Tag: 260205

Gallery gathering

Jazz guitar accompanies art opening

Art and music go together like chardonnay and a fine brie. The pairing of jazz guitarist David Newsam with an exhibition by a group of regional painters opening Feb. 7 promises to be equally satisfying. Explore, Express: Painting with Purpose offers works from a New England College class led by Bedford artist Patrick McKay that’s met for the past 15 years.

“Someone like David is ideally suited for this kind of thing,” Rick Lugg, Exhibition Chair at Two Villages Art Society, said recently. “We’re trying to generate traffic, so we want a lot of people in there, and we want something that at least loosely complements the theme or the work of the show.”

Newsam has performed at Two Villages openings before. In a phone interview from his home in Raymond, he said he’ll play jazz standards and American Songbook selections this time.

“In the past, I’ve done a lot of open, free improvisation,” he said, adding, “I feel that a really important element is to try to shape the music to match the vibe of the artists.”

He’ll play solo on acoustic and electric guitar, eschewing the pedals, loops and other sound-scaping tools other musicians often use to augment their sound.

“I think it’s much more of a challenge to be able to do it all live without any kind of effects,” he said, pointing to guitarist Tommy Emmanuel’s approach as an ideal.

“He can present and portray an entire band just by himself, with the mechanics of the instrument,” Newsam explained. “I heard him answer this question once at a clinic, and he just said, ‘I hear the bass, I hear the piano, I hear the vocals, and I just try to play it all.’”

Born in Connecticut, Newsam attended Berklee College of Music and returned later to teach. He also taught at Dartmouth College and at UNH, where he founded their jazz guitar program.

“I always joked that at Berklee I was one of 50 guitar faculty, and at UNH I was the entire guitar program,” he said.

In high school Newsam listened to Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, and guitar-based bands like the Allman Brothers; then he found jazz at Berklee. During his senior year he spent a lot of time in Hyannis, Mass., while taking care of his grandfather and got even deeper into the genre.

“Cape Cod was really a hotbed of amazing jazz players like Dave McKenna, the pianist, and Lou Colombo, the trumpet player,” he said. “I mean, these were some of the best players in the world, and they all were based in Cape Cod, so I had a ton of opportunities.”

Newsam continues to teach at Berklee and perform as well as occasionally record music. He and sax player Bobby Tynes recently released an instrumental EP, Kindred Souls. It includes a lively rendition of “Fishin’ Hole,” the theme song from 1960s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, and a scintillating version of “The Very Thought of You.”

The two became friends in 1983.

“I had an opportunity to play a summer job, so I moved up to the Lake Winnipesaukee region,” he said. “Bobby’s uncle had a cabin. We met at a jam session and we’ve been playing music ever since … partners in crime for over four decades.”

The record is their first together. “It’s a collection of things we either did in the studio or did live that Bobby took into his recording studio,” Newsam said. “Some of the recordings are probably 20 years old…. It’s not like we went in as a project and recorded all that in one day.”

The five-track effort is available on streaming services for now.

“It’s really been fun listening to that, reminiscing about the music that we’ve played,” Newsam said. “We really are kindred souls. We don’t play for two or three months and when we get together it feels like we’ve been playing every day. It’s just that kind of relationship.”

Opening reception with guitarist David Newsam
When: Saturday, Feb. 7, noon
Where: Two Villages Art Society, 846 Main St., Contoocook
More: twovillagesart.org

Featured photo: David Newsam. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/02/05

• Church chuckles: The upstairs lounge at Stone Church has a slate of standup comics including Rob Steen, Shawn Ruiz, a DJ/rapper turned comic and actor and the deadpan Matt McArthur. Thursday, Feb. 5, at 7 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, $15, stonechurchrocks.com, 21+.

• Twang rockers: Prog rockers turned electrified twangsters Horsefly Gulch headline a four-band show. The Strangeroos, super duo Blindspot and Frank Gruber open. Friday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, horseflygulch.com.

• Helping hands: A fundraiser for a nonprofit community recording studio, Hearts On Fire features several Nashua area bands from across multiple genres. Tree Streets Collective was flooded during the Vine Street fire last December and lost many instruments as a result. Cody Pope, 6 Minds Combined, Dead Harrison, Faith Ann Band, Trophy Wives and more perform. Saturday, Feb. 7, at 2 p.m., Backstreet Bar & Grill, 76 Derry St., Hudson, $20, newhampshireunderground.org.

• Violin brunch: Kick off Sunday with brunch and elegant music from Lilly Inella, a violinist who enhances her performance with loops and backing tracks. Sunday, Feb. 8, at 11 a.m., Copper Door, 41 S. Broadway, Salem, linktr.ee/lillygetslost.

• Buffalo wingers: Nearing four decades since forming in college, jam band pioneers moe. have a new album, Circle of Giants, its first with keyboard player Nate Wilson (Percy Hill, Ghosts of Jupiter). Monday, Feb. 11, at 7:30 p.m., Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $63 and up at ccanh.com.

Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

(St. Martin’s Press, 287 pages)

From Hollywood stars who microdose the drug to people who were once hundreds of pounds overweight, many people have found Ozempic and its imitators to be game-changers. Ozempic has also been a game-changer for Novo Nordisk, the Denmark-based company that brought the drug to market at a time when its fortunes were failing.

In the 1990s the company had what was internally described as “an innovation problem,” Aimee Donnellan explains in this deep dive into the history of Ozempic and similar drugs. But Novo Nordisk had a promising project, a drug to help people with diabetes. It was a synthetic version of a gut hormone called GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1), discovered through research on anglerfish caught in Boston Harbor, and it proved a powerful means of lowering blood sugar in people with diabetes — and, fortuitously, of helping these same people lose weight.

The weight loss industry has long been profitable in America, and it was clear there was money to be made. Ozempic was used for weight loss off-label; word spread and so did its use.

Several researchers did the work that would lead to this breakthrough, among them Danish chemist Svetlana Mojsov, whose work preceded the approval of Ozempic by more than a decade. But science is as competitive as politics, especially when its result is lucrative, and Donnellan takes up the banner of Mojsov here, presenting her as a woman done wrong by men who attempted to take credit for her work (and might have succeeded had she not kept detailed notes).

The story of the behind-the-scenes infighting seems incongruent with other parts of Off the Scales, which can’t seem to decide what sort of book it wants to be.

Donnellan, a Reuters columnist who covers the pharmaceutical industry, begins with the story of a marketing specialist in Michigan who lost more than 100 pounds on Ozempic and saw her world change. At work Sarah started getting promotions, even though her performance was the same. “At her parents’ house, her father, previously loving but somewhat absent, seemed to take a newfound interest in her. She could visibly see how proud he was of her. Now 34, she had never before seen this look on his face.”

Through Sarah’s story and others, Donnellan offers a picture of lives changed. Formerly invisible people gain social status as their bodies shrink and gain peace as the “food noise” that had dominated their lives quiets.

She also shares disturbing stories, like that of a Los Angeles hairstylist who lost weight on Mounjaro, albeit while also taking an anti-nausea medication because she constantly felt sick. After four months a friend told her she looked gaunt; she started getting facial injections to restore volume to her face. (Donnellan notes that not everyone can afford dermal fillers.) Moreover, Donnellan writes, “for a small minority of GLP-1 users, the side effects are so severe that they may wish they never even heard of the medication.”

Donnellan presents these and other stories without judgment. Toward the end she touches on what may be the most underreported part of the story: how these drugs will affect the culture as people who use them change their eating habits (several writers have tried to tackle this, as Kari Jenson Gold did in a First Things essay titled “The Night Ozempic Came to Dinner”). Donnellan suggests that changed eating patterns may spell doom for fast food restaurants and the makers of ultra-processed food, and says weight-loss drugs may also affect alcohol consumption.

But we are new to the GLP-1 world and we don’t know the drugs’ effect decades out. Donnellan’s examination, while sometimes disjointed and uneven in its readability, raises interesting questions. B-

Featured Photo: Off the Scales, by Aimee Donnellan

Album Reviews 26/02/05

Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission (Frontiers Music s.r.l.)

Any time a press release bumbles into my inbox touting a “supergroup,” I take the bait, thinking “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” In the case of the song in question here, an advance single from this hard-rock/AOR band’s upcoming debut LP Midnight Transmission, “supergroup” feels a bit hyperbolic: For starters, guitarist RJ Ronquillo has a YouTube channel with, I’d assume, eleventy-blah-blah-gorillion subscribers, not that he doesn’t have a great guitar sound; his comes off like a precision chainsaw that kind of wants to be a six-string bass, if you know what I mean. The other dudes are mostly highly paid journeymen, including Chris Reeve, who was drummer number four or five for Filter for a few years. You get the idea; basically they’re a hard-rock version of Toto that wishes they’d thought of Trans Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas-metal trip first (see the connection here, anyone? Trans Siberian/Transatlantic?). OK, fine, if I quibbled over every bit of unoriginality I encountered every week I’d never have room to talk about anything else, but hoo boy, this tune steals the riff from Trans Siberian’s biggest crowd-pleasing rockout, “First Snow.” I mean it’s fine other than that, I guess; Swedish vocalist Mattias Osbäck pulls off a decent Glenn Hughes, but that’s faint praise if I ever — OK, let’s just stop there. C —Eric W. Saeger

The Stripp, Life Imitates Art (self-released)

OK, this one reaches your overworked, overtired eyeballs courtesy of Friend-of-the-Hippo Dan Szczesny, who Facebooked me as I was wrapping up this week’s critically acclaimed column. First he tried to get me to talk about Brass Against’s cover version of the Pink Floyd song where the opera lady sings all opera-y, and I was like “Oh, you think that’s an awesome girl singer?!” and sent him a link to Delerium’s “Heaven’s Earth,” and then he melted into butter after the chorus ate his entire head, so I went back in our now mile-long message thread to this album so I could finish this column and go watch my shows and sip my hot Café Vienna toddy. Dan loves this Australian band, who profess to sound like Motorhead, which they don’t at all, firstly because they have a girl singer who’s not possessed of much in the way of je nais sais qua, but secondly because Motorhead’s guitars sound like a bear crashing its way into a museum, not like these guys, whose core sound is more like 1980s-era Black Flag mixed with early Kiss. But! There’s something to be said for early punk and Kiss, so if they get a new singer I’ll give them an A. That is my price, take it or leave it, and now Petunia and I will continue bingeing reruns of The Nanny. B- —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Keep on truckin’, fam, like they used to say when Woodrow Wilson was president, we’re already into February, the last full month of pure frozen misery, I can practically smell the deep-fried botulism wafting from the hilariously undercooked fish at the cheapest beach-food shack I can find when it’s unbearably hot out again and a few of you people actually start posting “I can’t wait for pumpkin-spice everything to get here again” on your Instagrams and Roblox gaming Discords, can we please get to the part where global warming turns New England’s weather into Georgia’s weather like they keep promising! Unfortunately, though, we’re trapped here together, but I’m keeping snug and super-warm buried under all the spam coming into my emailbox from bands and various people pretending to be “important cogs in the music industry,” asking me if I can get down to Austin, Texas, in mid-March for the 40th annual South By Southwest (SXSW) conference, I’m so warm and comfy right now! They all want me to show up and get free tickets, all these bands, and I’ll admit that it makes me feel special, but would I attend this “conference” if my airfare and hotel accommodations and car rental were paid? No, because Wire isn’t playing, and they’re the only band left on Earth that I’d actually sacrifice some American dollars to see, and neither is Mac Sabbath, the joke band that plays Black Sabbath songs while disguised as McDonaldland characters like Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar and whatnot, I told you guys about them, remember? No? Well, I’d go see them too, but no, I have no wish to see any of this year’s SXSW headliners, a list that includes All-American Rejects, Don Toliver, Junior H, and Mau P, but hey man, if you’re going to SXSW and want to co-write this column for an issue, I’ll tell you what, message me on Facebook or Bluesky (I’m barely on Twitter anymore, just like everyone else) and you can send me your thoughts on those four bands, and I’ll listen to them and add my two cents about why I think you’re wrong about them, sound fair? But look at how much we’ve digressed from business, specifically the business of the albums coming out on Feb. 6, for example The Fall-Off, the new one from North Carolina rapper J. Cole! Purported to be his final record, it features a tune designated/titled “Disc 2 Track 2” that features a sunny cheerful beat and (thankfully non-flashy) flows that are pretty masterful.

• Ha ha look, a new album from Nick Jonas, who used to be married to one-note sadgirl actress Sophie Tucker before she had her “what on Earth am I doing marrying a Jonas brother” moment! Oops, wait, this just in, the former Mr. Sophie Tucker was Joe, not Nick; Nick’s married to Priyanka Chopra, management couldn’t care less about the error! Sunday Best is the album, and “Gut Punch” is the single, featuring lightly AutoTuned boyband vocals; it rips off Katy Perry’s “Roar,” not that there’ll be a lot of royalties to grab from a lawsuit.

• L.A.-based emo/dream-pop whatchamallits Silversun Pickups release Tenterhooks this week. “New Wave” is a loud, depressing outburst with math-rock guitars, something you’d hear from Bono if his dog died and he was kind of metal.

• We’ll end this unbelievably disastrous week with Puma Blue, “the alias of artist, producer and romantic, Jacob Allen.” Wikipedia tells me he sings in falsetto, which he does in the title track from his new LP, Croak Dream. It’s pretty cool, jazzy yet street-wise, I don’t hate it at all. He’ll be at the small but great-sounding Crystal Ballroom in Somerville, Mass., on March 6. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Transatlantic Radio, “City Of Angels” Midnight Transmission and The Stripp, Life Imitates Art

Make it bitter

Most Americans don’t seem to appreciate bitter tastes. We’re fine with other strong flavors — we love sweets, many of us will go at a bag of salty snacks like it’s been away at war, there are certainly chili-heads who crave intensely spicy foods, and some children eat sour candies that would make the head of an adult collapse in on itself. But what about bitter foods?
I enjoy some bitterness from time to time, so on the off chance that you do, too, or are in the middle of a contentious break-up, here is a bitter but delicious cocktail, with a very bitter name:

Remember the Alimony

  • 1 1/4 ounces Fino sherry – I’m not exactly sure what “fino” means in this context, but whatever full-bodied sherry you have on hand.
  • 1 1/4 ounces Cynar or other bitter Italian liqueur. Cynar is the one with an artichoke on the label.
  • 3/4 ounce medium-shelf, London dry gin — Because of the strong flavor of this drink, subtle flavors will be overwhelmed; this is not a job for your best top-shelf gin. I used Gordon’s, and I do not regret the decision.

We will not be using a cocktail shaker for this drink. Add several ice cubes to a mixing glass, then add the sherry, Cynar and gin, then stir gently but thoroughly.
Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.

As expected, this is a bitter drink — not bitter to the extent that you’ll have to smash your fists against the table to force it down or anything, but there’s no getting around its bitterness. When you take your first sip of it, your immediate impression will be a bit of raisinyness from the sherry, quickly followed by bitter notes from the Cynar. It actually has a smooth finish and goes down easily, but there is a tail of bitterness in the aftertaste.
This is a very grown-up drink, for sitting by a window and watching the snow or rain come down and thinking about the turns your life has taken.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Smoothie move

New location and new name for smoothie purveyor born in the mall

The name is different, but the smoothies are still excellent, said Jonathan Allard.

“We’re called That Smoothie Spot,” he said. “We are a 100 percent natural smoothie spot. We used to be Nature’s Nectar in the Mall of New Hampshire. We were there for 16 years, but we felt it was finally time to change and move on. Nobody really associated the name with smoothies, so that’s when my wife and I came up with That Smoothie Spot. It just made sense. My wife managed the other spot, Nature’s Nectar, for over 12 years for the previous owner. She sold it to us in November of 2024. And now we’re here. We’ve been able to expand our menu, add some food items — some gluten-free, some dairy-free.”

“Here” is on March Avenue in Manchester, just off South Willow Street, in the plaza where Panera Bread and Broadway Shoes are located.

Allard said the new smoothie shop offers “refreshers, coffees, lattes, sandwiches, toasties and things like that. But our bread and butter is the smoothies for sure.”

“I believe what makes a good smoothie,” Allard said, “is just good natural fruit, making sure it’s blended properly, and in the proper combinations. We make all our bases fresh in-house. Our piña colada has been one of the biggest hits for 16 years. You can’t get anything like our piña colada base that we make here. We use cream of coconut and fresh pineapple. It’s our most popular base. A lot of smoothie places will use either milk or yogurt or oat milk or almond milk, something like that. We emulsify our natural fruit into our base and that’s what makes the liquid for the base. It helps make it creamier. It just tastes better. We don’t add any additional sugar, so we’re diabetic-friendly, and we’re able to keep it that way by making everything ourselves.”

“One of our biggest sellers on the menu right now has dragonfruit in it,” Allard said. “We love using it. Something else that a lot of people only use for bowls mostly is acai, but we use those in our smoothies as well. It just blends really well. Acai has immense benefits for your body and your immune system. We try to add as many good things as we can. Some fruits that I’d love to start kind of playing around with, and I don’t think many places use it, is like jackfruit. We use kiwi, but I think we can add kiwi a little bit more to some of our blends. We have some ideas for the summer, maybe sipping out of a coconut with a fresh smoothie.”

Selling smoothies from a stand-alone location has been an adjustment, Allard said, but customers have found it.

“It’s definitely a more intentional customer,” he said. “In the mall we were able to maybe stand out in the hallway, hand out some samples, maybe get a customer here or there. It feels more intentional here. We’ve become more of a destination spot. Our regulars that we had for 15 years in the mall have come to us now, knowing that we’re in a new spot. We’re definitely getting more regulars here.”

“Because we’re known for our dairy-free and gluten-free smoothies,” he said, “we really want to take that into our food aspect and offer just a really good place to go that has gluten-free, dairy-free options. We’re very allergy-friendly. If you have a peanut allergy, any type of allergy, we definitely accommodate anything like that. So our main goal is to just be that spot where you can go get a sandwich one day, get a smoothie the next, maybe get a coffee, and be confident in what you’re getting.”

That Smoothie Spot
102 March Ave., Manchester, 408-1390, facebook.com/ThatSmoothieSpotNH
Hours: open Tuesday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and weekends, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

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