Album Reviews 26/07/02

Ow! Live at The Penthouse, Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis (Reel To Real Records)

It’s summer in New England, when we hardscrabble Yankees regroup and take a look at things we may have missed over the past year. My problem is that so many albums get dumped into my virtual and non-virtual mailboxes that I tend to run years behind, which means a lot of releases never get the attention they deserve, case in point this one, which originally streeted on Record Store Day in 2019 as an exclusive, and then in standard form a couple of weeks later. Put simply, it’s a master class in hard bop jazz, spotlighting two amazingly gifted tenor saxophone players; it really show-stopped my music-listening life the first time I heard it and it’s become a staple in my car over the past couple of months. Recorded live over two nights at the Penthouse jazz club in Seattle in 1962, it features both guys (who were dubbed the “Tough Tenors” for their fast-motion interplay) in peak form, blazing (in an uncharacteristically gentlemanly way, as opposed to the one-upmanship observable in their other Prestige Records outings) through such improv-begging tunes as Count Basie’s “Tickle Toe,” at mind-boggling speeds. Advanced post-bop is everywhere here; if you buy one vintage jazz record this year, this should be it. A+

Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, A Very Unusual Head (Storm Kings Records)

Like I always say sometimes, if you can’t make the Who’s Who, try for the What The Hell Was That, where these guys are situated comfortably with a bullet. At first glance I was expecting steampunk: stovepipe hats, facial hair courtesy of 1971, suits louder than Godzilla after stubbing his toe on a school bus, etc., but this 30-plus-year veteran crew of upstate New Yorkers is usually found at folkie festivals, which makes sense, given their sound, but only a little. More accurately, their trip is usually described as “hillbilly Pink Floyd,” and when I found that out I was filled with dread (you all know what a jerk I am about Floyd, and obviously everything about these guys screams joke band). But whattaya know, opening tune “Beez (I Know Where The Beez Have Gone)” is very listenable and really very epic; if there was anything you liked about Dark Side Of The Moon, it’s distilled here. No, I’m being serious, the sound is very big, even when it gets a little weird thanks to the presence of hayloft/jackass instruments like ukuleles, melodicas, flutes and theremins. This is simply a great band of songwriters who happen to dress like Randy “Macho Man” Savage. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• OK, the summer’s already moving along too fast; the next new-CD Friday is this one, July 3, the day before this country’s 250th birthday, which means that everyone you know will be spending their time gathering together dangerous quantities of liquor and fireworks, not thinking about buying albums, but new albums will come nonetheless, and you can listen to them, while you shoot off fireworks, safely drunk, unless you hate George Washington! According to Metacritic, which has been proving itself increasingly worthless of late with regard to telling me about new albums, there are only two, but Google’s AI (the one everybody’s already using for free, which means it’s totally destined to win the AI wars, which will bankrupt companies like Microsoft and Oracle and bring on the Apocalypse, but not to worry, because something-something) found several more! The most “important” album comes from 58-year-old British hard-rock band Deep Purple, and it is titled SPLAT! Now, I don’t know how these fellas are even still alive, but I’m certain I’ll be impressed by their ability to keep up with the times and street a record that sounds fresh and innovative, let’s go find out! Yes, yes, the new single “Guilt Trippin’” is basically the same thing as their 54-year-old song “Space Truckin,’” except that 80-year-old singer Ian Gillan is trying to sound funny, like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead, so if you enjoy hearing five 80-year-old men pretending to be a joke band, I highly recommend that you consider purchasing this album!

• Two weeks ago, Happy Mag reported that Madonna wanted an “extortionist’s sum” to fund her biopic Who’s That Girl, and not even Netflix would pay for it. Says here that the script, which she wrote herself, would demand a blockbuster budget, so it’s on hold until further notice, meaning it will probably never happen, which is a bit unfair I suppose; as Happy observed, “[A Bob Dylan movie] gets [a gigantic budget]. Bruce gets one. Michael gets one. But Madonna? Apparently the industry forgot who invented half of pop culture.” Well, as far as I’m concerned — and not to minimize the fact that women are treated horribly by the music industry — I’d remind the Happy writer that we already had a Madonna documentary in 1991, titled Truth Or Dare, whose most non-boring moment was when she pretended to barf when Kevin Costner appeared backstage, but either way, Madge has a new album out this week, called Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, which harkens back to her space-disco days, with hypnotic progressive-house elements, random sexy whispering, etc. It’s fine.

• Next is Anton Pearson, guitarist for U.K. band Squid, which is, according to the band’s subreddit, “focused on post-punk, jazz-rock, ambient and krautrock,” meaning they’re, you know, totally unfocused, not that that’s always a bad thing. Pearson’s debut solo LP, Driving Through Belgium, is ambient stuff; I listened to two tracks, one that was cheesy Daedalus-type stuff, and another that sounded like an electric shaver getting pressed against a stainless steel pot; I’d cite the song titles but I already forgot them, mercifully.

• And finally we have Atlanta rapper/producer Ken Carson with his newest album, Xperiment, a 22-track affair that lays melodically competent AutoTuned rhymes over rage-y, distorted, experimental beats. I would give you the deets on one tune in particular, but given that all he’s made available for preview is a collection of snippets, I assume he couldn’t care less about my desire for exhibiting any journalistic professionalism whatsoever, bravo.

Featured Photo: Sublime, Until The Sun Explodes and Tori Kelly, God Must Really Love Me

Raspberry cake with raspberry ganache

Chocolate and raspberries are a classic combination. What makes this particular cake so very raspberry-y is that it is flavored with actual freeze-dried raspberries, not raspberry flavoring. There is lemon zest to brighten the flavor, and actual chocolate for chocolateyness. The rainbow unicorns will appear independently.

Cake

  • 1⅓ cups (300 g, 2 cubes + 5 Tablespoons) butter
  • 1⅓ cups (266 g) granulated sugar
  • zest of 1 lemon
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 cups (250 g) all-purpose flour
  • ¾ teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ⅓ cup (80 g) milk
  • 1 envelope (1.2 ounces or 34 g) freeze-dried raspberries

Ganache

  • ⅓ cup (80 g) heavy cream
  • 8.8 ounces (250 g) semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • Another 1.2 ounces (34 g) envelope of freeze-dried raspberries

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter and sugar a Bundt pan.

Grind each envelope of freeze-dried raspberries. Sift with a fine-mesh sifter to remove seeds. Set each aside.

In a mixing bowl, whisk the flour, baking powder, salt and raspberry powder together. Set Team Pink aside.

Cream the butter, lemon zest and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, and then the vanilla. Spoon the dry ingredients into the mix, then the milk.

Transfer the pink batter to the Bundt pan, one large spoonful at a time, then smooth the blobs out. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes or until the cake reaches an internal temperature of 200°F. Let the cake cool for 15 minutes or so, then flip it out onto a serving plate, and cool for another hour or so.

After you’ve dusted your mahjong trophies or written a Portuguese love poem, return to the kitchen.

Heat the chocolate and cream in a microwave-safe bowl for a few seconds at a time — 30 seconds, then 20, then 10, etc. — stirring each time, until combined and silky. Stir in the remaining raspberry powder, then spoon the ganache over the cake. Don’t worry if it’s drippy; it’s supposed to be.

Give the ganache a few minutes to set up, then cut slices, and serve with ice cream, or very cold milk.

Featured photo: Raspberry + chocolate. Photo by John Fladd.

Ice cream sandwiches for all

Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream has Happy Cake too

Jennifer Belmore was making a Happy Cake Bowl.

“I make cake pretty much every day here,” Belmore said, as she cut a slab of chocolate sheet cake from a baking pan and cut it into cubes. “Right now I have chocolate cake and funfetti to put at the bottom of a bowl. and then you get to pick your ice cream. You get to pick a hot topping and then it’s covered in whipped cream and sprinkles and a cherry. It’s a hybrid sundae per se — kind of like a throwback to your younger days when you were a birthday boy or girl and you had your cake and ice cream. We got away from it for some reason. And who doesn’t love cake and ice cream?”

Belmore opened Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream & Dessert Creations in Merrimack in April,

“I opened April 18. And business has been good so far,” she said. Her vision is to serve ice cream with a different spin on things. “My background is in baking,” she said. “I was trained as a French pastry chef, and I’ve always wanted to have a bakery. And so, fast-forward all these years later, and I have the attitude of, ‘What goes better with baked goods than ice cream?”

Belmore bought an existing ice cream shop on Daniel Webster Highway in Merrimack. “It already had the right footprint,” she said, “and I just had to add an oven, and voila! Here I am.”

At this point, Belmore put cubes of chocolate cake in the bottom of a bowl, setting several off to the side, and scooped ice cream on top of the bowl-cake. At any given time Sweet Bel’s offers more than 30 choices of ice cream.

“Our ice cream comes from Shain’s of Maine, up in Sanford, Maine,” she said, “a small little place.” This time Belmore chose banana ice cream to go over the cake cubes. Given the choice of chocolate, marshmallow, caramel, peanut butter or strawberry sauces, she chose peanut butter to go over the two scoops of ice cream.

“This is probably one of the best combinations,” Belmore said with a nod. “This and our peanut butter cup sundae; everyone loves peanut butter and chocolate.” She said she really likes making Happy Cake Bowls. “There’s something very satisfying about them,” she said. “My favorite ice cream probably changes by the week, but right now, it’s Turtles — vanilla [ice cream] with chocolate chips, cashews, and swirled with caramel. It’s so good; I like the texture. And then chocolate peanut butter is probably my second favorite.”

Scooped ice cream and sundae’s make up a large part of Belmore’s sales, she said, but her particular specialty is custom ice cream sandwiches.

“We do custom ice cream sandwiches,” she said. “I bake cookies every day and then you can pick your cookie, your ice cream.” Baking two types of cookies per day means that a customer might have more than 60 different ice cream sandwich combinations to choose from.

Belmore covered the sundae in the Happy Cake Bowl with whipped cream, then crumbled the remaining cake over the top. She examined the bowl carefully, then added a cherry, and sprinkles, then nodded again.

Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream & Dessert Creations
Where: 608 DW Highway, Merrimack, 670-2161, sweetbels.com
When: open seven days a week during the summer, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Featured photo: Happy Cake Bowl from Sweet Bel’s Ice Cream. Photo by John Fladd.

Now with gelato

A changing of the guard at the Bakeshop on Kelley Street

After more than 15 years, Denise Nickerson, the owner of The Bakeshop on Kelley Street in Manchester has sold her business and retired. The Bakeshop’s final day of business was June 26. The good news is that a new food business is set to take over the space at 171 Kelley St. within the week.

Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop plan to open Wednesday, July 8. Owner Brooke Viviers said that while the focus of the new shop will be in a slightly different direction, fans of the Bakeshop on Kelley Street’s baked goods will not be left hungry.

“My plans are to keep a lot of Denise’s baked goods,” she said, “but gelato is going to be our main seller. So we’re going to have gelato. We plan to make gelato cakes, sundaes, and we’re also thinking about serving smoothie bowls as well. I’ve talked with Denise about what her best sellers are and what people constantly come in here for. I want to try to keep that here so we’re not taking everything away that Denise does, but changing it up a bit.”

Gelato is a lot like ice cream, Viviers said — a sort of close Italian cousin to it.

“Gelato is prepared a little bit differently,” she said. “It actually has a much lower sugar content. but it’s made with milk instead of cream, so you think maybe it won’t be as creamy as ice cream because there’s less fat, but it’s very creamy and it’s softer; it’s kept at a higher temperature so it’s not as hard as regular ice cream.”

Viviers’ plan is to carry a large variety of gelato.

“We’re going to have 18 flavors to start,” she said. “We’ll have more than 18 flavors available from where we get the gelato from, but we’re going to rotate and see what sells the best. When we have a good idea of what [our customers] like the best, we’ll have some flavors that will probably always stay and then we’ll rotate some as well.”

Gelato is a family business for Viviers.

“My family has been in the bakery — and now gelato — business for the past eight years now,” she said. “My brother [Zack Smith] started selling gelato in his bakery [in Methuen, Mass.] three or four years ago, and since then, he’s acquired a couple more locations where he’s trying to do more gelato and not as many baked goods, and kind of steering more toward the frozen side of things. He built a relationship with the owner of [gelato maker] Dolce Freddo, and asked if he could sell it at his bakery, and that’s kind of how it happened. I moved to Manchester when I was dating my husband. We’re now married, but we have a home in Manchester, in the North End area, and I’ve been here for about six years now.”

Viviers said the gelato flavors at Karsyn’s [named after her new son] will be familiar to her customers.

“We’ll have a lot of standard flavors,” she said, “like chocolate, vanilla, we have a Nutella, Reese’s, and a cannoli flavor. We plan to do like a special cannoli sundae, cannoli ice cream cakes, that kind of thing. With mascarpone. We’ll keep Denise’s recipe, for cannoli filling, so it’ll be like, we’ll still sell cannolis like Denise does here, but we’re going to make cakes and sundaes out of it.”

“That said, we have an amazing pistachio gelato,” she said. “And maybe rum-raisin.”

Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop
Where: 171 Kelley St., Manchester
When: Starting Wednesday, July 8, open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Featured photo: Denise Nickerson, owner of The Bakeshop on Kelley Street, demonstrates her style of cake decorating to Brooke Viviers, the owner of Karsyn’s Gelato and Bakeshop, which will open in the same space at 171 Kelley St. in Manchester on Wednesday, July 8.

The Weekly Dish 26/7/02

• A new farmers market: According to a recent press release by Hampton’s Lane Memorial Library, there is a new farmers market in Hampton. “The Hampton Farmers Market is a new market in Hampton, NH with a mission to provide a community space for local farms and artisans to vend their products,” the announcement read. For its initial season, the market will run from July 11 to Aug. 8. All market dates are on Saturdays, from 2 to 5 p.m. at 19 Academy Ave, near the library. The market will be held rain or shine. Visit hampton.lib.nh.us/hampton-farmers-market.

• Making batch cocktails: Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) will host a class from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 2, teaching the art of making batch cocktails designed for summer parties and backyard barbecue. In this interactive class, guests will learn how to craft three crowd-friendly cocktails that are easy to prep ahead of time and serve in large batches. Afterward enjoy fireworks on the Tuscan Market Lawn. The cost is $64.74 through the Tuscan Brands website.

• BVI terrace party: The Bedford Village Inn (2 Olde Bedford Way, Bedford, 472-2001, bedfordvillageinn.com) will host a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary with an evening of festivities on its Fondi Terrace Thursday, July 2, from 5 to 9 p.m. There will be a live grill station serving a special outdoor menu featuring sausage and peppers (served on a fresh roll or paired with pasta), a variety of grilled skewers, pasta salad and more. There will also be a festive spritz bar. No tickets are required to attend, but registering for the event will help guests save the event to their calendar. Guests are welcome to stop by throughout the evening and enjoy the festivities.

• New brew: Shoreline Vodka Lemonade is now on draft at 603 Brewery & Beer Hall 42 Main St. in Derry, according to a brewery newsletter. 603’s hard lemonade has an alcohol by volume of 5 percent, the newsletter said. The newsletter also announced 603’s New England Strawberry Wheat, a beer with a 5.2 percent ABV. 603 will head to Meredith on Thursday, July 23, to celebrate National Lemonade day: “Join us at Town Docks … from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., where we will be sampling our collaboration with the Common Man, Big Lake Vodka Lemonade! … enjoy live music, swag giveaways, product samples, and of course the usual great food and drink offerings from Town Docks!” the newsletter said. See 603brewery.com.

Treasure Hunt 26/07/02

Dear Donna,

This blow dryer belonged to my mom. I can remember her using it on my sister and my own hair. It still actually works, although I wouldn’t want to use it. The heat from it is pretty intense. Does anyone collect such items?

Thank you, Donna, in advance.

Denise

Dear Denise,

OK, can I start with that my mom also had one and used it on my hair as well. LOL

This handheld style has been around since the early 1900s. Yours is from the 1950s ish.

Can you believe hair dryers have been around since the late 1800s, when they were invented?

There were several manufacturers and colors of a similar style to yours. Different colors, stainless steel, and with stands as well.

The values today I would think are for decorative and nostalgic reasons, and some repurposing reasons as well. I personally wouldn’t want to use it either. The heat is intense and I can’t even imagine the electrical cost! Also the cord could have age drying damage to the wiring.

Values are in the range of $30+ in good clean working condition. Some styles bring a little more for unusual colors, bases etc.

Denise, thanks for sharing and putting a smile on my face.

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