Category: Nightlife

Rocking up a staid stringed instrument

According to common wisdom, one way to deal with stage fright is to imagine the audience is naked. But what if they’re in the buff already? That’s what cellist Rebecca Roudman and her bandmates in Dirty Cello were thinking when they played at a nudist resort a few years back.

The Northern California quartet has toured the world with a revved-up brand of rock, blues and bluegrass that’s driven by Roudman’s cellist talents. Songs like “Dream On” by Aerosmith and AC/DC’s “Long Way to the Top” are transformed into grassified booty-shakers, and their originals are also stellar.

Luckily for the naked crowd that day, Roudman was the opposite of shy, as she worked her carbon fiber cello like Hendrix on a Strat. Nonetheless, guitarist Jason Eckl, who’s also Roudman’s husband, recalled in a recent Zoom interview with the couple that the gig was still a bit distracting.

“We’re playing our groovy music and people are dancing, which is funny,” he said. “Then all of a sudden without thinking about it I call out a very fast bluegrass song, and the dancing just kicks into high gear. The hula hoops are coming out, and Rebecca’s giggling through the whole thing.”

The gig was one of the few available during the social distancing days of the pandemic, but it put Dirty Cello on a special speed-dial list.

“We keep getting hired to go play at naked people places,” Eckl said. “But we always like to say we keep our clothes on.”

Roudman had a lifetime playing classical music in symphony orchestras when she decided to push the cello’s boundaries.

“I wanted to let my hair down, do something else,” she said. “I’d started performing with a blues band, and one day they asked me to solo and improvise on the blues. I didn’t know how, and I realized this is a skill that I wanted to learn.”

While her cello-playing stays front and center, Roudman has a powerful voice, one reason why Dirty Cello convincingly rocks songs like Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” But she never planned on being a singer, and deflected a compliment that compared her vocal style to Heart’s Ann Wilson.

“I always consider myself just a cellist but thank you very much,” she said, explaining that the band hired a singer or two, but none of them could keep up. “Jason encouraged me. He said, ‘Look, you can sing, you should sing with the band.’ I was very stubborn, but after a while I was like, ‘OK, well I guess I’ve got to do it.’ … Now I’m very comfortable.”

Beginning with the 2018 release By Request, Dirty Cello has made five albums; the latest, By the Seat of Our Pants, came out in late February. Cello-fied covers include a version of “Sympathy for the Devil” with a female Lucifer, Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine,” and “Run Through the Jungle,” a Creedence Clearwater Revival deep cut.

They balance the record out nicely with solid songs of their own. Despite its title, “Go Slow” moves along at a heady clip, while “Feelin’ Frisky in Frisco” is a nod to the band’s home base. “Further Down the Road” closes out the album. A blues rocker that also ends many of their shows, it’s a barn-burner.

Though cellists like Rushan Eggleston and Ben Sollee have redefined the instrument in the recent past, Roudman didn’t look to them for cues when pivoting from classical to more raucous, rousing music. “I wanted to be completely different,” she said.

With Dirty Cello, Roudman decided to “focus more on rock and blues, and maybe throw in some bluegrass and Americana … be the Swiss Army knife of cello-playing. So when people come to our shows, they’re going to hear a whole bunch of stuff reimagined on the cello. We wanted to stand out and be unique, and it’s been working for us.”

Dirty Cello
When: Sunday, March 29, at 3 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $34 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Dirty Cello. Courtesy photo.

James Fernando Trio swings into Concord

Piano player James Fernando believes improvisational jazz is a conversation between musicians that begins before the first note is played. Parameters are established, relationships understood. It’s similar to two friends meeting for coffee — there’s no agenda, but they both know their talk will be more genial than a chat about the financial markets.

“I think improvisation is misunderstood, largely by people who aren’t really in the jazz world,” Fernando said in a recent phone interview. “They think there’s nothing to it because they’re just making it up as they go along, and that’s true, to an extent … but you know who you’re talking to.”

Chord changes, an established tempo and a song’s key are among the elements that provide a jumping-off point, he continued.

“The melody that we played before we begin the improvisation is the same, and all of these contextual elements make it so you’re not just starting from absolutely nothing,” he said. “There’s a lot of information surrounding it, and that makes your decision-making a little bit easier.”

Even so, one of Fernando’s most memorable shows was performed with musicians that he barely knew.

For years the pianist had wanted to start a dedicated jazz trio. Many of his favorite pianists had led their own trios, and the piano-bass-drums format is an enduring configuration in jazz. Though he’d performed with trios many times, he’d never built one of his own.

The chance came in late 2023, with an invitation to play at the Kennedy Center.

“I was asked on very short notice,” he said. “I think some Irish band had their head person get Covid or something like that … obviously, very unfortunate for them, but it was a nice opportunity for us.”

Though long based in Washington, D.C., Fernando had relocated to Philadelphia when he got the call. So he decided to kickstart the project with musicians from his new hometown.

“I called some strangers, really,” he said. “I even met the drummer on stage at the Kennedy Center that same evening.”

The show was a solid success.

“We got a nice recording and video of us at the Kennedy Center, which was very useful in booking more shows,” he said. “I was able to leverage those videos into more performances, and it went so well that I kept working with the same guys … and the rest is history.”

Earlier this year, the trio released Philly 3. Their first album together consists of eight Fernando compositions and a cover of Erroll Garner, one of his key influences.

“I composed with this band in mind, playing to their strengths,” he said, “We performed and rehearsed and kind of developed the music through live performances.”

The disc reflects Fernando’s desire to make music that’s both sophisticated and swinging, playful yet meticulous. He’s aiming for a sound that, as he told an interviewer a while back, “couldn’t have been written by just anyone with a jazz degree, and certainly not by an algorithm.”

On March 21, the James Fernando Trio will perform a fundraiser for Concord Community Music School. It’s his second visit — he did a set at the Bach’s Lunch series last April. The school, he said, “is a well-rounded beacon for music [that’s] very clearly open to people coming and expressing themselves and learning the ways that they’re most passionate about.”

In addition to performing, Fernando has taught classes for several years at D.C.-based Levine Music. He’s a frequent guest instructor, recently hosting a workshop at an Arizona high school, and he’s at UNC Pembroke for a similar event ahead of his stop in New Hampshire.

“So I’ve gotten the chance to see a lot of different programs and see the energy around the schools and whatnot,” he said. “And Concord Community Music School seems absolutely lovely.”

CCMS Jazz Night Fundraiser w/ James Fernando Trio
When: Saturday, March 21, 5:30 p.m.
Where: Concord Community Music School Recital Hall, 23 Wall St., Concord
Tickets: $80 and up includes reception, call 228-1196

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Nebraska singer-songwriter performs area show

When the time comes for career growth, most musicians from small towns move to an industry hub like Nashville or L.A., but Andrea von Kampen, who plays March 14 at The Word Barn, hardly considered it. And while she had a label deal for a while, she’s more than content to now be back in the ranks of the independents.

Born and raised in Nebraska, von Kampen makes music that is lyrically sharp, sonically ethereal, and informed by place. The latter, she believes, isn’t intentional.

“I only feel the difference when I’m with people from the major cities,” she said in a recent phone interview. “In my day-to-day, I don’t feel like it’s influencing me at all.”

The internet is one reason she stays in the heartland.

“I started to make music in the era of Spotify, so it all felt very globalized,” she said. “I was making a pretty good livelihood before I even talked to a label, and I was able to connect with artists from all over the world digitally. So it never even really occurred to me that I’d have to move.”

Family is another, perhaps more important factor.

“My brother’s a composer; he’s a huge influence on the process of our records, and he’s got a great recording setup,” she said. “So … I can make records here, I can put them out, they can be listened to by people all over the world, and I can make an income.”

Her voice has been called “soulful and worn in,” with a hymn-like quality that can be traced to her German Lutheran roots. At times, it sounds effortless. “Singing is like breathing,” she said in a 2024 interview. “I think about my voice like a wind instrument. I’m breathing through it and creating sound and I don’t want anything to obstruct the pure sound coming out.”

Hearing Paul Simon’s album Hearts and Bones at 9 years old left an indelible impression on von Kampen; she often plays the title track in concert. Later, her influences included Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James and other jazz singers: “In high school, I really got into Laura Marling and now it’s a whole bunch of different people in my genre.”

Current artists she enjoys include singer Rita Payés. “I absolutely love bossa nova kind of quiet Spanish guitar settings,” she said, and she also approves of the NFL’s Super Bowl halftime entertainment. “I’m obsessed with what Bad Bunny is doing … I think my inspiration now is very wide and broad.”

The three-song EP Before I Buy a Gun is von Kampen’s latest release, an agonized response to the last election. The title song closing out the record has a sense of hope, though. “I will find a better way,” she sings. “Before I buy a gun, I’ll get to know my neighbor; it’s a fragile thread that holds us all fraying at the seams.”

A gathering feeling of powerlessness compelled her to begin writing songs in the cold Nebraska winter.

“I sort of did the only thing I could do, which was make music,” she explained. “That can feel sort of silly at times, but it’s easy to think you’re not making a difference unless you’re really doing something.”

Sister Moon, her last full-length album, was released in March 2024. Inspired by Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, it’s a meditation on the environment. “It’s all about trees, deforestation and humans’ impact on the earth,” she said, “and this big time crunch we have to get this figured out in some sort of way or it’s going to be too late.”

At her Word Barn concert, von Kampen will perform with her trio, which includes Jessican Hanson, a violinist influenced by Andrew Bird and Kishi Bashi. “She’s been touring with me forever,” she said. Jonah Bennet, an upright bass player who’s appeared on several of her recordings, rounds out the group.

Following that, she’ll fly to the U.K. for her first headlining tour there, then return to write songs inspired by This Blessed Earth, Ted Genoways’ book about living on a family farm.

“I’d like to do a concept album into a stage production, but I know that’s a very long process,” she said. “That’ll be the next big project that I dive into, I think.”

Andrea von Kampen
When: Saturday, March 14, 7 p.m.
Where: The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter
Tickets: $25 at thewordbarn.com

Featured photo: Andrea von Kampen. Courtesy photo.

Three standups bring the funny to Barley House

There are laughs aplenty this weekend at a Concord restaurant/bar, as the Headliners franchise brings three comics to its downstairs function room: Jody Sloane, Dave Decker and Mystaru. Comedy shows are a bimonthly staple these days at The Barley House, across from the Statehouse on North Main Street.

Sloane’s entry into comedy began when she enlisted in the Coast Guard mistakenly believing it had amphibious vehicles. Upon discharge, she got a job as a Duck Tour driver in Boston. Tourists loved her humorous banter, and urged her to try standup. Though her first set was wrecked by a few of her Southie pals who were drunk, it’s been a great run since.

Decker is a 17-year veteran of the New England comedy scene and also performs in New York City clubs. He’s known for bringing “a distinct point of view to the stage in a way that both engages and charms audiences” and is a Headliners regular.

Mystaru is the performing name of Hampton comic Shawn Ruiz. It started as his rap name — he did that for a decade or so starting in the early 1990s. He’s also an actor who’s appeared on the true crime series Fatal Family Feuds a dozen times and is cast for a similar upcoming show on Oxygen TV called Accident, Suicide or Murder?

Comedy is a newer development for Mystaru — though he always wanted to do it.

“I wasn’t going to try to be a rapper in my forties, so I needed a way to get back on stage,” he said by phone recently. “I figured I’d start writing.” So he enrolled in Tony V’s 24-week standup comedy course at Boston’s Laugh University.

The school boasts that it can get a five-minute set from almost anyone, but Tony V kept it real in the classroom.

“You can come here every day for the rest of your life, but I can’t make you funny,” Mystaru recalled him saying. “I can make you write better jokes and teach you what you’re supposed to do on stage, but once you’re up there it’s up to you.”

An initial class of 165 winnowed down to three still doing comedy three years later, among them Mystaru. Since then his success has grown to include a couple of appearances at Jim McCue’s Boston Comedy Festival, where both times he was chosen from more than 700 comic hopefuls.

He admires comics like Brian Regan and Jim Gaffigan. Like both, he works clean, and quite well. There’s a TikTok reel of him entertaining a church audience that’s worth checking out. The skill makes him a good Headliners fit, where shows can happen just about anywhere there’s a stage, in front of widely varied audiences.

That includes campgrounds. Mystaru remembers the first time he performed at one, a year or two ago. His good friend and fellow comic Matt Barry was there to watch.

“He went and got a beer because he’s like, ‘This is gonna be a spectacle,’” he recalled. “He was 100 percent right.”

He performed on a pavilion to 50 mostly empty chairs.

“For about 12 people under 16 whose parents just made them get out of the pool or off the beach,” he said. “The parents all sat along the outside, drinking in their golf carts. So I’m performing to 48 empty seats and a bunch of 12-year-olds that want to go back in the pool.”

The experience was among those that made him stop fearing playing to large audiences.

“You’re thinking that you don’t want to bomb in front of a big crowd, then as you get better you realize it’s really tough to do good in front of a small crowd,” he said. “When I can get 15 or 20 people to laugh in an 80-seat room, that’s the test.”

Comedy With Jody Sloane, Dave Decker and Mystaru
When: Saturday, March 7, at 7 p.m.
Where: The Barley House, 132 N. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Mystaru. Courtesy photo.

Pointless Culture performs local showcase

The upcoming “Locally Sourced” show at Concord’s BNH Stage is a two-band affair. Granite Staters Pointless Culture draw from a range of influences for a sound that’s equally raucous, angsty and melodic. From Billerica, Cosmic Triumph brings full-throttled abandon to their energetic original songs.

The two groups have a history of helping each other out, Pointless Culture band members said in a recent Zoom interview. “Anytime they have a big show going on down there, they always call us,” guitarist Harrison Fantasia said. “So we make sure to call them. They go good with us, like cheese and wine.”

“We’ve played with them quite a bit,” drummer Harrison Hinman agreed. “So it was kind of a no-brainer to ask them.”

Yes, the two share a first name.

It’s something they bonded over the day Hinman walked into an Upper Valley guitar shop to buy drumsticks a few years back. Fantasia, who worked there, was strumming a tune he wrote and asked Hinman to check it out.

“You didn’t even introduce yourself, right?” Hinman said to Fantasia in the interview, who nodded in assent. “Eventually, we did. He said, ‘My name’s Harrison,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, my name’s Harrison. How can I help you?’ We didn’t know what to say. We’re like, ‘Wow, two Harrisons.’ That took us as a surprise. He played the song, and I loved it.”

The two ended up practicing together after hours in the shop — until Fantasia quit. “I’m a carpenter,” he said. “I tried working at a guitar shop and I didn’t like it, but I met this guy through it.” Sadly, they wouldn’t connect again for another two years, when he asked Hinman to support him at a festival in Acworth.

The gig went very well, as did a few jams after. In 2022 the two decided to get serious.

“We’re like, ‘We gotta make a band; I can’t believe we let that slip for two years,’” Hinman recalled. “I’d thought he didn’t like me anymore, but it’s funny — we just realized that we’re both really bad at texting people back.”

Fantasia “begged” childhood friend Ben Schultz to be lead guitarist, but it took some time for their schedules to line up.

“I couldn’t practice because I was always working at like seven o’clock at night,” Schultz said. Eventually he got a first-shift job and was able to join the band.

Guitarist Nolan Cota had played with Hinman in a “couple of failed metal bands” and really wanted to join his new one.

“I could tell he was jealous of what I was doing, and I felt bad,” Hinman said, but the multi-instrumentalist was undeterred. “Nolan was like, ‘You guys need a bass player?’”

Their first single, “Severed Ties,” came at the end of 2022, followed by “Breakfast Song,” a quirky ode to morning meal proclivities that helped raise their profile. Both were on Can’t Stand the Rain, an EP released in December 2023. Preceded by a few singles, the debut LP Better Off Dead came last summer, including the song Fantasia played in the store that day.

It’s hard to pin down Pointless Culture’s music. The playful “Little House,” from the new album, is sweet and brims with innocence, while “Warning Signs” rocks harder and comes off a bit darker, with a grungy angst, and the new “Squirrel Food” is, Fantasia said, “written from the point of view of an acorn.” Yes, the band delights in being a moving target.

“One of the biggest compliments I get at the end of the shows is people can’t compare us to anybody, and they really like what we’re doing,” Fantasia said. “It’s like classic punk and rock, but then we play a little bit of bluegrass. We play a little bit of everything. We just want to see people out having fun … come have fun with us.”

Pointless Culture w/ Cosmic Triumph
When: Friday, Feb. 27, 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Pointless Culture. Courtesy photo.

Get the Led Out comes to Concord

Paul Hammond has an extra ticket for Led Zeppelin’s reunion show. The caveat is that anyone looking to claim it will have to time travel. Hammond plays lead guitar in Get the Led Out, a band that outflanks other tribute acts via exacting attention to detail. One of his more memorable Zep moments, however, was as a spectator. It was a rock ’n’ roll fantasy come true.

It’s no stretch to say Zep’s one-off 2007 concert was the hardest ticket ever; 20 million fans entered a worldwide lottery to purchase a mere 18,000 seats. Hammond, however, knew someone connected to a charity run by Jimmy Page’s wife at the time, who got him in, and then some.

Prior to the show, he watched soundcheck with Queen guitarist Brian May for company, and the two enjoyed the concert from the VIP section. Also, and what explains the wayback machine requirement, Hammond had access to six additional tickets. Sadly, he couldn’t find anyone able to quickly jet to London and use them.

“I was with the top of the top rock stars, the inner circle of rock royalty,” Hammond said in a recent phone interview. He may perform the music of the gods, and convincingly, but he enjoyed the perks of one that night. “In the A100 section, with Brian May, and then three rows down in front of me was Ronnie Wood and Jeff Beck.”

Hammond also met Page backstage that night. He had another Zep-adjacent moment, courtesy of the band he co-formed in 2003 with singer Paul Sinclair, with a mission to perform note for note songs from the iconic band’s studio recordings. It came as GTLO was preparing to go on stage at Portsmouth’s Music Hall a few years back.

After a phone call, the show’s promoter informed him she’d been speaking to Robert Plant. “He asked her, ‘What band is playing tonight?’ and she said, ‘It’s Get the Led Out,’ and he says, ‘Oh, Get the Led Out, that’s a great band,’” he recalled. “He knows us! Our sound man told us he’d come to our show in Nashville.”

GTLO delivers a concert experience that’s currently rivaled only by Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening. The son of the late Zep drummer was also behind the kit in 2007 at O2 Arena. They play the iconic band’s entire catalog, almost. A few songs just don’t translate well to their arena rock show.

“Like, ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’ from Led Zeppelin III is a bizarre song with the effects, and doesn’t have a lot of crowd appeal,” Hammond said. “‘Carouselambra’ from In Through the Out Door is essentially a John Paul Jones experimental record. I don’t know what Jimmy Page was up to then, maybe hanging out in the pub … but it’s a long and a weary song.”

The good news is GTLO plays everything else in their two-and-a-half-hour show, even Zeppelin’s lone B-side, “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do.” To call the band’s approach exacting is an understatement. Songs are not only transcribed precisely, but they are also true to both key and pitch, which provides a big dopamine hit for true fans.

“It brings back that memory, that sound, because intrinsically people know,” Hammond said. “Some Led Zeppelin bands, if the singer can’t hit the notes, they’ll tune a half-step down, and it just doesn’t sound the same, and the audience knows it, whether they know it or not. Because it’s just been ingrained for so many years, hearing it the way you want to hear it.”

The band grew out of a residency at Bridgeport Rib House in Pennsylvania. Zeppelin was one band they covered in a set that included Aerosmith songs, but patrons there kept asking for a Zep-centric show.

It works because Hammond and his mates revere Zeppelin as much as their audience, and deliver accordingly.

“Basically, we want to give people all the stuff that they know and love,” Hammond said. “When we go into deep cuts, they’re deep cuts that people also would know, that true die-hard Zeppelin fans would be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe they did ‘In The Light’ or we’ve delved as deep as ‘Sick Again.’”

Get the Led Out
When: Saturday, Feb. 21, at 8 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $45 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.