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ENTERTAINMENT
Saturday, Feb. 23, 2013
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Garrett and all that jazz BY LANA MICHELIN ADVOCATE STAFF Juno Award-winning guitarist Amos Garrett is aiming to crank up the thermostat on jazz when his trio performs in downtown Red Deer. Anyone who thinks jazz is cold, overintellectualized music likely hasn’t heard the Amos Garrett Jazz Trio. “The motto of our group is bringing the blues back into jazz,” said the High River resident, who’s known internationally for his innovative guitar style. “Jazz used to be extremely visceral,” added Garrett, who believes the emotional component that was inherent to the improvised genre has somehow disappeared over the last two decades. “There was a tremendous blues influence but it’s been lost over the last 20 years and, as a result, this has driven a lot of fans away.” When Garrett performs along with finger-style guitarist Keith Smith and string bassist Greg Carroll on Friday, March 1, at The Hub on Ross, the trio intends to get things cooking in the bebop style of the 1940s and early ’50s. “People love it, they absolutely love it,” said Garrett. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Geez, I really didn’t think I liked jazz’ — but they love what we do.” The concert program, drawn from the group’s new CD, will include standards such as Miles Davis’s Freddy Freeloader, Thelonious Monk’s Misterioso, Art Tatum’s Cocktails for Two, Freddie Hubbard’s Little Sunflower, and Skylark, by Hoagy Carmichael, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Garrett said the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie is what he listened to as a teenager in the 1950s. It was staking out new ground, since his
‘THE MOTTO OF OUR GROUP IS BRINGING THE BLUES BACK INTO JAZZ.’ — AMOS GARRETT
father was devoted to the early swingera jazz of the 1930s. “That would have been New Orleans, Chicago, Dixieland. . . . “My dad was what bebop players would have referred to as a ‘mouldy fig,’ ” Garrett added, with a chuckle. The 71-year-old guitarist was born in Detroit, but raised in Toronto, where his parents put him into piano and trombone lessons. Garrett didn’t find an instrument that suited him until he took up the guitar at 14. Then, he took to it so well he was performing gigs a year later. By the time he hit college age, Garrett was learning the early acoustic blues of Robert Johnson and Leadbelly and working hard at developing his own style of playing. The technique he eventually came up with involves bending more than one guitar string at a time, which allows him to sound something like a steel-pedal guitarist, while remaining rooted as a jazz player. “It’s an almost impossible style,” admitted Garrett, who noted that despite his teaching DVDs, only Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and a few other guitarists have managed to put the technique into practise. “It’s very physically difficult.” Among the many luminaries Garrett has played with over the years were Ian and Sylvia Tyson and their Great Speckled Bird band, Anne Murray, and Geoff and Maria Muldaur. In fact, he played the famed guitar solo in Maria Muldaur’s 1974 hit Midnight at
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Alberta based Amos Garrett will perform at The Hub on March 1. the Oasis. For the past 30 years, Garrett has led his own bands, including an acoustic act, a blues band and the jazz trio. The guitarist said he loves playing for a club-sized crowd, as is expected at The Hub.
Just a hint of subtlety BUT THIS EARLY PROMISE SOON FADES AND SNITCH BECOMES ANOTHER TYPICAL BRAWNY THRILLER Snitch 2.5 stars (out of four) Rated: PG Snitch is torn from the headlines, the “inspired by true events” story of a regular dad who turns vigilante squealer to aid a son unreasonably jailed for drug trafficking. Where it’s really coming from, though, is actor Dwayne PETER Johnson’s resumé. The actor HOWELL formerly known as The Rock, back when he kicked asses for real as a wrestler, is keen to show that he’s more than a brawny force of nature. The ambition is admirable, as is Johnson’s effort, but the casting is questionable. Few people are going to buy this physically imposing guy as someone meek enough to be kicked to the ground by raggedy
MOVIES
“It’s a really nice performance space, with a nice sound system, and the people are so nice. . . .” Tickets for the 7 to 9 p.m. show at 4936 Ross St. are $20 at the door. Cash only. lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com Photo by ADVOCATE NEWS SERVICES
Dwayne Johnson is trying to broaden his acting chops, but in the end his latest movie, Snitch, falls into a familiar pattern.
drug dealers, as happens early in the film. That’s when it still seems that Snitch might be a bone with real meat on it, before it becomes just another bone to beat people over the head with. Directed by veteran Hollywood stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, who co-writes with Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road), the film initially sets up a moral quandary as urgent as a New York Times editorial from this very week. The Times questions, as does Snitch, whether current mandatory minimum sentence laws stateside, typically doled out for drug offences, are fair and just. The film’s “inspired” story sets 18-year-old Jason (Rafi Gavron) as a good Missouri kid who gets caught accepting a stash of ecstasy pills couriered to him by a weasel pal. Timid Jason is a first-time offender, but he’s sent up for a minimum 10 years that could stretch to 30, a no-mercy penalty exceeding those handed to many child molesters, rapists and other heinous scum. The weasel pal, a drug dealer nailed by a federal sting operation, betrayed Jason after being offered a reduced prison sentence in exchange for ratting out an accomplice.
A similar devil’s pact is offered to Johnson’s John Matthews, a trucking firm owner and father of Jason. He’s told by U.S. Attorney Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon, coasting), a blunt woman with Congressional ambitions, that the only way she can reduce Jason’s sentence is if dad goes undercover to help the cops nab someone else to take the kid’s place. It doesn’t really matter who that someone else is, as long as drug cops can collar him. This squeal deal is another unsavoury aspect of current U.S. law, but Snitch quickly loses interest in moral quandaries. It instead hits the autopilot button, with Johnson literally driving his 18-wheeler into harm’s way to take on not just a neighbourhood drug thug but also an international crime kingpin named El Topo (Benjamin Bratt). Johnson’s brow furrows and his muscles flex; so much for character nuance. Fortunately, there’s bench strength beyond the bench presses. Michael K. Williams (TV’s The Wire) is scarily brilliant as El Topo’s street enforcer, although you almost need subtitles to understand what he’s saying. Jon Bernthal (TV’s The Walking Dead) is aces as the ex-con trucking firm employee who reluctantly helps Matthews penetrate the drug underworld. And Barry Pepper, sporting a ZZ Top beard as a streetwise undercover drug cop torn by ethical concerns, displays the kind of character complexity that Johnson could only hope to achieve, and perhaps will someday. Williams, Bernthal and Pepper ride to the rescue of the marquee talent, and also to Snitch. Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.
Opening a window into the infinite MICKEY HART BAND EXPLORES NEW MUSICAL TERRAIN IN RED DEER CONCERT From the cross-cultural to the cosmic, the Mickey Hart Band concert with the African Showboyz was ‘out there’ in the best of ways. From the minute the African Showboyz claimed Red Deer’s Memorial Centre stage on Thursday night, the audience of about 300 knew they were about to explore some exciting — maybe even uncharted — musical territory. The Showboyz’s energized, rhythmic songs from West Africa stirred up the eclectic crowd, which included aging ’60s types (including a few tie-dye sporting LANA Deadheads), as MICHELIN well as bearded young hipsters in crocheted head gear. The only instruments the four singing Sabbah brothers played were a couple of handmade drums, a twostring guitar and a round shaker, like a large maraca without a handle. Yet the four acoustic musicians from Ghana created a wall of soulexpanding emotional sound that could send shivers down your back — especially when they combined their hypnotic African beats with Bob Marley’s
REVIEW
plaintive and powerful Redemption Song lyrics. “How did you feel it, brothers and sisters?” asked the group’s founder Napoleon Sabbah, to wild cheers from listeners. The audience, warmed up by the African Showboyz, cooled down again during the long wait for the Mickey Hart Band to take the stage (one guy was desperately shouting for dancing girls as an alternative to the canned music we’d been listening to for some 50 minutes). Lucky for fans — and also presumably for Hart — the former Grateful Dead drummer delivered a heck of a show when he finally took the stage with seven other musicians and vocalists. The concert sponsored by the Central Music Festival went for an hourlong first set, then, after a half-hour intermission, another set that was still running when I had to bail at 11:15 p.m. By that time, people were dancing in the aisles, and the few disappointed Deadheads who had skipped out when it became apparent that Hart was not doing a Grateful Dead tribute show were missing out on some truly kaleidoscopic music. A few of the songs were a throw to Hart’s former legendary band — including Ramble on Rose and Shakedown Street, which went over big with the baby boomer crowd. But most of the tunes delivered by the Mickey Hart Band were decades
younger than the Grateful Dead. In fact, many were off the recent Mysterium Tremendum album that was created by taking light, radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation given off by the sun, planets, stars and galaxies and using computers to transform them into soundwaves. The band’s spectral songs sound as if a window had been opened on the infinite. Starlight, Starbright, Endless Skies and Let There Be Light featured haunting, ethereal vocals by spectacular singer Crystal Monee Hall, supported by the soulful Joe Bagale, who is also the band’s keyboardist. Bagale and the other musicians — including Hart, Greg Schutte and Sikiru Adepoju on elaborate percussion, Gawain Mathews on guitar, Dave Schools on bass and Jonah Sharp on synthesizer — created eerie spectral soundscapes. Amid the melodic bleeps were some garbled, sing-song-y fragments of conversation — the kind of sound snippets that might be caught by a transmitter in the cosmos light years after first being broadcast on Earth. At one point, Hart dragged a violin bow across a synthesizer, adding a high-pitched space moan to the aural landscape. It was a very cool touch and the audience was transfixed. The Mickey Hart Band switched up the mood by performing Code War (a song Hart wrote with Sammy Hagar), Fire on the Mountain, the beautiful Jersey Shore (written for a Superstorm
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Mickey Hart has gone beyond his roots with the legendary Grateful Dead. Sandy benefit), and the infectious Iko, Iko with the African Showboyz. Like Robert Plant, a member of another legendary 1960s-’70s group who refuses to be pinned down by Led Zeppelin fans, Hart clearly prefers exploring new musical terrain, instead of rehashing the old. After his band’s fascinating spaceage concert in Red Deer, it could even be argued that Hart is boldly venturing where no musician has gone before. lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com