Category: Nightlife

John McEuen traces a musical path

Along with his musical prowess, John McEuen could give a master class in networking. Fifty years ago he asked his new friend, bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, to work with his group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on what became Will The Circle Be Unbroken, a record that brought together American roots music’s leading lights.

McEuen used that promise to bring the equally iconic Doc Watson on board. “I told him, ‘We’re making an album with Earl Scruggs, and I want to know if you want to be part of it,’” he recalled by phone recently. “We weren’t making an album yet — he’d just said he would record with us.”

One by one, an all-star cast of bluegrass legends joined up.

Its success led to two follow-ups, one in 1989 featuring John Prine, Rosanne Cash, John Hiatt and other country-folk stars, and a third volume in 2002, which had Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson, the latter singing “Goodnight Irene” with Tom Petty.

The Willie and Tom duet came together when McEuen heard Petty recording in another studio and again chose to be bold.

“I walked in and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Petty, I’m John McEuen from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and I have one question: Have you ever wanted to sing with Willie Nelson?’ It took him off guard. He said, ‘Well, yeah, I wanna sing with Willie Nelson’ and I said, ‘We’re recording him down the hall.’ He came right then.”

There will be more stories like that when McEuen and his group The Circle Band appear March 18 at Manchester’s Rex Theatre. During the interview, he recalled getting a private serenade from Linda Ronstadt at her “When Will I Be Loved” session, capturing an early take of Gregg Allman’s “It’s Not My Cross To Bear” in a Los Angeles studio, and recording an 18-year-old Kenny Loggins in McEuen’s Laurel Canyon home, before Loggins joined Jim Messina.

A few years later, McEuen and bandmate John Hanna turned down Messina when he pitched him a tune; Hanna didn’t think it was a hit. “It’s a teeny-bopper song,” he recalled him saying. “Anybody can write, ‘Your mama don’t dance and your daddy don’t rock and roll.’ I called up Jimmy the next day and said no. He said, ‘That’s OK; Kenny and I decided to put that out together.’ Good decision, huh?”

The show commences with early hits like “Mr. Bojangles” — the Dirt Band was the first act to have a hit with that song — and winds through gems like “Voila, An American Dream” and “Long Hard Road (The Sharecropper’s Dream).” Along with McEuen are bassist (and Dirt Band cofounder) Les Thompson, and Nashville guitarist Danny Knicely.

The bulk of the evening is devoted to McEuen’s best-known project, a recording that so powerfully documented the many threads of American acoustic music that a copy of the 1972 triple disc could have been sent to the Library of Congress at the same time it shipped to record stores across the country.

It’s a multimedia show, much of it centered on that first Circle album.

“My brother Bill was manager of the group; he also produced the record, and he shot photographs, so behind us on a screen will be a projection of the studio sessions, with us in front, playing the music,” he said, adding, “it’s really exciting to see myself 50 years ago; it helps keep me young.”

There are occasional divergences, McEuen continued.

“We do things that aren’t reflected by what’s on the screen when we get into some other music,” he said, then began to muse. “This is a strange job; you travel all this time so you can go work for an hour and a half. Well, I try to make it … maybe two hours depending on the audience. I hear that this room is really nice and I’m looking forward to it.”

Asked what fans can expect from the evening, McEuen was expansive.

“People should come if they want to see a night of music that takes them to a pleasant space that exists from 1860 to 2018,” he said. “ I like to tell stories about what’s going on before and after the songs, and we have a good time. We play hot, fast, sweet, smooth and all that. I hope people come out to hear us.”

John McEuen & The Circle Band
When: Saturday, March 18, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 and up at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: John McEuen. Courtesy photo.

International guitar duo performs in Concord

The best guitar duos carry on a conversation with their instruments, but Nicola Cipriani and Brad Myrick engage in musical mind-melding, two sonic serpents swirling into a rope of notes. The Italian-born Cipriani and Concord native Myrick recall the similarly synchronistic Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, of the ’70s rock band Television.

Those two, though, had amplifiers. not to mention lyrics and a rhythm section. Cipriani and Myrick speak strictly through their fretboards — and they’re unplugged. On stage, they sit in angled chairs to play, with eyes moving fluidly between each other and an eavesdropping audience.

They also compose this way, a practice firmed up on the 2020 album Reflections. Released in the spring of that year, this fine effort disappeared in the pandemic’s fog. A canceled world tour was another costly problem, and even worse was the lockdown’s impact on their creative process.

“We tried to compose from a distance,” Myrick recalled in a recent joint interview with Cipriani. “For the kind of music that we do, it ended up being impossible…. We need to be in the room together, have the interplay, the visual connection. We just found that it wasn’t working out, so basically we were on pause for almost three years.”

Finally, the two have new a new album, Silver Lining, and are back on tour. They spoke during a pause on a Southern run that wrapped up in Asheville. It resumes with a show at Bank of NH Stage on March 5, and another the next day at UNH’s Paul Creative Arts Center. In April they’re in Italy, and they hope to book a few South American dates later in the year.

The cover of the new album is a monochrome Noemi Trazzi photo of Myrick and Cipriani facing each other in a terminal. This theme is explored in the opening track, “Ritrovarsi.” The Italian word translates to “find again,” and for Cipriani, the joyous, playful track has “a double meaning … to find ourselves again as artists and composers, and find each other.”

“Like reunite,” Myrick added.

With all the talk of Covid silver linings in the world of music like extra time to reflect and write, there weren’t many for the duo. That’s reflected on the new album. With titles like “Ode To Solitude” and “Remember To Breathe,” many of its songs came from “the experience that we had all been through,” Myrick said. “There was a lot of darkness in there, some tension, some melancholy.”

The seemingly ironic title was chosen, Myrick explained, because “we found that there was still so much good that we were able to pull out, even in this really challenging time — for me particularly.” That said, Silver Lining isn’t intentionally a pandemic album. “A lot of artists made those,” Cipriani said, while allowing that “it was a perfect photography of where we were at the time, actually.”

A suite in three stages, “Dragonfly Ritual” is one of the record’s celebratory moments. “I think that speaks to silver linings,” said Myrick, who wrote it as he watched the regal insects mating from his back window. “They’re attached as they’re flying, then they detach. I think they’re the only animal that does that; it’s this really incredible kind of ritual.”

Though a tonic, quiet contemplation doesn’t compare to the feeling Cipriani and Myrick had walking on stage and leaving with a standing ovation a few weeks ago at Coastal Carolina University, where they once recorded a live album.

“It was rewarding and it was inspiring,” Myrick said. “It is just totally propelling us forward. For me at least, and Nicola can tell me if this is true for him, it’s confirming that this is exactly what I should be doing artistically right now.”

“It is a huge privilege, what we are able to do…. I never get the sensation that I’m doing a kind of a normal job,” Cipriani agreed. “When we go to places like the university, and get the chance to meet a lot of people, especially young students that are really passionate and searching for their own artistic way, it’s so inspiring.”

One big benefit of live performance is it gives their instrumental music a narrative.

“We get to tell the stories and share the ideas behind it, so we can give people a little bit more information before they listen,” Myrick said. “Here’s what we were feeling, this is what sparked the idea; now maybe you have an idea in your head, and you can take it into a place, follow on the journey, and make it your own with us.”

Nicola Cipriani and Brad Myrick
When: Sunday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 44 S Main St., Concord
Tickets: $23.75 at ccanh.com
Also Monday, March 6, 8 p.m., Paul Creative Arts Center (Verrette Recital Hall), 30 Academic Way, Durham

Featured photo: Nicola Cipriani & Brad Myrick. Courtesy photo.

Teddy Thompson plays solo in Manchester

At the end of a benefit show in New Jersey last month, Richard Thompson invited his son Teddy onstage to perform with him. The elder Thompson is folk music royalty, while Teddy Thompson is a singer-songwriter who over two decades has dipped his toes in many musical ponds including country, pop and, on his 2020 LP Heartbreaker Please, Muscle Shoals soul.

The song they led off with that night, however, wasn’t one of those genres. Instead, they covered Eddie Cochran’s “Cut Across Shorty,” a rousing rave-up from rock ’n’ roll’s early days.

This suited Teddy Thompson perfectly. When he was twelve and his friends were hooked on MTV fare like Madonna, he was time traveling. “1955 to 1959 … that’s all I listened to,” he said by phone recently. “I thought, this is my first taste of what music is, and if it’s this good, I can’t wait to hear more. It turns out actually that’s as good as it got … everything I’ve heard since then has been a sort of slight letdown.”

He eventually learned to embrace artists of his own era like Culture Club and Crowded House. This was a reflection of what his mother, Linda Thompson, termed a “catholic” music taste that ran in his family. “It doesn’t matter where it comes from,” he said. “If you like it, you like it.”

For his own material, which he’ll perform solo at an upcoming show in Manchester, Thompson remains committed to just one thing, which in his telling is, well, everything.

“When it comes down to it, I’m really mostly enamored and focused on the song itself, hopefully something that is a strong suit,” he said. “I write the songs with just me and the guitar and then, depending on the album, sometimes it leans one way or the other.”

On Thompson’s latest project he collaborated with Jenni Muldaur, another child of a famous musician, to cover classic country duet partners. Three songs each from Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, they recorded it mostly to pass time during the pandemic, then put it out online. “We sort of half-ass released it,” he said.

“Our mutual friend David Mansfield, who is a real autodidactic and renaissance man, really put the whole thing together,” Thomson continued. “By the time we finished it, we sort of realized, ‘Oh, this should be a record.’ So we’re in the process now of getting a deal together to put it out … hopefully next year.”

Thompson’s worked with a lot of musicians over the years, both as musician and producer. His production began with his mother’s 2002 return Fashionably Late. Since then he’s helmed Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer’s haunting Not Dark Yet, three LPs from Dori Freeman, and Roseanne Reid’s 2019 Trails.

When asked what draws him behind the console, Thompson is a bit self-deprecating.

“I think it’s a little bit to do with not being very disciplined in my own writing and direction,” he said. “I’m not somebody who’s terribly focused and ambitious and has a real long-term view of what my career should be, when my next album should come out, all that stuff. So I think I’ve turned to collaborations in between things. When I don’t feel like I’m ready to make another record of my own, it’s a musical project to do in the meantime.”

This logic didn’t apply on 2014’s Family, a record Thompson conceived, produced and played on. He was joined by his mother and father, a once-acclaimed musical duo who divorced when he was young, his sister Kami, nephew Zak Hobbs, half-brother Jack Thompson, and a few other relations. The New York Times wrote brilliantly about the often fraught effort.

“Even if you’re not a musician, you can just imagine trying to do any kind of project with your entire family; there’s gonna be difficult moments,” he said. “There were a lot of emotions involved, mostly just for me. Because it was my idea, I was in charge, it was all on my head … it was pathetic in a way, as it really was enjoyable once it all came together.”

Heartbreaker Please was a breakup album, and Thompson thinks the best songs come from pain in relationships.

“That’s just what we feel the most and it’s the subject that everybody’s drawn to,” he said. “I guess some people are writing songs about other things but it’s tough for me to do anything really heartfelt when it’s not about the heart, if you see what I mean. I tend to write more songs about me and my woes, but it never seems boring or old to me … it’s endlessly interesting and fascinating and moving.”

Teddy Thompson
When: Saturday, Feb. 25, 8 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Teddy Thompson. Courtesy photo.

Hard work and tenacity define Jordan Quinn

Settling behind an electric keyboard to play covers for the dinner crowd at Fratello’s in Manchester on a frigid Saturday night, Jordan Quinn is logging a few more of the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in his book Outliers. Since mid-2021 the 23-year-old singer has done more than 300 gigs, and her calendar remains packed.

Most sets are like this one, with lots of soulful ballads — Whitney Houston is a favorite. She’ll make multiple tables look up and take notice when she hits the key change on her rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” Quinn also can make a song all her own. Her take on Al Green’s playful “Let’s Stay Together” is reinvented as a plaintive plea to a distancing lover.

Occasionally, like during a recent set with her band at Hennessy’s in Boston, Quinn will dip into a growing catalog of originals that started with the easygoing “Dream World” about a year ago. Her latest, “Can We Become Friends,” shows Quinn’s growing maturity as a songwriter. It’s a response to the war in Ukraine, but addresses problems closer to home.

Inspired by Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song,” it’s boosted by an angelic choir that’s almost entirely Quinn. “I was supposed to have a few buddies in the studio to do the choir part and everyone canceled on me,” she said in a phone interview. “So it’s actually 13 tracks of just my voice, with the exception of one, which is my bass player.”

Quinn released the video for the song early, spurred by a recent shooting outside a Manchester nightclub; the victim was a casual friend of hers. “To just see that some random person was able to take his life so easily, it just really affected me,” she said. “This needs to be done, the whole violence thing … life is precious.”

The title cut of her debut album in progress is about striving to become and belong. Quinn wrote “Somebody” while in Los Angeles preparing to meet with a potential manager.

“I’ve had a lot of hard times with self-confidence, figuring out the path that I want to be on,” she explained. “This was a reminder to myself that everything will work out — you’re where you’re supposed to be, things will get better. Then I was like, why not share this message with other people? Because I know I’m definitely not the only person that feels this way.”

Quinn penned a lot of songs on that West Coast trip. She found being in a place where so many performers are looking for a foothold very inspiring.

“I definitely liked being out there and seeing all the talent and everything; it motivated me to just push,” she said. “All these people are trying to be somebody … it doesn’t need to be the entire world, where everyone knows your name. Just one little thing to make a difference.”

Born in Manchester, Quinn relocated to Connecticut with her mother while in fourth grade. “This whole time, my dad still lived in New Hampshire,” she said. “I would do the trip twice a month to see him on the weekends.” After high school, she went to South Carolina for a year, then returned to move in with him and enroll in the theater program at UNH.

Her father encouraged his daughter’s creative urges, taking steps to help her find her way.

“My dad is the sole reason that it all happened,” she said. “He knew [local musician] Chad LaMarsh and kind of took it upon himself to see what would happen if he introduced us…. I’ve been on this path ever since.”

She eschews many modern artists, calling her singing range similar to Ariana Grande’s, but adding that she’s not a fan of her music. “I used her vocals as influence for mine,” Quinn said, but “instrumentally, I’m really into rock like Queen, and then Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. I try to incorporate their styles along with everyday pop.”

She’s sung “Somebody to Love” with tribute act Queen Flash on a few occasions, and will open for them later this year.

For now Quinn stays on her Gladwell path, night after night. “My goal is to continue to find myself,” she said. “Testing my abilities … seeing how far I can go. I don’t really have any career goals [beyond] improving who I am as an artist, and really seeing what I’m capable of.”

Jordan Quinn
Next show: Saturday, Feb. 18, 6 p.m.
Where: Homestead Restaurant & Tavern, 641 Daniel Webster Hwy., Merrimack
Full calendar: facebook.com/jordan.quinn.7106

Featured photo: Jordan Quinn. Courtesy photo.

Singer-songwriter kicks off concert series

A three-weekend original music concert series at a Hopkinton art gallery offers buoyant pop, jazz-infused Americana and bluegrass. It kicks off Feb. 11 with Ariel Strasser, a Boston by way of Minnesota singer, pianist and guitar player with influences ranging from Carole King to Rufus Wainwright. The Honey Bees — chanteuse Mary Fagan and guitarist Chris O’Neill — arrive the following Saturday, with the all-acoustic Hydro-Geo Trio closing things out Feb. 18.

With light refreshments and soothing ambience, the two-hour events are presented by Two Villages Art Gallery and NH Music Collective. Strasser is returning, having performed there last year.

“It’s a really warm and inviting space,” Strasser said by phone recently. “Acoustic music is well-suited to it, and they’re really great people. I’m excited to be back.”

Strasser has released two albums. 2013’s Crooked Line featured duets with fellow songwriter and mentor Chris Trapper. Motivation came out in 2018 and led to a pair of New England Music Awards nominations the following year. She’s assembling material for a third long-player. Among the new songs is “Small,” a gentle ballad about putting things in perspective.

“I’m not sure yet when that one’s going to land, but hopefully soon,” she said. “It’s about staying grounded and remembering that the little things you agonize over sometimes don’t have as much power as you believe that they do, and understanding that we’re really just a small piece of this large universe, and remembering that when we get bogged down.”

The singer-songwriter came to New England to study musical theater at the Boston Conservatory, now a part of Berklee College of Music. There she “found a love of songwriting and sort of latched onto that even more, but my theater roots definitely feed into my songwriting, in terms of lyrics and things like that.”

Her songwriting process varies. “Sometimes I’ll be inspired by something I see and the lyric will come from that and I’ll want to set it to music,” she said. “Other times I’ll be sitting with an instrument and the musical idea will come to me and I’ll find the gibberish that goes with it, then figure out what the song means later. It just depends on the inspiration.”

Along with performing, Strasser runs ArtsBridge, an organization that helps aspiring young performers find arts colleges. “I run programs for theater, voice, fashion students,” she said. “It’s a cool opportunity to work with high school kids who are really talented…. It’s definitely inspiring to see people at that stage of their life where they’re on the brink and excited about everything.”

The two-week summer camp has a job fair vibe. “They learn about the different programs and what works for them and also what different schools like to see,” she said. “They’re learning about the process through the eyes of these different college faculties…. It’s definitely a valuable experience for them.”

Performing, however, remains Strasser’s passion, and she’s excited about upcoming shows, both the solo Two Villages set and an in the round show with fellow songwriters Katie Dobbins and Audrey Drake at Hermit Woods Winery on Feb. 22, also organized by NH Music Collective.

“As an artist, I love so many different parts of being in this world, but I really love playing live,” she said. “I don’t know if that comes from theater or just me, but that’s definitely my favorite…. Solo shows that are real listening room type places are really fulfilling for me. I feel like you can see the songs land.”

Audience interaction, she continued, “is the one thing you can’t replace online. There’s so much we can do on the internet, but live shows … those you can only do one way and that’s to show up. So I hope to see some people out there, and I’ll just keep playing as much as I can.”

Ariel Strasser
When: Saturday, Feb. 11, 4 p.m.
Where: Two Villages Art Society, 846 Main St., Hopkinton
Tickets: Donations accepted at the door
More: arielstrasser.com and nhmusiccollective.com

Featured photo: Ariel Strasser. Courtesy photo.

Comic Cory Gee debuts at Headliners

When Cory Gee bounds onstage, he’s almost immediately mixing with the crowd. Learning who’s married, dating for the first time, celebrating a birthday. The rapid-fire back and forth helps the veteran comic size up the audience, but it’s not a call for conversation.

He’s setting up jokes, polished over time. Like the one about why asking a baby-faced cop how he caught him while riding a Big Wheel isn’t a good way to get out of a speeding ticket, or how single men shouldn’t plan bachelor parties, and the reason a VFW hall is a better venue for such gatherings than a strip bar.

Cory Gee really doesn’t want to hear about your day, but thanks anyway.

“In today’s TikTok era, crowd work is a necessary evil,” Gee said in a recent phone interview, noting that shutting down hecklers is a reliable way to get clicks. “I love to engage with the crowd, but what is frustrating for me as a comedian is when the crowd talks to me. Does that make sense?”

Sometimes, though, Gee’s high-wire act leads to comedy gold. “A perfect joke for me is the joke I never intended to do,” he said. Like when a random crowd remark sparks the memory of a long-unfinished bit. “You just start to work it, then it all starts to fall into place … and it’s like this moment. I was not meant to figure out that joke until just now.”

Gee will appear for the first time at Headliners in Manchester on Feb. 4. He’s talked for a while with promoter Rob Steen about playing there. “I pretty much know every headliner he uses on a regular basis, and they were all saying the same thing … ‘You’d do so well in New Hampshire, those crowds would really enjoy you.’ I’m really looking forward to it.”

He began doing comedy in 2002 at Comedy Connection in Providence, Rhode Island. The decision to become a standup was an evolution. He majored in theater in college, left early to find fame in Hollywood, but only got as far as his dad’s home in Georgia, where he got work in a professional theater company.

It didn’t last past a series of grueling rehearsals for Lips Together, Teeth Apart.

“I was just tired of saying other people’s words,” Gee explained. “In comedy, everything sits on you, all of the writing is you, all of the performing is you, every movement you make on stage is solely you, [and] knowing I was in complete control was probably the moment that I realized … this is what I want to be doing.”

It ended in 2013. His employer, a well-known nonprofit, gave him an ultimatum: jokes or a job. With two sons, Gee had little choice, so he quit, cold turkey. He didn’t write a bit, go to a show, or even think about comedy for five years. Then he got an offer at a new company. It was a lateral move; commuting costs actually reduced his take-home.

His wife had only one question. “She said, ‘Can you do comedy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, they told me they don’t care what I do.’ She was like, ‘We will figure out whatever financial impact this will have; you have to get back to comedy,’” he recalled.

He’s ever grateful for the boost. After shows, she helps him deconstruct and decompress. “I took it for granted the first time,” he said. “It has definitely added a wrinkle to our relationship from a support standpoint. Not that it wasn’t there before; I just I didn’t realize how important it was.”

Gee returns the favor by co-hosting a podcast with her. Ready, Set, Disney offers tips for visiting the theme parks. It helps that the manic stage prowler is already a big fan of Disney World. “If you’ve seen my act, you know I can’t stand still,” he said. “So the idea of a vacation in which I sit on a beach and just kinda throw my feet up would not work for me. When we go to Disney, I’m constantly moving.”

Cory Gee
When: Saturday, Feb. 4, 8:30 p.m.
Where: Headliners Comedy Club, 700 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at headlinersnh.com

Featured photo: Cory Gee. Courtesy photo.