mon: r
happy hural grit WeD 2/12our 6-9 // karaok e @ 10pm ChriS m the pleaeCk & the guilty S BirDS, e p Fri 2/14 SyDney WrighleaSe me, t Y 9 p m Sha Sat 2/15 BleSSeD DeS oF JaDe - 9pm Br t h e WeD 2/19 SaWyerSoke, DeaD VoiCe- no CoVer S, m a r thu 2/2 ia the Fri 2/21 0 nu-Blu, CoWmeXiCan, lanCe raChel r girl’S tra CanaleS in 9p ie Sat 2/22 the SeCret lS, anthony laDeSet - 9pm m truCkSt iQuor Cur SiCh anD op hone ymoon e, Ben SummerS
LIVE MUSIC EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT 8-12PM Feb. 14 - Junebug & The Porchlights Feb. 21 - Allied Saints
Feb. 28 - Tru Blood Blues Band Mar. 7 - Blue Orleans
Mar. 17 - St. Patty’s Day Party w/ Junebug & The Porchlights!
CHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE FOR FOOD SPECIALS & UPCOMING BAND DATES!
523 E. Red Bridge Rd. KCMO • Red Bridge Shopping Center •
816.942.0400 • www.theDailyLimitkc.com
26
the pitch
f e b r u a r y 1 3 - 1 9, 2 0 1 4
music
Sabor Del amor
Making Movies has your
By
Valentine’s Day recipe for love.
N ata l ie G a l l a Ghe r
I
t’s easy for a band like Making Movies to stand out in Kansas City. The foursome — Panamanian-born brothers Enrique and Diego Chi, Mexican-born Juan-Carlos Chaurand, KCborn Brendan Culp — are used to the confusion of new fans when they explain that their psych-rock and Latin-jazz fusion sprouted in decidedly unspicy Midwestern fields. They’re also quite proud of that fact. Last March, Making Movies released the Steve Berlin–produced full-length A La Deriva, an excellent collection of highly danceable, energetic songs sung in Spanish and English. This Valentine’s Day, the band celebrates its fifth anniversary at RecordBar. We chatted with lead singer and guitarist Enrique Chi over the phone from his Kansas City home. The Pitch: You’re playing on Valentine’s Day. Do you envision this as a great big love fest, or is this a show that all the single saps can enjoy? Making Movies: your wingmen Chi: I think it’ll be for both. We have the luck all the ideas in music today. Electronic stuff, of having a fan family that’s really diverse. new-wave punk stuff that we’re into, all that Once we start playing, the whole audience gets up to dance. Even if you’re bringing a date, stuff mixed up together. We try to find the link with all of it. that’s great — you can dance and have a good I imagine that you see some very different time together. I should say that there’s always audiences when you take your music to different more girls willing to dance than there are guys willing to dance, so if you’re a guy and you’re coasts and on international tours. What makes the Kansas City audience different, and why do willing to dance, our shows are great. you keep coming back to it? Your music highlights a variety of influences, I like the diversity here. With the other cities from cumbia to Afro-Cuban beats to classic American rock. People have a hard time agree- we go to — we fit more easily into Latin events, ing on what genre to put you into. What gives a Hispanic events, because there’s more of a population or it’s more of an ingrained thing in that song a Making Movies sound? I think our songs need to be a link between city, whether it’s San Antonio or L.A. There’s already a scene of Mexican-American kids whatever shared DNA between a blues song and a Cuban song or a Mexican or Afro-Peruvian who read Pitchfork and listen to mainstream radio. When we play those shows, the audience rhythm. There’s some linked DNA. I think is a little more specific: more Hispanic, more music shows how cultures come together. There are similarities between music Latino. When we’re in Kansas City, because there hasn’t been a scene for that kind of music all throughout the Americas, because it’s yet and because there aren’t that weird mix — a cocka lot of events for us to play, tail created by the African Making Movies our audience is very mixed. slaves coming over with With the Conquerors I remember when we whatever Europeans were Friday, February 14, played the Buzz’s Homebringing them over. And in at RecordBar grown for the Holidays show Latin America, that was the in November, and it was for Spanish, and the Spanish an audience for all these kids that probably brought guitars, and then that mixed in with the indigenous people. So every country, ev- had never heard a band sing in Spanish. Maybe ery region, has its own little flavor, but there’s 400 people there had heard of us, but the other also some common bonds. And I guess that’s 1,200 had no idea who we were. We brought El Grupo Atotonilco [a traditional folk-dance what we’re searching for: common bonds. group], and they went into their dance rouAnd what we’ve found is that when we hit the tine, and the look on these kids’ faces — you nail on the head and combine those things the right way, it sounds like us, but it’s also a way know, 96.5 the Buzz listeners, 18-to-23-year-old people who are just there to see an indie-folk to connect with thousands of people. band the Mowgli’s. And their faces light up. We grab the Latin American soil that we were born on, and take an old, traditional They don’t know what they’re seeing. That’s what makes it fun and special to us, folk-song structure, and we rearrange it with
pitch.com
that we get to be the vehicle that exposes them to those kinds of things. If those kids would have grown up in L.A., they probably would have already seen a performance like that at some point in their lives. So it’s a chance for us to introduce this to audiences. We can be a curator for some of this kind of stuff in Kansas City, and that makes it really special to play here.
E-mail natalie.gallagher@pitch.com
J a z z B e at Eboni FondrEn QuartEt, at thE broadway Jazz Club and thE GrEEn lady lounGE
Eboni Fondren has a voice that drips with the blues and a seductive power — a song from her pulls you in, then knocks you around with a powerful, sultry swing. She’s got quite the pedigree, too, having spent eight years singing with organist Everette DeVan, and she can still sometimes be heard sitting in with DeVan’s Tuesday jams at the Phoenix. She has performed musical roles, and she has her own ensembles. Among the best is the Eboni Fondren Quartet, backed by the exquisite piano of Charles Williams. Two shows this week offer two chances to hear the group: Friday at the Broadway Jazz Club and Saturday at the Green Lady Lounge. — Larry Kopitnik Eboni Fondren Quartet, 9 p.m.–1 a.m. Friday, February 14, at the Broadway Jazz Club (3601 Broadway, 816-298-6316), $5 cover; 9 p.m.–1 a.m. Saturday, February 15, at the Green Lady Lounge (1809 Grand, 816-215-2954), no cover.