can get out there and play more and more. But it’s been a lot of duo shows.”

On April 10, a power trio version of Lamont Smooth will perform at Penuche’s — Laliotis, his brother Chris and Scott Seeley, the band’s original bass player. They’re listed on the bar’s chalkboard schedule under an alias.

“Maybe there’s a little too much confidence in what we can do, but it is limited capacity,” Laliotis said. In later months, “we look forward to getting back at it with the full band again — we’re a six-piece.”

In February the band contributed a 15-minute video to Bank of NH Stage’s Local Band Mixer, part of the venue’s Mud Season Sampler. Concord performers Dusty Gray Band, The Special Guests with Lucas Gallo, Mallory Weiss, Andrew North & the Rangers, Supernothing, Will Hatch & Co, Bosey Joe, Trade, and Ethyric & B.Snair all appeared.

“We had to be in and out in an hour,” Laliotis said, “but it’s actually good to be in there again playing.”

A fresh outbreak of Covid cases in the state caused the cancellation of a scheduled Blue Light Rain show at Bank of NH Stage in early December.

Lamont Smooth will also do an outdoor show at Area 23 on May 8. He’s a big fan of the out-of-the-way Concord tap room and restaurant, which hosts local performers several times each week. Venue owner Kirk McNeil “helped us a lot last summer, booking us a bunch of times with different acts,” he said. “You get so used to playing a lot of shows and when it’s gone, that creative outlet all the other stresses in life kind of build up on you, you know?”

Consistent with his ubiquity, Laliotis will join Jared Steer and Friends a week after the Lamont Smooth show at Penuche’s on Saturday, April 17.

“We’ll be doing Dead and Jerry Garcia Band, as well as other stuff,” he said.

His Dead tribute is in its 13th year.

“I get to make a set list of my favorite tunes, and it’s good to be playing with my friend Rob [Farquhar], who’s the original bass player,” Laliotis said. “When we started, it was supposed to be a one-off gig, but it just stuck.”

Blue Light Rain also provides Laliotis with a chance to play with another musical brother, George — Lamont Smooth’s original drummer and a big reason he found music as a teenager.

“He picked up the guitar and I was around,” he said, “then I started getting more and more into going to shows.”

Lamont Smooth released one album, in 2003, and Laliotis has hopes of returning to the studio for a follow-up.

“There are so many songs we haven’t even touched,” he said.

The band’s eponymous record is on TouchTunes, a digital jukebox that’s in every Waffle House in the country, among other places. It’s surprisingly popular, even now, Laliotis said.

“I get random texts from people all over the country saying that they played it in North Carolina or somewhere else, because it’s in boxes all across the country,” he said. “It’s pretty wild.”

Andy & Chris Laliotis and Scott Seeley
When: Saturday, April 10, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: $15 at headlinerscomedyclub.com
Andy Laliotis appears with Jared Steer & Friends at Penuche’s on Saturday, April 17

Featured photo: Andy Laliotis. Photo by Cory MacEachern Ghelli.

Kelly MacFarland headlines at Chunky’s

For Kelly MacFarland, succeeding as a female comedian isn’t more or less difficult than succeeding in any other profession.

“There are unique challenges for women in general, so take all of those and just apply them to this job as well,” she said in a recent interview. “I’m scrappy, and I learned early on that I might have to work a little harder in some ways. … [But] if I can do the job well, being a woman is going to serve me.”

MacFarland’s ethic is borne out; she regularly headlines, has appeared on Comedy Central, NBC’s Last Comic Standing and the 2019 Comics Come Home benefit show in Boston and has new sets on the Hulu show Up Early Tonight and Dry Bar Comedy.

“I always just focused on being the best comedian that I could be, and I still do that,” she said. “In that way, hopefully I’m just undeniable … [and] it won’t matter what my gender is.”

Though she loved TV funny women, MacFarland’s early influences were men: Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy.

“I’m not super-delicate,” she said. “To me, it was that male energy.”

This would change in hindsight.

“Looking back on it, a lot of those female comics had a male energy that I liked as I was getting older,” she said, citing Joan Rivers and Rosie O’Donnell as examples. “That aggressive kind of comedy that is … unapologetic, I guess, is the best way to say it.”

On stage, MacFarland riffs a lot on her home life. She married in 2016 and isn’t coy about the union’s many non-romantic benefits.

“When he said, ‘Do you wanna marry me?’ I was like, ‘I do, because I want to put out another album.’ The one I just released is all about him and my stepson. So, thanks. I need to put the divorce album out. I’m really excited,” she laughed. “No, we’re not gonna do that.”

When it comes to Covid-19, the opposite’s true.

“At first, I loved talking about the pandemic; now I’m done,” she said. “I write from an emotional place, which seems really silly, because I’m a comedian. But as soon as the world started to open up again, I actually found my writer’s block kind of go away. In 2021, I want to discover a whole new thing to talk about. I’m excited about that.”

After spending much of the last year doing podcasts, including the well-received I’m Fine with fellow comic Dan Crohn, MacFarland is pleased to be back performing to equally enthusiastic (albeit socially distanced) crowds.

“The audience is so grateful that you’re willing to come out, and you’re so grateful,” she said. “It’s a love fest; how would you be angry? You just risked catching the virus to come here, and paid money, so be on your best behavior.”

She’s especially fond of Granite State comedy fans.

“I love the people in New Hampshire; they want to have a good time,” she said. “One of the things I love about standup is that for any audience I want them to feel like they’re having a moment in time that they haven’t had before and that I haven’t had before. … New Hampshire really delivers on that. I don’t know if it’s that they realize what I’m doing and or if it’s just that New England way of being very engaged.”

MacFarland uses a pre-pandemic analogy to illustrate her point.

“If you sit down at a bar in New England, you’re going to talk to the person next to you; it’s just how it works here,” she said. “You’ll find out their name and where they’re from and whatever. Playing in New Hampshire is like bellying up to the bar with a new friend, and that’s so fun to me.”

As mass vaccinations offer hope for herd immunity, MacFarland is thinking of a cultural renaissance akin to the one that followed the flu epidemic of 1918; however, she goes a step further.

“They keep saying that’s how the Roaring Twenties happened,” she said. “I don’t care about the roar; I care about cash. [I want] people to want to go out. Please come to a show and support live performance.”

Kelly MacFarland
When: Saturday, March 27, 8 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema & Pub, 150 Bridge St., Pelham
Tickets: $15 at headlinerscomedyclub.com

Featured photo: Kelly MacFarland. Courtesy photo.

Take3 on a mission to the mainstream

Classical music is rigorous and demanding, its top purveyors virtuosic — but it’s box office anathema. Charity, not ticket sales, provides the majority of revenue for most American orchestras.

Enter Lindsay Deutsch. She launched her group Take3 to change the genre’s perception. The violin, piano and cello trio performs modern songs like “Despacito” and “Yellow” with the same musical discipline Deutsch learned when she was classically trained at The Colburn School in Los Angeles.

It’s an approach familiar to fans of Netflix’s Bridgerton, which offered string quartet renditions of Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 hits, among others, but Deutsch arguably got there first. Beyond that, her kinetic stage presence is singularly unique. She’s to the violin what Ian Anderson is on the flute with Jethro Tull, stalking the boards like a dervish.

The idea for reimagining pop songs as classical pieces came from frustration with the medium’s strict rules.

“The thing about Bach, Brahms and Beethoven is you have to play in a box, so to speak,” Deutsch said in a recent phone interview. “As an artist, I felt like … I have this huge voice, and people keep asking me not to use my voice, but to try and figure out what this dead, old white guy wants.”

Deutsch’s light bulb moment came when she traveled to Saudi Arabia for a last-minute spot playing with Yanni. The New Age superstar had found her on YouTube; she’d never heard of him until he called to say his regular violinist was leaving to have a baby. She had three weeks to learn the material; it would be her first time performing with amplification and in-ear monitors.

During her initial solo, Deutsch couldn’t hear anything and feared the worst was happening.

“I’m just fingering the violin, I can’t hear one note, I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “My thought is, OK, this is my first and last performance with Yanni, because I’m gonna for sure be fired.”

When she glanced at the bandleader, however, he was smiling broadly at her.

“I look up further and see a sea of people on their feet, cheering. That’s when I realized my in-ear monitors are fine; it’s the sound of the crowd that is so loud.”

For Deutsch, it was a revelation.

“In classical music, we don’t have audiences that make that kind of noise,” she said. “It was something that I realized I was really missing. … I became kind of addicted to that passion and to that fire the audience was giving me in response to this crossover style. After that moment, I just never looked back.”

Though the group’s material is accessible, it remains musically challenging.

“Take3 never felt that just playing the tune was good enough, because we had the chops to play big concerti with an orchestra,” Deutsch said. “We were not going to be happy with just playing single notes and easy renditions. So we made this stuff super hard, and we added double stops all over the place and cool techniques. … We wanted to really show off what we learned.”

After a few lineup changes, Take3 is currently Deutsch, Juilliard-trained pianist Jason Stoll and fellow L.A.-based cellist Mikala Schmitz, who studied at Cleveland Institute of Music.

“It’s very rare to find serious classical musicians that have the chops needed who can also let their hair down and have fun. … It’s been beaten into us since we were 5 years old to read the music, play exactly you see,” Deutsch said. “I’m saying the music is a guide, and if you want to diverge from that, have a little fun and do something different, by all means go for it. We’re on stage to have a good time.”

Though she’s playing a violin that’s over two centuries old, Deutsch knows she’s competing with 21^st-century distractions like movies and video games.

“These amazing things that people are used to seeing … if I just walk out on stage and plop myself down in a chair, it doesn’t matter how good it sounds, I’m never going to compete with modern-day entertainment.”

A livestreamed show sponsored by the Palace Theatre in Manchester on March 26 will feature Take3 performing a wide selection of material.

“It’s just all our favorite tunes that we’ve been playing over the last three years,” Deutsch said. “Anything from Justin Bieber to The Beatles to Coldplay, Pirates of the Caribbean and Game of Thrones. All good stuff.”

Take3 Virtual Stream
When: Friday, March 26, 8 p.m.
Where: Hosted by The Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Take3. Courtesy photo.