music
Music
Now that Live Wire Music Hall has passed into collective memory, the guys who ran the “music” end of the club — brothers Daniel and Brenden Robertson — are staying in the rock ‘n’ roll game, via their Live Wire Sound Inc. and Love Music imprints.
By Bill DeYoung
Friday at 9:30 p.m., Sunday at 11:30 a.m.
bill@connectsavannah.com
Zach Deputy
JUN 19-JUN 25, 2013 | WWW.CONNECTSAVANNAH.COM
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This weekend’s Savannah Summer Solstice Festival is very much like your cross-America jam band fests — loads of music jammed into three days, of varying styles on several stages, with all the amenities including primitive camping, should that be where one’s inclinations lie. The Robertsons believe it’s Savannah’s first such festival. It’s at the 200-acre Red Gate Farms, an RV/camping facility on the west side of town. Local restaurants will have groovy grub for sale, and the event also includes multiple art, culture and info vendors on-site. As for the tuneage, a good many of these artists — most are local, although some aren’t — proved themselves audience favorites at one time or another at the good old Live Wire Music Hall. You want to talk about the DIY ethos? Zach Deputy does everything himself. He’s a bearded barrelhouse of a one-man band, in every sense you can imagine. The Savannah native was a beat-boxing youngster, fascinated by hip hop and also obsessed with calypso and island music (his mother comes from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands), rhythm ‘n’ blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Growing up in Bluffton, he was the 17-year-old “token white kid” in the long-lived R&B group These Guys, which still performs regularly up Hilton Head way. The thing is, Zach Deputy has a four-octave vocal range. And he can play just about any instrument. And that’s what he does — through a mountain of onstage looping machines and processors, he plays — and sings — everything you hear. Judging by his esteemed status at jam band festivals over the last seven or eight years, he’s more fun that a lot of full bands we could name. “Early on, I had no intention of being a loop artist,” Deputy tells Connect. “It was something I was doing on the side. But over the course of time, I found that the things I was trying to achieve, I was able to communicate as well as I was able to just do it through the loop machine. “I still thought that eventually I was going to have a band. But it was more like the people spoke than anything. My following for my loop machine show just increased.” Like guitarist Keller Williams, or punk player Jay Vance (the creator of Captured! By Robots), Deputy finds freedom in working without other musicians. “When you start doing some of the Latin stuff, the bass lines are kinda backwards to American music,” he explains. “I love playing bass. I love seeing the whole spectrum of what all’s going on in a song. And so I understand it. But explain that to a bass player; it’s really hard for them if all their fundamentals are in American music. “So it’s hard to find people that have the same kind of feel or vision for music that you do, when your vision is not narrow. It’s very broad. And I’ve always had a very broad vision of music, due to my upbringing and where I’m from.” He does enjoy “doing the band thing,” he says, and has plans to delve further into that world in the near future. “But when you’re solo, you don’t have to think about anything. You get this feeling like ‘Oh, I want to go here’ and then you just go there. You don’t signal it.” He can switch up the rhythms, change keys, beef the aura and cue background vocals, all without taking his hands off the guitar. Connect: It’s like being a singing drummer, isn’t it? You’re using both feet, both hands and your brain simultaneously! “The brain is going crazy,” Deputy replies with a chuckle. “For me, I get in a zone. Everybody has their zone, and some people are really good at doing one thing. Some people can do one thing better than I can do, because I work better in the medium of the more I do, the more pocket I get, it calms me down. I have more tunnel vision when I’m over-challenged.”
Larry Mitchell Band
At 1 p.m. Sunday A former session and tour player, Mitchell is an insanely good guitarist who’s more interested in putting across tones and emotions, as opposed to simply shredding — which he can do, too. He’s appeared in Savannah before (at the Live Wire Music Hall, in fact) with a drummer and bassist, for the full Experience (get it?) The winner of 25 New Mexico Music Awards, Larry won a Grammy in 2007 for production work on Native American artist Johnny Whitehorse’s album Totemic Flute Chants. He’s released six solo albums encompassing everything from world music and Native American Contemporary and/or Traditional to rap, rock and children’s music. “I like to play for people and get their reaction to it,” he’s said. “I like to hear people laugh, smile, cry, whatever. If they enjoy it, then that’s great. If they don’t enjoy it, I understand that. Music is a personal choice, so I don’t expect everyone to like it. I just hope I can reach a lot of different people.”