Category: Nightlife

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

Greg Fitzsimmons brings his comedy to Manchester

It was inevitable that Greg Fitzsimmons would find his way into comedy. His father was a revered New York City radio host who knew guys like Henny Youngman and emceed Friars Club roasts. “It was sort of the family business…. It’s like when your father’s a doctor, you think, ‘OK, Dad did that, I could do it,’” Fitzsimmons said by phone recently.

That prediction has been borne out by a career lasting over 30 years. He’s won accolades for his writing skills, including four daytime Emmys working on the Ellen DeGeneres show, and his standup, which comes to Manchester for two shows on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13. However, Fitzsimmons’s first foray into comedy happened in Boston, not the Big Apple.

In the late ’80s, while attending BU, he tested the waters at places like Nick’s Comedy Stop, one among a rich crop of new comics.

“Joe Rogan and I started at the exact same time,” he said. “We spent a lot of time in cars together, going to gigs all over New England. Dane Cook, David Cross, Marc Maron, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Patrice O’Neal…. Those were all the guys that were around when I was coming up. It was just crazy that there was this much talent.”

One luxury they shared during that time was access, even if there were plenty of what Fitzsimmons termed “hell gigs … true saloon comedy where it was never assumed that the comedian was the funniest one in the room” — a hard but valuable proving ground. Today’s young comics are encountering a different terrain.

“It’s so competitive at the entry level, trying to get seen and get stage time,” Fitzsimmons said. “I was fortunate enough to make a living when I wasn’t even very funny just because there was a ton of rooms and they needed warm bodies. Because of that, I was able to log my 10,000 hours and get to a more proficient place.”

Fitzsimmons was one of the first comics to launch a podcast, in the mid-2000s. It grew out of a radio show Howard Stern gave him for his Howard 101 channel. “I would get these really great guests, like Bill Burr, Adam Carolla, Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, and then it would be over so fast,” he said. “So we’d continue with the same guest for another hour.”

The Fitzdog Radio podcast marks its 1,000th episode in a few weeks. Along with Ellen, he’s also written for HBO’s slice-of-standup-life series Crashing, The Man Show, Politically Incorrect and Lucky Louie. The latter was his favorite. “I just had so much respect for Louis [C.K.],” he said. “We started in Boston together, we’ve always lived in the same city, and we have kids that are the same age. We’d drive to work together and just talk about ideas … very organic, I didn’t have to imagine anything. We just had to tell stories from our life.”

An unconventional show with a dour disposition, Lucky Louie only lasted one season, though HBO ordered a second one that wasn’t made. “I think the show was aesthetically unappealing … done to look like The Honeymooners,” Fitzsimmons said. “With the drabness of the characters, it became something people [who] watch sitcoms weren’t used to. They wanted a bunch of people in a bright coffee shop.”

The comic’s onstage act doesn’t suffer similarly. Fitzsimmons is quick and instinctive, adept at crowd work and able to mine his own life for comedy gold. Lately, as he noted in a recent Fitzdog Radio episode, he’s hitting on all cylinders.

“I’m very funny right now; it goes in waves,” he said. As to why, “it’s all about being in the moment. … There are times where you’re caught up in your thoughts and second-guessing, trying too hard, worrying about whatever you’re doing wrong. Then there are times you just get in the pocket … it’s money. Even the same jokes you’ve been doing for a long time have new life in them for some reason.”

If it sounds easy, it’s not, he continued, offering advice to aspirants: “Comedy is a game of inches; each joke lives and dies on a turn of a phrase, losing a word or adding a little tag line,” he said. It starts with finding a voice. “Some people are storytellers and it doesn’t hinge on the words as much. But life for most comics really is about rolling up your sleeves, really honing the material. Because people are seeing a lot of comedy; they know the difference. They can feel it when somebody has put in the work.”

Greg Fitzsimmons
When: Friday, Aug. 12, 8:30 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 13, 9 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 707 Huse Road, Manchester
Tickets: $30 at chunkys.com

Featured photo: Greg Fitzsimmons. Courtesy photo.

Off With Their Heads unplugged, and comedy

Music and standup comedy have intersected since Midge Maisel opened for Shy Baldwin — OK, that’s fiction, but Steve Martin was the lead-in for Toto back in the ’70s, and Richard Belzer once did the same for Warren Zevon. Ben Roy uniquely embodies this junction; he’s a comic, who co-wrote and starred in TruTV’s Those Who Can’t, and a singer in a band. He’s also a veteran of J.T. Habersaat’s annual punk-spirited Altercation Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas.

Roy has opened for Minnesota punk rockers Off With Their Heads both as a comic and as a musician. For a show that’s part of a stripped down OWTH tour Friday, Aug. 12, at Manchester’s Shaskeen Pub, he’ll only be telling jokes. He’s joined by local favorite Jay Chanoine and host Eric Hurst for the laughter portion of the evening. That’s followed by music from Nick Ferrero of the Graniteers and Seth Anderson.

Two-thirds of Off With Their Heads, singer-guitarist Ryan Young and drummer Kyle Manning, will close things out.

The duo tour was inspired by Character, an album released mid-lockdown containing reworked versions of favorite songs from the band’s catalog. Adding comedy to the Shaskeen show was Roy’s idea. A native New Englander who relocated to Denver in 1999, he saw an opportunity for a family visit, and a chance to again work with one of his favorite acts.

Both Roy and Chanoine are keen on the idea of blending unplugged punk rock with comedy.

“It actually lends itself super well to stand-up, just because of that more stripped-down vibe,” Roy said in a recent phone interview. “Ryan is a really good songwriter and people love to sing along…. There’s a lot of catharsis to their special brand of misery.”

Starting with jokes and closing with bands makes sense. “It’s harder to go back once you’re in music mode. It’s a different energy,” Roy said. Also, Young and Manning are happy with the arrangement. “They’re all big comedy nerds [and] I know they like that they get to sit and listen and watch.”

Roy recorded his third album of comedy, Take The Sandwich, at the end of 2020, releasing it early last year. It has some great bits about Covid-19, like how the best intentions to eat healthy in lockdown were derailed when his grocery store ran out of quinoa, replaced by mac & cheese and “those shiny Hawaiian buns that are sweet and buttery all at the same time.”

However, his Shaskeen set will draw from non-pandemic material Roy plans to use in an upcoming one-hour special.

“What really frustrates me is this plunge into anti-intellectualism, our continued backslide as a culture into being proud of being inconsiderate or ignorant,” he said, teasing one of the subjects he’ll cover. “It’s super f-in’ annoying [and] it’s created a division in music, especially in punk rock. This feeling you shouldn’t do things to protect other people simply because you’re told to [since] we’re anti-establishment.”

He holds special ire for bad television, particularly the show Is It Cake? “One of the dumbest ideas … of all time,” he said. “Most of the world is struggling to put food in their mouths and we’re using that food to build objects and decide whether they’re food or not. It’s just it’s a slap in the face to the rest of the planet as we careen into an environmental catastrophe.”

The set will be Roy’s second at the Shaskeen; he headlined the regular midweek comedy night in 2021.

“That was my first time and I loved it,” he said. “Everybody was super rad; the comics were all really funny. Growing up, we used to come down to Manchester if there was a show there. I lived in New Hampshire for half the time I was in New England, so it was a little bit of a homecoming to come back as well.”

During the three years that Those Who Can’t ran, Roy lived and worked in Los Angeles. He left with mostly positive feelings about the city.

“It’s a strange place that has the rare distinction of not being nearly as good or as bad as everybody describes it,” he said. “It’s like demonized by so many people as being terrible and it’s not; it’s filled with really awesome people and amazing food and culture. But then there are people who make it out to be ‘Cali! It’s amazing!’ It’s also not that … but I actually liked Los Angeles. It’s alive, and in a weird way that a lot of other places aren’t. I miss a lot of the diversity.”

Off With Their Heads feat. Seth Anderson w/ Ben Roy, Jay Chanoine
When: Friday, Aug. 12, 8 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Ben Roy. Courtesy photo.

On his latest, Albert Cummings shifts gears

Though firmly rooted in New England, Albert Cummings has an affinity for the South. He made his 2003 breakthrough album, From the Heart, in Austin, Texas, backed by Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. His longtime producer Jim Gaines is a Memphis native, and with him, 2019’s Believe was recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Cummings’ latest, Ten, was done in Nashville, a city he admits is probably the only one that might pry him from his home in Williamstown, Mass. “I don’t have any plans on leaving,” he said on his way to a tour stop in Reading, Pennsylvania. “But if I do, I’d go there. I love the whole area. You’re in the music world, that’s a pretty good place to go and hang out.”

For Ten, Cummings immersed himself in the spirit of Music City. He worked with producer Chuck Ainlay, whose credits include a who’s who of country royalty, from Conway Twitty and George Strait to Dolly Parton and Miranda Lambert. For a guitarist who once had plans to play bluegrass before shifting to blues, it was a dream come true.

“Oh man, it was such a great experience,” Cummings said. “Chuck is just an amazing guy. He jokes around and says, ‘Well, I’m pretty good at turning knobs,’ but he’s a master of orchestrating everything … to work with him was an honor, and to watch him was just amazing.”

For the project, Ainlay recruited “all the first-call players down there, just the best musicians I’ve ever seen,” Cummings said. If that weren’t enough, Vince Gill was enticed to sing harmony on “Last Call,” a country rocker about a long night of drinking that’s one of the disc’s highlights.

“It’s a pinch-me moment, you know what I mean? Vince Gill, talk about an idol,” Cummings said. “It’s just lightning; how does that happen? I really don’t have any words to describe it … an amazing experience, a beautiful human being.”

Cummings says he dug deep for the songs on his most country-flavored record ever. “What I wanted to do was be honest with what was in my head,” he said.

Not every tune was new. “Beautiful Bride” was the first song Cummings ever sang in front of an audience, in 1989. He’d done a spare version for From the Heart, but “I always wanted to have kind of a little bit bigger sound, a different flavor,” he said. “Give it a little boost … I knew once I was in Nashville I had to put that on the record.”

“Sounds Like the Road” is a solid blues rocker inspired by a hotel lobby encounter with fellow guitarist Robben Ford — “I was checking in, he was checking out,” Cummings explained. It was during a period when he split time between working construction and performing, a late-blooming musician who hadn’t begun to play in public until age 27.

When Ford asked Cummings what he was up to, “I told him, ‘I’m just trying to get things squared away, go out and play.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah? Where are you playing?’ I said, ‘We’re going here, we’re going there, and then we’re flying here.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Sounds like the road to me.’ I was like, ‘Bam, that’s a song.’ I knew it right then.”

Many years and tours later, “it just feels so good to be back playing,” Cummings said, particularly after Covid cut a swath through his livelihood; he released Believe just as the world shut down. “It never had a life; it died before it ever got the chance to even get out.”

He’s buoyed by a new release that’s exciting fans, even drawing new ones.

“I think this record has really brought me a lot of attention, because crowds are way bigger than they used to be,” he said. “I have a feeling that people are just loving to get back out; couple of years away from music made them realize how much they miss it … I really do love it, no matter how hard the road is.”

Finally, though much of the buzz around Ten is it’s “Cummings Goes Country,” the fiery-fingered guitarist who’s shared stages with B.B. King and Johnny Winter and worked with Nashville’s A-Team isn’t tucking himself into any genre. He has opined that the difference between blues and country is beverages — one’s whiskey, the other’s beer. He still feels that way.

“I told that to Vince Gill,” he recalled. “He said, ‘That’s a great analogy — the same three chords, just a different cocktail.’”

Albert Cummings
When: Thursday, July 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $30 at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Albert Cummings. Courtesy photo.