Author: Michael Witthaus

Billy Wylder rises to the moment

“Just hang on to the band,” Pete Townshend sang back when. “You can dance while your knowledge is growing.”

Decades later, this spirit is exuded by the band Billy Wylder and its leader Avi Salloway. Their songs are infectious, full of deep grooves, spirit and kinetic musicianship. At the same time, they evoke more purposeful movement. Salloway’s words inspire souls to stir as their bodies dance, delivering a fierce-hearted call to change.

A singer, songwriter and guitarist, Salloway honed his passion on the front lines of many world crisis points. He brings his activism to songs like “Painter,” which warns against the lure of social media (“We see the world scroll on by / are we demand or supply?”) and offers a call to battle on “Whatcha Looking For,” the title track of the band’s 2021 EP.

“With all this loss and despair, the struggle of the pandemic and the extremes of injustice, our climate crisis, all of these things, it’s a moment to zoom out a bit and really home in on what are we looking for,” he said in a recent phone interview. “What is it that we value? What are our ideals?”

He bemoans the “screen space mindset” and strives through music to “help people break out of this headspace, into their bodies, and reconnect with each other.” In “Santiago,” a slow tango with a nod to his personal hero Leonard Cohen, Salloway dives into the online darkness and declares, “we’re more like our enemies than we believed before.”

The observation comes with an admonition. “Finding that common ground is essential to building any kind of unity and coming together, which I think we’re desperately in need of right now,” Salloway said. “It takes a lot of willpower and creative imagination [but] I feel like people inherently are good. Yet the systems that are tying us together aren’t; they’re not serving their interests, or the eight million species that exist on this planet.”

Fortunately, rather than put their message in a dire toned musical box, Salloway and his mates — polymath Rob Flax and a rhythm section of Krista Speroni on bass and drummer Zamar Odongo — blast it from the cosmos. Salloway and Flax’s frenetic interplay on “Whatcha Looking For” suggests a meeting of the minds between Beck and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Flax, playing guitar, violin and keys, is “on a really cool personal exploration of soundscapes,” explained Salloway. “What he’s been able to do with the violin is groundbreaking … through different pedals, soundscapes, and also synthesizers; it’s been really fun to explore that together.”

Mid-decade, Salloway toured with Bombino, a guitarist often called “Hendrix of the Sahara.” The experience has followed him since. “I think one element that carries over is the force, and the deep, deep groove that was so central to the hypnotic music I played with Bombino, and at the same time, how heavy and dynamic it can be,” he said.

Salloway’s commitment to using art as a social tool continues to drive him.

“I’m trying to collaborate and be part of a revolution of transformation in how we exist and connect,” he said. “Organizing how we really bring more understanding with the way we live our lives, and more joy, and love and equality.”

The band just released “Flower To The Sun,” an upbeat, positive song that’s in many ways opposite to the often somber Whatcha Looking For. Appropriately, it came out as summer began in late June. It’s the first song from a forthcoming album, “release date TBD, but in the next five months,” Salloway said.

In the meantime, Billy Wylder has a busy schedule, a pleasing condition for Salloway.

“I believe in the power of humanity … being able to bring people together under one roof to experience something physical and emotional through musical performance,” he said. “I feel one of my main roles as a musician is to help people break out of this headspace and into their bodies, reconnecting with each other on a person-to-person level.”

Salloway reinforced his thought by quoting an old folk song made popular by the Grateful Dead. “The sun will shine on our back door someday,” he said, “but we have to show up to make that happen. I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Billy Wylder
When: Friday, Sept. 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Billy Wylder. Courtesy photo.

RoC The Range offers full palette of jam acts

It’s been a long, strange trip for The Range, a Mason driving range, restaurant, and tiki bar that began offering live music outdoors just over a decade ago. The first foray lasted until 2014, when legal challenges shut it down for four years. In 2018 The Range rocked again with a show headlined by Badfish, Roots of Creation and a few area bands, and it has kept going since. With upgrades to the stage and sound, it bills itself as “the greatest live music venue you’ve never heard of in New Hampshire.”

Brett Wilson recalled his group Roots of Creation being the first to play there in 2011. The southern New Hampshire jam band called the event RoC the Range, a name that’s stuck through subsequent years and is back for an extended two-day run, on Friday, Aug. 26, and Saturday, Aug. 27. RoC will play three sets, one drawing from its Dead-inspired Grateful Dub records, and two of original music.

“When we first played the driving range, there was no stage, it was under a tiny little tent,” Wilson said by phone recently. “The next year, they bought a bigger tent.”

Badfish will headline Friday night, with RoC providing the lead-in and promising a full-length set of originals. “Like an hour and half, not a little opening set, because they’re our friends, and they’re cool letting us do that,” Wilson said, adding, “it’s kind of our branded event, but they’re closing it out.”

Saturday will feature a hybrid reggae/jam set, music that has them frequently called Bradley Nowell and Jerry Garcia’s love child, followed by another all-original performance. RoC recently signed with Nugs.net, a concert streaming site, and Wilson is keen to show their variety.

“I think a lot of the jam-band people don’t really know how much we jam and how we try not to repeat songs,” he said. “I was like, ‘We should go there and do three sets with no repeats.’ We have enough material.”

The RoC lineup for the festival includes Wilson and longtime members Tal Pearson on keyboards, and sax player/vocalist Andrew Riordan. Brendan Dillon is on drums and the newest addition is Mathew James, a 16-year-old bassist the group found on Instagram covering their videos. “He knows like almost every single one of our songs better than us,” Wilson said, “and his parents are freaking awesome, they’re Deadheads and supper supportive.”

When Badfish follows with its Sublime tribute, it’s likely Wilson will be back on stage. “They always invite me to jam,” he said. All of the weekend’s performers have more than a musical connection to the band, and that’s the point. Most of the tracks on last year’s Dub Free or Die, Vol. 1 featured guest appearances.

“At this point, I consider the band to be a collective,” Wilson said in an interview last year. Boston reggae star Mighty Mystic, who performs Saturday, appeared on four tracks, and Twiddle’s Mihali, also on the second day’s bill, was on “Arabia,” an instrumental inspired by Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin.

So jamming is inevitable, “but let’s have something where it makes sense,” Wilson said. “I look up to my friends Slightly Stoopid; when I saw them in Boston, they brought up this rapper from Boston, Ed OG, that nobody knows about in the reggae rock scene, and Charlie Tuna from Jurassic 5 is on tour with them, and all the bands are jamming with each other. I like that kind of environment, when spontaneous things will happen that are just here and now to experience.”

Family friend Caylin Costello will open both nights on the side stage, and Wilson is excited the and up-and-coming singer-songwriter is included. “She’s another person that we can bring up and collaborate with in the moment,” he said, “It’s cool, like, she’s been coming to see us since she was a kid, so it’s awesome to see her.”

RoC The Range
When: Friday, Aug. 26, and Saturday, Aug. 27, 6 p.m.
Where: Marty’s Driving Range, 96 Old Turnpike Road, Mason
Tickets: $25 single-day, $60 two-day, $150 VIP at etix.com

Featured photo: Roots of Creation.

Bluegrass with Bella White in Portsmouth

It’s understandable to mistake Bella White’s debut album, Just Like Leaving, for a mid-20th-century episode of Louisiana Hayride. With its layers of honey, hardscrabble and harmony, it’s a throwback that’s only missing the crackle and hiss of a big table radio.

The bigger surprise is it’s coming from a Canadian urbanite who was barely 20 years old when she recorded it at a rustic studio in the Green Mountains. Exposed to bluegrass at an early age by a touring musician father, Bella White became a natural at the genre, and her talent continues to grow.

She deftly draws from the hill country music that captivated her as a youngster, while staying aware of the dichotomy of it and her Calgary, Alberta, upbringing. “I was growing up going to public school in the city, taking the C train … this very urban kind of lifestyle,” White said by phone recently. “Then singing all of these really troublesome, ‘woe is me’ songs; I always found it really interesting.”

That said, she can evoke the pain of her own lived experience. “Broke (When I Realized)” recalls the dissolution of her parents’ marriage when she was a child. It’s devastating, as she recounts overhearing her father deliver the news and thinking it’s a bad dream, only to have a dawning awareness: “I’d yet to fall asleep.”

White can also express romantic longing with startling maturity. “Now I’ve chased your love ’cause I thought it might feel woolen/like a dram on a damn cold winter’s night,” she sings on Just Like Leaving’s title track. The line, oft-quoted by admiring writers and critics, would be at home on an early Joni Mitchell album.

The likening delights White. “That means a lot, she’s my favorite,” she said, adding, “we’re both from the Prairies.”

The characters in many of White’s songs are on the move, a state that often mirrors her life. At 19, she came to Boston after hearing about the city’s roots scene. “I kind of just took a leap of faith,” she said. Settling into a dorm-like, musician-filled dwelling called Brighton House, she gained a Berklee education by osmosis, auditing the music college’s American Roots class and jamming whenever she could.

Better still was hanging out with many others who were close to her in age. “I wasn’t really exposed to that growing up; I felt like I was always the youngest person at the jam,” White said. “I started to meet people through going to bluegrass festivals who went to Berklee…. I thought, how funny that there’s this mecca for old-time bluegrass and country music in Boston, of all places.”

She hung around New England long enough to make her first serious record — a studio recording done in her teens remains unreleased — at the urging of old home country friend Patrick M’Gonigle. The multi-instrumentalist, known for his time in the Lonely Heartstring Band, produced, and led her to Guilford Sound, a facility built into a southern Vermont hill.

Fortune smiled when they entered the studio just as lockdown began in mid-March 2020. “We were in this little box in the woods, kind of oblivious to what’s going on,” she said. “It created this really interesting dynamic … the best quarantine I could have ever asked for. Definitely some divine intervention or something.”

White then decamped to Nashville, keeping a home base there while touring a lot. She’s opened for Sierra Ferrell, Molly Tuttle and others, while becoming a steady presence on the festival scene. One day after her show at Portsmouth’s newly renovated Music Hall Lounge, she’ll be at the Green Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Manchester, Vermont.

Lately she’s been “kind of just quietly” staying in Victoria, British Columbia. “I’ve lived in Nashville kind of on and off for the past three years or so, but have been mostly in Victoria these days,” she said.

Ahead of a run that continues through mid-September, White released a new single. “The Way I Oughta Go” finds her voice with a Lydia Loveless edge as she rambles from city to city. It’s part of an upcoming album done with Jonathan Wilson, a producer who’s worked with Father John Misty, Billy Strings and White’s friend Erin Rae, among others.

A big fan of the country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, White sees herself evolving beyond her bluegrass roots into something a bit more raucous.

“In the fall, I plan on having some electric guitar and maybe some pedal steel coming into the mix,” she said. “There are so many other elements of country music that are not acoustic, that are electric … that’s a huge part of the history as well. It’s really fun to broaden your horizon and play with it all, you know?”

Bella White
When: Saturday, Aug. 20, 8 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $15 advance, $17 day of show, $25 premium seating at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Bella White. Photo Credit Morgan-Mason