again, Cantor demonstrates that not ail the good music is on the charts. And sit tight for his immi nent release of new product from Burlington’s reigning bluegrass boys, Breakaway.
WEB OF DECEIT I promised I’d
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cal chairs this week is the departure of three members from the large acid-jazzy family that is viperHouse. Vocalist Heloise Williams, trumpeter Brian Boyce and percussionist P.J. Davidian are departing, each for different rea sons, but all surely the result of the band’s incessant — and financially draining — touring over the past year or so. Williams decided the size of the band was no longer the right fit for her, explains viper Manager NiCOle SaltUS. “She wants to do some other musical projects but will take some time to figure it out.” For his part, Boyce is leaving to teach music at Cabot High School, which he had been doing, but found “teaching plus touring too stressful and strenu ous,” Saltus says, adding that Davidian, the youngest member, is going after a better-paying day job and will also continue other musi cal projects. “We sort of knew about Heloise and Brian for a while, then P.J. said he was leaving,” says Saltus, “so we just decided to have everyone leave at once so we could make the big change.” Without a lead vocalist, that change will leave room for “more improvisation and experi
mentation,” Saltus explains. Under the seasoned direction of saxophon ist Michael Chorney, the remain ing six members have already begun to rehearse music in new directions. The band plays its last nine-mem ber show June 10 at Higher Ground, and introduces the septet — with new tenor sax man Zack Tennyson — June 15, at the Mad Mountain Tavern in Waitsfield.
SPINNING OUT THE NON-HITS Mitch Cantor must believe good things come in threes — or fours. Owner of the little local label Gadfly Records, he always seems to release several new CDs at a time, and the latest offering is no excep tion. Try Love is a collection of 14 tunes by songwriter Julie Gold, whose career as a songwriter took off after penning Bette Midler’s Grammy-winning “From a Distance” in 1990. Tjalkuri is the eponymous release of Australian pop-rocker Broughton Mitchell, who got his other moniker — and some of his musical influences — from the aboriginal tribe he lived with for some time. And Odd Fellows comes from The Spongetones, North Carolina’s appealing power popsters with dis tinct Liverpool influences. Once
get back to you on the mp3 ripoff, but unfortunately there’s not a lot of progress to report. Regular readers will recall a few weeks back that several Burlington bands — including Non Compos Mentis, Never Again and Chin Ho! — had discovered themselves appropriated on mp3.com. That is, someone had altered their band and CD names, even fabricated band bios, influences and favorite other artists, and presented them on pages within the music Web site. In the case of NCM, fake CDs were actually being sold, with a different title but using the band’s real logo and similar CD art. NCM frontman has the proof: He bought one. Matt Roy, guitarist for NCM and Drowningman, actually tracked down the guy — or girl — who did it at an e-mail address (sykoaffect@cs.com), but the perp “claimed someone had hacked into his account, and made it seem like it was someone else,” Roy says. He didn’t buy it, but there wasn’t much he could do, and CompuServe didn’t respond to requests for their e-mail client’s identity. “All the bands getting ripped off were on this one guy’s station,” Roy adds. On mp3, any one can create their own “station” — a sort of personal jukebox — with the music they like. Roy notes further that the names and
Band name of the w e e k :
titles the person created — e.g., Tides of Darkness, Warcraft — are from role-playing games, sug gesting an adolescent boy. Though mp3 personnel removed the fake pages after receiving complaints from Burlington bands, they have done nothing else. “I don’t think anyone at mp3 cares,” says Roy. “You can stop this person selling, but mp3 gets 50 percent, so where’s our money?”
SINGLE TRACKS Speaking of Drowningman — that’s a photo of frontman Simon Brody on the brand-new 242 Main home page, shot by 19-year-old photog Veronique Ouellette. Designed by Jim Lockridge of Big Heavy World, the Web site is courtesy of Together Networks. Check it out at homepages, together.net/-club242 . . . Chin Ho! has licensed “(I Wish I was a) Girl” for use during the XGames 2000 on ESPN, airing this August and September from San Francisco . . . St. Albans singersongwriter Kate Barclay has another licensing deal, too: Songs from her Sunshine From Mars have been signed up by the media com pany Oxygen Media — co-owned by Oprah Winfrey — for use somewhere on the 24-hour cable network. Oxygen also owns Internet sites catering to women (oxygen.com) . . . Finally, the State Song, “These Green Mountains,” penned by Plainfield native Diane Martin, has been safely signed into existence and christened, with a performance by the students ofTwinfield Union School. ®
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SEVEN DAYS
Records) — W ith the advent of jazz-rock fusion in the 1970s came much discussion about what jazz was or was not. The period in question, roughly from Miles Davis’ experiments on Bitches Brew in 1968 to the coming o f Wynton Marsalis in the early 1980s, was one in which jazz players incorporated rock rhythms and electric instruments into the genre, continuing to improvise as they always had. The arrival of Marsalis on the scene marked a new acoustic era in jazz, or, as some might see it, a step backward. Marsalis has since gone on to become an ardent spokesperson for neo-traditionalism, dismissing the fusion years as a wrong turn toward popular music, and attempting to define jazz for the masses from his respected position as head of jazz at Lincoln Center. The music of Jamie Masefield’s Jazz Mandolin Project has the potential to rekindle the flames of this jazz/not jazz discourse. With the release o f Xenoblast, the hybrid power trio that was born in Burlington has hit new heights o f improvisational sophistication, although its instrumentation and its approach are way out side o f what Wynton Marsalis calls “the tradi tion.” The mandolin, though strong on percus sive attack, is a low-volume instrument — or at least it was until Masefield amped it up over the top o f bass and drums in large venues. It is also a tightly strung instrument, which limits its ability to sustain or reverberate. Making the most o f these inherent limitations, Masefield’s playing relies heavily on rhythm, though his melodic and harmonic statements are consider ably more sophisticated than those of the so-
called jam band milieu from which JMP emerged seven years ago. He also takes an electric approach to the acoustic instrument, even incorporating electronic sound effects. Much of the material on Xenoblast has an underlying rock groove laid down by the fiery drumming of Ari Hoenig and straight-ahead bass work of Chris Dahlgren, though calling it rock music would trivialize it. The band recently signed with the premier jazz label Blue Note, and the word Jazz is, after all, one third of their name. So are they playing jazz? Listeners can decide for themselves when JMP open up the Discover Jazz Festival next month — June 6 at the Flynn Theatre. — Richard Mayer
ranges from songs by Eric Anderson, Stan Rogers and Si Kahn to a Georgia Sea Islands hymn about the Titanic to lyrics by Rudyard Kipling set to an original melody, but one is left with the distinct impression that this is a home grown Vermont production. The meat-andpotatoes of the disc are songs you might hear around a fireplace some winter night, deep in the wilds of rural Rutland County. The music was mainly recorded at Horace Williams’ Little Castle Studios in Starksboro. Little Castle is justly noted as one of the best studios in the state for acoustic production, because of Williams’ affinity for folk music and his will ingness to let the musicians call the shots with a minimum of artistic interference. One thing that comes across immediately is that Woodchucks’ Revenge love their music. This is a band that doesn’t just learn someone else’s material and rehash it. The research and care the trio has applied to Fill One Room are evi dent in “The Song of the Vermonters,” a W hittier poem set to music by the band. Every song, though, is performed with affection and attention to detail. Peter Cady provides lead vocals on some of the most memorable cuts, WOODCHUCKS’ REVENGE, FILL O N E ROOM including “Brisbane Ladies” and “The Sack of (self-released, CD) — Woodchucks’ Revenge is the Gods” — the Kipling poem. He also sup a hard-working band from plies a strong, on-key Pittsford — they play what center for what are seems like hundreds of gigs, 4 sometimes very shaky large and small, all over vocals and harmonies. Vermont every year. Members Fill One Room is the Kristina and Peter Cady and perfect CD for the Sandy Morse recently released band’s many fans who their second CD, Fill One want a true-to-life Room, named after the song recording to entertain penned by Vermont folk-singer them at home between and State Senator (D-Windsor) Woodchuck gigs. Dick McCormack, which closes — Robert Resnik the recording. The material here F i ll O n e R o o m
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