Category: Nightlife

Low Lily unveils Angels in the Wreckage

On their latest album, Low Lily, the rootsy trio of married couple Liz Simmons and Flynn Cohen and fiddler Natalie Padilla, decided to be bold. Angels in the Wreckage runs an expansive 14 tracks and is full of forthright songs. An a capella anthem, “What’ll You Do” is punchy, political, ready-made for a protest march; “One Wild World” covers similar territory more tenderly. Neither song, however, shies away from their core beliefs.

“We feel a little bit more comfortable being ourselves and speaking our mind and just kind of putting it all out there, because we’re not in our 20s anymore,” Simmons said in a recent interview. “Making a 14-track album would have felt almost gratuitous when we were younger, but at this point, we just don’t care; we had a lot to say.”

The album is their first with Padilla, as former fiddler Lissa Schneckenburger departed last year. “Travel was really too much for her at this stage in her life; it was an amicable parting,” Simmons explained. In fact, Schneckenburger contributed four songs to the new LP, one a co-write with Simmons, and plays on the opening track, a cover of Shawn Colvin’s “Round of Blues.”

“It feels like she’s still kind of present in the music, in that back of the curtain way,” Simmons concluded.

Cohen met Padilla at a fiddle camp, run by Brian Wicklund, where they’d both taught for several years. Initially he thought she’d be a good accompanist for his solo gigs. “She had a lot of the same taste in multiple styles,” Simmons said. Faced with a lineup change, they realized “someone like her, with all this versatility, would be the best fit.”

Padilla was living in Montana when she joined the band, but she recently relocated to Northampton, Mass., a short drive from Cohen and Simmons’s home in Brattleboro, Vermont. “We were ready to continue to fly her out for every tour, but she actually decided of her own volition to move,” Simmons said. “Now she’s a local.”

Born into a musical family, Padilla is also a singer, songwriter and guitarist. All three talents are on display in her lilting ballad “Captivate Me,” one of the album’s best tracks. An ode to her medicine man great-grandfather, it includes a gorgeous three-part harmony, and lovely acoustic interplay between her, Cohen and multi-instrumentalist/producer Dirk Powell.

Powell mastered their 2018 album 10,000 Days Like These and was the right choice to produce this time around.

“Especially because Natalie brings some of that old-time fiddle, and Dirk is so familiar with that particular style,” Simmons said, adding, “in terms of the American roots music, him being such a kind of legend in that world, it seemed like such a natural pairing.”

Throughout the project, they worked virtually with Powell, emailing tracks to him in Louisiana. “He would pick up what we were putting down,” Simmons said. He played banjo, double bass, electric guitar and, on the superb “Lonely,” piano, triangle and button accordion. “He brings a little of that Bayou flavor, that Cajun sound, which I think works so nicely on that track.”

There are two Cohen instrumentals on the record. “Keep the Pachysandra Flying” is a full group romp. He performs solo on “Bastard Plantagenet Blues,” a tribute to his time with English guitar master Davey Graham early in his playing days.

“Flynn went to school in England in Devon for three years and had the amazing opportunity to study with him, he also even had an all-day lesson with Burt Jansch” — a gift, as it turned out, Simmons said. “Burt was like, ‘Oh, you don’t owe me anything.’ Rolling with those guys, they were just so nice. None of them are alive anymore, so he enjoys little tributes when he can to those folks.”

The record ends as it began, with a cover — Jethro Tull’s “Wond’ring Again.” Simmons considers the song apocalyptic, a reflection of the album’s overall mood. “That’s kind of where that Angels in The Wreckage title comes from,” she said. “I’m struck by how beauty and destruction can live side by side.”

For a CD release tour that stops at Concord’s Bank of New Hampshire Stage on April 28, Low Lily will perform as a five-piece, with a rhythm section of double bass player Hazel Royer and Stefan Amidon on drums. They will perform the new LP from start to finish.

“We’re really excited to go on the road and represent the album sound live in this fuller way,” Simmons said.

Low Lily CD Release Show w/ Green Heron
When: Friday, April 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $23.75 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Low Lily. Courtesy photo.

John Craigie and Langhorne Slim co-bill in Concord

Every John Craigie concert has two sides. His songs are sweet, lingering earworms, with lyricism that’s soothing, provocative and often hilarious. The latter trait is the other part of experiencing Craigie; his comedy talent has earned him comparisons to Mitch Hedberg, even though he’s a storyteller and Hedberg was an absurdist with a skill for the one-liner.

Both share a beat poet delivery. Marry that jazzy cadence to Arlo Guthrie’s breeziness and perhaps feed it an edible, and you’ll have a sense of why fans love Craigie, and the reason other musicians tend to find ways to work with him, such as Jack Johnson, Mary Chapin Carpenter and, most recently, Langhorne Slim.

The two met at last year’s Newport Folk Festival. Craigie played two sets that weekend. The second was a last-minute addition when another artist canceled their appearance. Billed as John Craigie & Friends, it consisted of Beatles songs. He’d just recorded Let It Be Lonely, the latest in a series of live Fab Four cover records; Revolver will be next.

Slim joined him for “I Dig a Pony,” and the two were quickly smitten. “We had mutual friends,” Craigie said by phone recently. “I’d never met him before, but we started talking and he agreed to do that one song with me, and it was really fun.” A short tour, stopping in Concord April 24, resulted.

“I’m really excited to have our crowds mix together and kind of bounce off each other,” Craigie continued. “He’s got a great stage presence, as you probably know. At the end of the night, we’ll do a handful of stuff together for sure…. I think the audiences really like that, because you get something that really makes the show unique.”

Layered with electric texture, Craigie’s studio albums are the opposite of his live shows. For example, “Microdose,” which leads off 2022’s Mermaid Salt, ends with a jazzy dreamscape of multiple guitars. That’s not happening when Craigie hits the stage. On tour, it’s typically just him and his instrument, which suits him fine.

“You’re still very free, and you can talk just as long as the crowd will have you, but when there’s four or five people, kinda twiddling their thumbs behind you, I’m not quite as relaxed,” he said, adding, “my audiences have never said to me, like, ‘Where’s the band?’ It seems to me that what they want is what I’ve been giving them.”

Born in Southern California, Craigie found his musical voice while attending UC Santa Cruz, a few hundred miles north. “L.A. felt very particular and precious; I didn’t feel very free to sit and play my guitar casually,” he said. In the laid-back beach town, “music felt like a much more natural thing … to sort of practice to an audience of people that was very nice, forgiving and pleasant.”

There’s a lot of religious skepticism in Craigie’s lyrics. “It’s a war of the gods … I never picked a side,” he sings at one point. “Is this the Rapture or just the first wave?” is his refrain on “Laurie Rolled Me A J,” one of the best depictions of lockdown neurosis to come out of the pandemic.

Some of this can be attributed to his attending parochial school in a milieu where “there was no way for them to shield us from anything,” he said. “A vague Christianity was how I like to call the way that the Catholics raised me.”

The ’90s milieu offered a weird melting pot of belief and non-belief systems, Craigie continued.

“Kids at that time were going through this born-again thing, so I was meeting hardcore Christians, getting that sort of window … meeting Mormons, people like that,” he said, “All that coming together gave me an understanding, while the society I was in was also heavily rejecting Christianity. I think it was a combination of all that stuff.”

Langhorne Slim & John Craigie
When: Monday, April 24, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $30.75 and $53.75 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: John Craigie. Photo by Keith Berson.

Nashua Center for the Arts welcomes Suzanne Vega

On her 2020 live album, An Evening of New York Songs and Stories, Suzanne Vega covers Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” and talks about how seeing him perform while she was in college changed her view of rock music. Vega was then a folkie, deep into Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. “To me, rock ’n’ roll was that thing that other people do,” she said in a recent phone interview.

Reed’s “blunt, graphic depictions” of New York life grabbed her. “I thought, wow, you can write about these things. When I first saw it, I found it repulsive; then I became fascinated. … I wanted to take it in so I could do it myself.”

On songs like “Tom’s Diner,” “Frank and Eva,” “New York is a Woman” and the poignant “Anniversary,” an ode to 9/11, Vega is a vital chronicler and erudite ambassador of her home city. On April 15 she’ll take the stage at the just-opened Nashua Center for the Arts, the second nationally touring act to play there. It’s also one of her first New Hampshire shows in a while.

The evening will also feature selections from Lover, Beloved, the film version of which premiered last year at South by Southwest. Written by Vega, the one-woman show began in 2011 as Carson McCullers Talks About Love. It’s a work in progress, she said. “In time, I’d love to see a transgender actor play her, especially in Act 1.”

Vega discovered the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café when a musical theater teacher assigned the task of dressing up and taking questions as someone in the arts who was no longer alive.

“I’d seen a photograph of Carson McCullers, and I thought to myself … I could probably play that woman, whoever she is,” she recalled. Then she read the Southern Gothic writer’s biography. “I loved her character, I loved the fact that she was this young woman in the 1940s with super-liberal politics and a precocious, freakish talent for writing. She was so fearless in her imagination; and I also loved that she drank and smoked like Hemingway.”

McCullers was also hopelessly drawn to the Big Apple, a topic Vega covers on “New York is My Destination” from Lover, Beloved. “New York is where I will be from,” she sings implacably. “New York is made for grander things / Just. Like. Me.”

Vega’s highest-charting hit is “Luka,” the second single from her 1987 album Solitude Standing. For years, she told anyone who asked that the story of an abused child came from her imagination, but 2021, Jay Lustig, a writer who was working on a series for The Museum of New York, approached her for an interview. Their initial conversation would lead to Vega declaring for the first time, “There was abuse in my family; I am actually Luka.”

She said Lustig approached his task as a historian, not a journalist. “He said, ‘I know your secret, and I know this because I watched the videos of your stepfather’s memorial, and I saw your sister’s speech. So I know that you’re an abused child.’ He just put it to me bluntly that way.”

Lustig offered her the choice of talking for publication with her abuse as the premise or walking away.

“I thought, OK, finally, I have someone who’s gonna force my hand,” she recalled. “There’s no point in saying my usual thing which is — I don’t lie, I say, ‘Yes, there was a boy, his name was Luka, he lived upstairs from me, he was not abused, but I’ve known children who were abused over the years.’ Since he’d presented it very thoughtfully and sensitively, I thought to myself, I don’t think I’ll ever get another chance like this to actually delve into it, and so that interview remains a very special moment in time.”

Surprisingly, response to her revelation was muted.

“I thought that this was a story that would go viral, everybody would be asking questions and carrying on. Almost nobody talks about it, it’s kind of stunning,” she said. “I did get letters from people who were abused as children, saying, ‘We already knew’” — though at most three people over the years had ever intimated they suspected.

“People close to me said, are you going to make a formal announcement? I thought, there’s no reason,” she continued. “I mean, that is the formal announcement. It’s not up to me to push it along, it’s there. If people want to talk about it, I’m into it. If they want to talk about other things, that’s fine too.”

Suzanne Vega – An Intimate Evening of Songs and Stories
When: Saturday, April 15, 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $49 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Suzanne Vega. Courtesy photo.

Snarky Puppy arrives at Capitol Center

Jazz fusion collective Snarky Puppy is hot on the heels of winning its fifth Grammy, for the double album Empire Central. Bass player and primary composer Michael League spoke with the Hippo by phone from Minnesota, as a tour that stops in Concord on April 12 kicked off. League discussed moving to Catalonia, Spain, in 2020, the nature of his ever-changing band and its influences, and what all that Grammy love really means.

What led the decision to relocate to Spain?

I was looking to focus more on production rather than playing live, and I had gone through a lot of drama with recording studios in New York; there was always an issue in the spaces I was in… I was just like, I want to have my own studio in my own house, where I can bring artists to me, a place that I enjoy living that’s calm and tranquil … half of my family is Greek, so I always felt really at home in the Mediterranean … it’s one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

Has the evolution of technology helped your creative process?

Everyone’s using technology, my bass plugs into an amp, that’s technology, but I wouldn’t say that we focus on being revolutionary or cutting edge with it. At the risk of sounding like an old kerfuffle, I think that we’re very analog. We’re very about getting in the room together and playing, and seeing what happens from the beginning … playing live is the essence of Snarky Puppy. Our thing is not making slick videos; we play music together, we’re like a family, and the chemistry between the members is what makes the music so special, I think.

What are your influences?

Oh my god, I listen to a lot of music, like everybody in the band does. I mean, I listen to a lot of music from different parts of the world, but I mean Snarky Puppy above all has been greatly influenced by Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, Steely Dan, yeah sure, Tower of Power, you know and Parliament; Jaco Pastorius. I feel like a lot of the groups that sit in the cracks of genres, they are our biggest influences.

How does Grammy validation matter to you?

What the awards have done is vastly improve our quality of life on the road. We get paid better, treated better, and there’s more respect, which means our touring life is more sustainable. It used to be really rough, very intense and very hard on our bodies and bank accounts… people may not say [it] because we’ve been nominated five times and we’ve won five times, but the nature of Snarky Puppy is being underdogs. We started when we were too jazz for rock and too rock for jazz, and no one would book us. Festivals hated us because we were too electric, and rock clubs didn’t like us because we weren’t rock enough, and we somehow figured out a way to make it work.

What are your thoughts on working with David Crosby, on his passing, and his legacy?

He was one of my closest friends … he was like family. He changed so much about how I think about music, and I’m very grateful to have been able to spend time with him in the last part of his life. He had a reputation for being a difficult person, and I wouldn’t say that’s untrue, but … I will say that I experienced that very little in the years that I knew him. He was nothing but beautiful to me and all of my friends and everyone in my community. Just one the most generous people with his time and his resources…. When people talk about him, they talk about relationships that were destroyed [and] the more outlandish stuff that happened in his life, but if you’re going to talk about that, you have to talk about how he was so full of joy and generosity, and above all, so full of wonder about music. He was like a little kid with music, he always used to say it was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. It was just beautiful. The main thing that I learned from him is that it doesn’t matter how old you are, or famous or rich, just music brings joy. You get rid of all the superficial stuff, and you can reduce it down as much as you like and the core of it is just joy, and he had that at 81 years old. He was still so juiced and excited about playing, recording and creating.

You have many side projects — when you go on stage for this show, are you basically sticking to Snarky Puppy?

What I love about having so many projects is when you enter into one of them, you’re going into an entire world of music, with its own rules and natural laws and all this kind of stuff. It’s beautiful, because it exposes all kinds of parts of your personality. Actually, I don’t even like the thought of playing one of the songs from one band with another band, it doesn’t inspire me at all. I love going out with Snarky Puppy and just being in Snarky Puppy land, and then going out with Bokanté and being in that world. It’s fun, it’s like putting on a new pair of pants.

Snarky Puppy
When: Wednesday, April 12, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35.25 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Snarky Puppy. Michael League is in the foreground, left. Courtesy photo.

Music and food benefit Ukraine

A charity focused on humanitarian aid for a war-besieged country is the beneficiary at an event that includes traditional food and a variety of music. Voices United For Ukraine began as a way for local musician Val Blachly to do something, even from a distance, to help.

“I thought a musical event would be a really nice way of going about raising money, so that’s how I got involved,” she said. “The country’s in need with what’s been going on and we really wanted to give back, and give to the people there.”

Hot Skillet Club will headline the show. They’re a newly formed trio that includes Blachly on upright bass and a pair of musicians she’s played with in other groups: guitarist Liza Constable, part of retro-swing group Swing A Cat, and Ellen Carlson, a fiddler she began working with in Sweet, Hot & Sassy, which had a 12-year run starting in the early 1990s.

A pair of Ukrainian accordion players will serenade during dinner, followed by Northern Lights, a vocal group organized by Concord musician Peggo Hodes. Acoustic quintet Wholly Rollers follows with old-time bluegrass and gospel, and what their website dubs “sea shanties and land shanties.” Folk singer Andriy Zharkov, another native of Ukraine, will perform between sets and speak about his journey of how he came to the United States.

After looking at some venues that didn’t fit the benefit’s modest budget, Blachly approached Concord’s Unitarian Church and found a perfect match. After a sit-down meeting, “I said, ‘this is my vision, I’d love to do something for the Ukraine, incorporate music and some people from there,’” she recalled. “They both looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is exactly what we want to do … we’ve been talking about doing something like this.’”

Ukrainian native and activist Natalia Karaulova connected Blachly to Sunflower Network, an organization that directs donations to where they’ll do the most good. Karaulova found out about them while visiting Ukraine a few months ago, after a chance meeting with an old high school friend who was working with them to bring aid to the ravaged country.

“Everybody’s trying to help each other, to help displaced people and the army, because they are fighting the fight and making sure that the rest of the country is safe,” Karaulova said from her home in Warner. “That’s how I learned about Sunflower Network, just having that personal connection.”

Asked about the dinner preceding the concert, she said, “If somebody asked me to describe Ukrainian cuisine, I’d say it’s very earthy. People still grow most of their food…. It’s very hearty.” The evening menu will include staples like borscht and cabbage wraps, along with dumplings and a special dessert.

For their set, Northern Lights will perform “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” and a Ukrainian folk song picked by Hodes with help from Karaulova. “She had Natalia assist her and the women in the group with pronouncing the lyrics,” Blachly explained. “This particular song was written by a Russian, so the pronunciation was a little different. Peggo called her in and said she really wanted to do it with a Ukrainian accent.”

Closing the show, Hot Skillet Club will draw from an array of selections. Their set will have throwbacks from the Boswell Sisters, a proto-swing vocal group at the center of Blachly and Constable’s band Honest Millie, along with Bob Wills and Asleep at the Wheel-flavored material delivered with a feminine touch.

“We’ve been listening to Swing Sisters and women that came into Western swing, the music that they came out singing, and picking up ideas,” Blachly said. “Ellen has that down on the violin, so it’s kind of a combination of the two.” They’ve also worked up a great version of Merle Haggard’s “Tonight The Bottle Let Me Down,” now up on Blachly’s Facebook page.

More recently, the trio started rehearsing gypsy jazz pioneer Django Reinhart’s song “Limehouse Blues.” The best part is the honey-sweet three-part harmonies that come easy for the old friends. “We’re all stepping up to the plate,” Blachly said.

Beyond the benefit show, there’s more on the way from Hot Skillet Club.

“It’s amazing that in the little time we’ve had together we have a fair amount of tunes,” Blachly said. “We’re so new we don’t even have our website up yet. And we already have 10 gigs.”

Voices United For Ukraine
When: Saturday, April 1, dinner at 5:30 p.m., concert 7:15 p.m.
Where: UU Church, 274 Pleasant St., Concord
Tickets: dinner $15, concert $20 per person (under 5 free)

Featured photo: Hot Skillet Club. Courtesy photo.

All-woman showcase at Shaskeen

An upcoming Saturday afternoon of music will be an eclectic gathering of four women, each with a unique voice. Rachel Berlin echoes Ladies of the Canyon-era Joni Mitchell, Bri Bell writes and records lush folk pop as a solo artist and plays in a hardcore metal band on the side, Savoir Faire offers noir jazz with a sharp lyrical edge, and Fatma Salem’s songs are raw, spare and full of life experience.

The four will meet for the first time when each does a half-hour set at Shaskeen Pub on March 25. The common thread bringing them together is the WMNH-FM local music program Granite State of Mind. Each has appeared there recently.

“I went in search of more female performers … as a winter task for myself and the show,” host Rob Azevedo said recently.

As to why he chose these four performers, he said, “I found Savoir Faire to be symphonic almost. Fatma was refreshing, endearing, quietly captivating. Bri sounds like street love to me and her delivery is striking. Rachel was instantly next-level in her command and presence, and her voice melts into each song.”

Salem works as a mental health counselor in the same building as WMNH. Azevedo first met her in the hall there, then learned she was a musician. Her music often reflects her work.

“To have the background of life experiences adds another layer,” Salem said on her GSOM appearance. “You can track my journey through my songs.”

Berlin only recently made her first song public, but it is full of promise, and she has many more in waiting. “Wandering One Ways” has a verse/refrain structure and alternate tuning resembles Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree,” which is no accident. “I really wanted to write a song that is inspired by her,” she said in a recent phone interview. “Her ability to stay on one emotion and just really dig into it, lay it out there … I really wanted to be able to do that.”

Though both her parents are music teachers, Berlin’s journey to the stage wasn’t a given. “I’m definitely not a natural-born performer,” the 20-year old said. She’s battled stage fright since her childhood piano recital days. But after polishing up her guitar skills during the pandemic, she decided it was mind over matter and started hitting open mics.

When Lamont Smooth, a band from her hometown of Concord, invited her to sing with them at their Bank of NH Stage show last year, Berlin nervously agreed. “I couldn’t eat before I went on,” she said, “but … I turned off my feelings and just got into the music.”

Her songwriting heroes inspired Berlin to become a lyricist. “Anytime I thought I had a good line, I would write it down, and then I would try to mold all those lines into something,” she said. “Now, because I started doing it, it’s just an impulse; I can’t not do it. It feels wrong to hold it all in.”

Conversely, Bri Bell is a veteran of the Manchester scene. She started playing in 2013 at the Central Ale House open jam, an experience she remembers warmly. “

If you put yourself in a circle of other people who are creative and have similar goals, you almost feed off each other,” Bell said by phone recently. “It became like a family. We taught each other things, played together and just grew up as musicians.”

That led to playing out in local bars, but that didn’t last long for Bell. “I definitely did the grind, which a lot of my fellow musicians, peers in this area do,” she said. “Playing any show you can get … playing covers. Unfortunately, it’s something that I personally don’t like.”

These days, she plays fewer but more satisfying gigs. “I like to be in an environment where I can be heard … appreciated, if that makes sense.”

Bell released the all-acoustic Depressive Times in 2022, later fleshing out those songs and a few others into two EPs, Fall and Winter. Both were made in her home studio and came out in the past few months. She cites Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Power and Massive Attack as influences. Her friend Monica Grasso, who plays bass in the Graniteers, had an interesting response to the records.

“She told me, ‘I could never play the kind of music that you do, but I need to hear it’ — I appreciate that compliment,” Bell recalled. “It is very depressing music, but that’s my process. It’s very vulnerable. My music will make you sad, but the goal is to relate in those emotions that we’re not alone.”

Rising Star Series: Savoir Faire, Fatma Salem, Bri Bell & Rachel Berlin
When: Saturday, March 25, 4 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
More: facebook.com/rob.azevedo

Featured photo: top left: Savoir Faire, top right: Fatma Salem, bottom left: Bri Bell and bottom right: Rachel Berlin. Courtesy photos.