Tag: 260101

Piano Man’s many sides

Billy Joel tribute act returns to Tupelo

In a crowded milieu, there are some tribute acts that stand out — for their authenticity, an innovative approach, or a clear love of the music they’re recreating. Gloucester-based Captain Jack & the Strangers, who cover Billy Joel’s songbook, manage to tick all three boxes. Since forming in 2022 they’ve become a favorite on the New England circuit.

The group began after Jack Favazza and a group of musician friends traveled to see Joel perform. A piano player in his early twenties, Favazza was already a fan, as was his bass-playing friend Mike Parsons. The rest, all members of well-known North Shore bands, were curious but not as committed.

By the show’s end all were in agreement. Favazza and Parsons, along with percussionist, sax and keyboard player Mike Lindberg, drummer Steve Russo and guitarists Mark Pelosi and Jim Frontiero, were ready to start a Joel-centric band. They started crafting a setlist that included both well-known hits and tasty deep cuts.

They began with a swagger Joel might appreciate. Though veterans of the nightclub circuit, all wanted the act to work in big venues.

“Not that we don’t like the music in the bar scene, but we wanted to get on a stage, we wanted to sell tickets,” Favazza recalled in a recent phone interview. “We wanted to take it a little more seriously.”

A good instinct, it turned out. An early show at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass., happened because Favazza knew someone at the venue who was willing to take a chance on a new band. They sold the place out in seven weeks. “So after that, she said, ‘We’ll be having you back next year.’”

Another high point came this year when they played Toad’s Place, a legendary New Haven, Connecticut, club where stars like Bob Dylan and Steve Earle have performed.

“It was kind of a short-notice thing and that’s OK,” Favazza said. “They gave us a chance [and] they loved the show.”

They’re building a fan base in New Hampshire, having appeared at Nashua’s Center for the Arts, and multiple times at Tupelo Music Hall.

“A lot of the other venues say, ‘Yeah, we’d like you to come back next year or in six months.’ That’s when you pick up the momentum and your confidence goes up,” Favazza said.

Though the song selection ranges across Joel’s career, the band maintains the exuberant energy of his mid-’70s to late ’80s prime. During the show, Favazza bounds across the stage for the in-your-face hit “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me” and lays a tablecloth on his piano to perform his favorite, “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant.”

Even seasoned fans can be surprised by the mix of material, Favazza continued.

“After every show, someone comes up to us and goes, ‘I didn’t know that Billy Joel wrote all those songs. When we dive into the B-sides, they’re like, ‘I remember that song, it was in this movie.’ These songs are tied everywhere in our culture.”

Favazza plays solo gigs in Boston and around the North Shore. His sets include Elton John and Barry Manilow along with Joel’s material. He’s been doing it since a college friend helped him secure a gig in a Gloucester restaurant. After playing a couple of songs, he was invited to appear weekly.

“Billy Joel is the only tribute act I do,” he said. “I figured, who’s the No. 1 piano man? OK, I found him.”

He’s drawn to Joel’s music because he discerns a thread in it that dates back to rock’s beginnings. Many musicians were inspired in 1964 when The Beatles appeared on national television for three consecutive Sunday nights, like Joel. “You can hear The Beatles in his songs — that’s what I think makes it timeless, whether it’s lyrics or feelings or the music itself.”

Though Favazza enjoys honoring the music of one artist in his act, he has original songs, and their time may come.

“I haven’t published anything for the public, but maybe someday,” he said. For the time being, he continued, “I play these songs because I want to.”

Captain Jack & the Strangers
When: Saturday, Jan. 3, at 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $40 at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Captain Jack & the Strangers. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/01/01

• Banging in: After ringing in 2026, Recycled Percussion continues its traditional New Year’s run with 11 shows over the next two weekends. The junk rockers rose to fame on America’s Got Talent, finishing second but winning enough hearts to land a Las Vegas Strip residency that ran for years. Shows start Thursday, Jan. 1, at 1 and 6 p.m., Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester, $44 and up at palacetheatre.org.

• Grunge memories: Billed as the ultimate Alice In Chains experience, Jar of Flies is a tribute to the Seattle ’90s standard-bearers and their troubled lead singer Layne Staley. The band appeared last fall at Flannel Fest in Eastern Washington with Sublime, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots and other tributes, going over well there. They’re a music-friendly bar-restaurant’s first ticketed show. Friday, Jan. 2, at 8 p.m., Riley’s Place, 29 Mont Vernon St., Milford, $10 at the door, rileysplacellc.com.

• Raving up: A craft cocktail bar and restaurant that opened last summer hosts Robin Gaming, a scrappy pop punk band with a rough-hewn sound that gives off a solid Replacements and Lemonheads vibe. Since 2019 the quartet has churned out several energetic EPs and albums; the latest is Caught On Tape, its title possibly a reference to the many full-length shows they’ve posted on YouTube (worth a look). Friday, Jan. 2, at 7 p.m., 90 Low, 90 Low Ave., Concord., idiotcan.com.

• Double down: With a sound much bigger than its two band members, Muddy Ruckus offers everything from zoot suit swing to conjured New Orleans second line with traces of Delta blues, rustic folk and punk-infused gypsy jazz. Saturday, Jan. 3, at 7 p.m., Auspicious Brew, 1 Washington St., Dover, $8 ($10 at the door), auspiciousbrew.com.

Album Reviews 26/01/01

W.E.B., Darkness Alive (Metal Blade Records)

Oh boy, could there be anything more important than making symphonic metal even more “extreme?” That’s what this Athens, Greece-based fivesome is doing, plastering synth-crafted orchestral maneuverings with Cookie Monster vocals from (apparently) a guy and a girl who’re both equally capable of pulling off an exquisite twin-punch karaoke of Bathory and Cannibal Corpse at a kid’s birthday party. This is a live set, just so you know, and thankfully the synthesizer making all the super-epic symphonic sounds didn’t melt down to ruin everyone’s vibe; essentially it’s a barrage of slightly out-of-date thrash metal ravings with bursts of faux-John Williams soundtracking doing epic things here and there. I was promised that “Into Hell Fire We Burn” has a chorus that “will make you want to sing along,” but there’s no melody to it, just demonic chanting over some bonk-bonk-bonk power chords, occasionally interrupted by [place name of literally any thrash band here] hamster-wheel shredding. And people are worried about AI barfing out hilariously disposable music (eyeroll). C —Eric W. Saeger

genCab, “Open Graves” (Metropolis Records)

I can’t come up with a single reason why any self-respecting goth shouldn’t give this dark-techno trio’s new extended single a listen. The driving force behind it is Bucks County, Pennsylvania’s (fine, he obviously wants me to say he’s a Philadelphia-based act, so whatever) own Dave Dutton, a big Elden Ring player who sure loves him some Trent Reznor, at least the harder, more rock-based, Gravity Kills-type stuff. He’s working his way up the ladder, having spent some time in Los Angeles working on various projects and refining his art, which required getting a new computer when his old one kept running out of memory when he was putting tunes together. With regard to the music, yeah, we’re definitely in Trent territory, but he’s an ’80s kid who’s obviously been exposed to tons of synthpop and has a decent sense of song structure; the tune does slap pretty hard in the manner of KMFDM but with much less sampling. Plus he likes Wumpscut, which earned him my rubber stamp from the jump. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• OMG no way, it’s a new year, are we even still standing, holy crow. Jan. 2 is the first new-CD-Friday of 2026, so, as we all try to remember to date our work-email messages with 2026 instead of 2025, it’s a good idea to think about what monstrosities are heading music’s way in the coming — you know, year. Most importantly, it will be a year in which music turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new hit songs and full albums, and many are already complaining about the situation, declaring it somehow bad or “wrong.” In an interview with the Jacobin podcast, overexposed nincompoop and registered mediocre bass player Anthony Fantano, aka “Needle Drop,” professed concern that the “owners” (corporations like Disney and such) of machine-generated music will issue licenses to platforms like Spotify so that said platforms will have the right to use computer-generated voices and songwriting styles at will (which I’m sure will lead to a period when people start rejecting anything AI-generated). As well, like most people who don’t get the point of something, Fantano dismissed last year’s AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” (by the fictitious country-rock artist Breaking Rust, the creation of Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a semi-anonymous, Burial-like content creator) as having “not actually broken big” because the tune “only” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, a chart that would be “very easy” for bots to mess with. I’ll let you finish your Fritos while you think about how stupid that is (hint: YouTube used to — and probably still does — count views of commercials for Lady Gaga’s singles as actual listens, and we’ve all seen bot-like behavior in YouTube comments sections for disposable divas like Sabrina Carpenter), but in the meantime, yes, the song was digitally created, which Fantano knew, so he knew automatically to write it off as “terrible” and “the most reductive parody of a popular genre you could imagine.” Personally, I’d say T Bone Burnett had already cornered that particular market (the song has a mud-blues sound a la Howlin’ Wolf), but it’s not any more “reductive” or redundant than Burnett’s depleted soil output, especially when he was trying to barf out as much music as he could to capitalize on his Aughts-era period of popularity. So no, we could argue these points all day, but the fact is that AI is coming to replace a lot of workers, including debatably original artists, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that established rock stars are definitely going to deploy AI themselves to save time producing albums. But that might actually be good in some ways: Lady Gaga ran out of ideas after The Fame Monster, so why wouldn’t she program a robot to produce “something that Cher would sing but that would appeal to fans of Lorde” instead of stealing directly from Madonna like she did on “Born This Way?” Interesting times, eh?

• Devon Allman is the son of Greg Allman, so he’s automatically relevant and I’ll just leave it at that rather than whine about nepo babies again. His new album, Nightvision, is said to be an “alt-rock” album, but it’s actually a prog-rock album, going by advance single “Dead Sea Scrolls,” which is like boring-era Rush but with better guitar shredding.

• Paleface Swiss is a “beatdown hardcore” band from Switzerland with a new EP titled The Wilted. Basically like Fields Of The Nephilim meets Killing Time, it’s OK.

• We’ll wrap it up with Los Angeles-based indie-folk singer Miya Folick, whose new album Erotica Veronica reminds me of Oceanlab and Lisa Loeb: gentle, waifish singing over ambient niceness and strummy ’90s-pop that don’t mix all that well together. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: W.E.B., Darkness Alive and genCab, “Open Graves”

Too Many Pears

So you find yourself with half a dozen fresh pears on your hands. What does one do with Too Many Pears?

Pear Crisp

Filling

  • 6 ripe medium-to-large pears, peeled, cored and chopped
  • ½ cup (107 g) brown sugar
  • 1 Tablespoon corn starch – This filling will be very liquidy, particularly if your pears are super-ripe and/or juicy. A full tablespoon of starch will help everything pull together as it bakes.
  • ¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
  • 2 teaspoons bourbon – optional
  • Zest of 1 orange – This too, is optional. Bourbon and orange both get along extremely well with pears, but a love triangle of all three is a bit chaotic. You should probably pick one and give the other a lovely parting gift.

Crust

  • ¾ cup (67 g) rolled oats – not instant or steel-cut oats
  • ¾ cup (90 g) all-purpose flour
  • 1⁄3 cup (71 g) brown sugar
  • ½ cup (65 g) chopped nuts – Walnuts or pecans are traditional, but if you wanted to use hazelnuts, or even pistachios, who could argue with you? “Why, yes, Helen, I did use hazelnuts in the crust. **steely gaze** Thank you so much for asking.”
  • ½ cup (1 stick) butter, melted (about 1 minute in your microwave)

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Grease an 8”x8” baking pan liberally with butter. I like to smear a full tablespoonful around with my fingers. You know, for thoroughness.

Combine all the filling ingredients. Stir and set aside.

In a separate bowl, combine all the crust ingredients except for the melted butter. Add the butter, and stir the mixture with a fork, until it all pulls together into a lumpy, streusel-y texture.

Pour the pear mixture into the buttery baking pan, then top with the crust mixture. Place the baking pan on a lined baking sheet, in case of a bubble-over situation, then bake for 30 to 35 minutes.

Remove the pear crisp from your oven when it looks golden-brown and gloppy. Let it cool for 10 minutes or so; at 350°F, the brown sugar/pear syrup is dangerously hot. Aim for “warm and comforting” rather than “hot from the oven.” Top with vanilla ice cream, or serve with a milkshake. You won’t be sorry.

Featured photo: Pear Crisp. Photo by John Fladd.

Pizza-focused course correction

Hellenic Pizzeria emerges on Elm Street

Walking down Elm Street in Manchester, you notice a new pizzeria next to Cat Alley, and you stop short. Wait a second, wasn’t that the new—?

Yes, owner Dionysius Lemos said, it was the Statesman Diner.

“We had an occupancy permit for 21 days. Out of 21 days, we only opened for nine days.” This problem, he explained, was with the Statesman’s kitchen’s exhaust system. “We kept triggering off the fire alarm in here. What was happening, the exhaust was going up the ductwork, but it was bellowing out because we have an open concept kitchen into the dining room, and it was affecting the patrons, and then the fire alarms would go off.”

This led to a quick redesign of the restaurant, one not built around an exhaust system. Lemos installed ventless pizza ovens and changed his restaurant’s focus to traditional Greek pizza. “We use a Greek recipe,” Lemos said. “It’s a Peloponnesian recipe for pizza. It comes from southern Greece. It’s been around for hundreds of years. Greeks’ public position [is] they recognize the influence that the Italians have had with pizza, but they’ve also played a major role with pizza since the 1600s. So this recipe is well over 300 years old. It’s a recipe that nobody uses anywhere around us.”

What makes Hellenic’s pizza special, Lemos said, is the dough.

“It’s a thick crust,” he said. “But the difference is in our fermentation process. We sit on the dough for two days. The longer you sit on that dough, the tastier it is.” The dough is cold-proofed, which means it is left to rise in the refrigerator, so the yeast in the dough has time to develop flavor.

“So we specialize in 10-inch Greek pies. Everything’s fresh. Our own dough, our own sauce, our own cheese, which we shred ourselves,” Lemos said. “We use a blend of cheddar and mozzarella.” The pizzas are baked for a short time at a high temperature. “We’re running at about 800 degrees, and we’re running seven-minute pies.”

While the Statesman had a long and ambitious menu, Lemos said, the change in concept has led to a smaller, pizza-focused range of dishes. But that leaves a question hanging in the air: What about the french fries?

Hellenic Pizzeria is next to Cat Alley, an alley covered on one side with murals of cats made by area artists, which has become a cultural landmark in Manchester. During renovations to the restaurant in its diner iteration, Lemos installed a walk-up french fry window on the non-mural side of the alley. The goal was to make top-quality fries available to late-night customers leaving concerts or downtown bars. There has been a lot of excitement about the french fry window among late-night foodies.

“The french fries are gone,” Lemos said sadly. “But the window is being repurposed. It will still be open, but it will serve rotisserie hot dogs. In deference to the cat people, it’s going to be called Cat Alley Landmark Dawgs. There will be a hot dog [available], a cheese dog, a chili dog, or a chili cheese dog. I’m really sad to see the fry station going — on weekends we’re selling 50 pounds an hour, some days — and that was when we were only open for nine days.”

Hellenic Pizzeria
Where: 836 Elm St., Manchester, 932-2751
Hours: Open seven days a week 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Hours of operation for the walk-up hot dog window are still being determined.

The Weekly Dish 26/01/01

• Hot pot: OBA Korean BBQ & Hot Pot has opened at 371 S. Willow St. in Manchester (obakoreanbbqhotpot.com). The all-you-can-eat Korean restaurant is open Wednesday through Monday at 11:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and until 10:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

• An Italian New Year’s Eve: There will be a Bubbles and Truffles New Year’s Eve event at Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) Wednesday, Dec. 31, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. This two-course cooking class will begin with a classic shrimp cocktail paired with a prosecco toast. Guests will then explore the elegance of truffles through a curated tasting, starting with truffle bites paired with Franciacorta, followed by fresh truffle-finished pasta tossed tableside in a Parmesan wheel and paired with a crisp Blanc de Noir. This will be a celebratory, elevated way to toast the new year. Tickets are $131.63 through eventbrite.com.

• Holiday ice cream: Social Club Creamery (138 N. Main St., Concord, 333-2111, socialclubcreamery.com) will continue to offer a special Holiday Series Menu through the end of December, with limited-time cookies, and ice creams including Peppermint Mocha, Cinnamon Roll Cheesecake, Gingerbread House, and Santa’s Oat Milk & Cookies (vegan).

• Melted snowman cookies: The Nashua Public Library (2 Court St., Nashua, 589-4600, nashualibrary.org) will host a Melted Snowman Cookie workshop for children in grades K-5, Monday, Dec. 29, from 2 to 3 p.m. “In this hands-on program, you’ll decorate your own melting snowman cookie using icing, candy, and other fun toppings. Learn some basic cookie decorating techniques, like spreading icing, placing decorations, and adding finishing touches, while giving your frosty friend a wobbly, ‘melting’ look. Space and supplies are limited,” according to the website.

• New year, new flavors: The Hooksett Library, 31 Mount Saint Mary’s Way in Hooksett, hooksettlibrary.org, has a Spice Club. While supplies last, pick up a spice kit with a new spice and recipes each month, according to the website. In January, the spice is ginger; pick up the spice kit at Patron Services on Jan. 20 while supplies last, the website said.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!