Antsy Griffith Austin’s Nanci Griffith is holed up in Nashville recording Blue Roses From the Moon(s) (Elektra), which should be in stores this spring. The album’s release coincides with the tenth anniversary of Griffith’s first collaboration with her band, the Blue Moon Orchestra, and features guest appearances by Buddy Holly’s
Hot CDsTwo years after their wildly successful debut, Elida y Avante bounce back from label troubles with Algo Entero (Tejas). For my money, Mercedes-born Elida Reyna is tejano’s next female superstar. Her husky, throbbing voice is mature well beyond her 24 years—she has the archetypal blend of innocence and experience—and
Around the State subheading: A selective guide to amusements and events. Edited by Quita McMath, Josh Daniel, Erin Gromen, and Cheri Ballew summary: Members of Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys and Playgirls stage a swinging comeback (Austin and Bandera). Plus: The Day of the Dead lives (Austin, El Paso, Houston, and
ON MAY 29, 1995, TWO MONTHS AFTER THE TRAGIC death of tejano star Selena, a tribute was staged in her honor at Houston’s Astrodome. Although many well-known acts performed that day, including hometown superstars La Mafia and Selena’s former bandmate Pete Astudillo, it was an unknown eleven-year-old dynamo named Jennifer
TEN DAYS AFTER HE CELEBRATED HIS FOURTEENTH birthday by downing a seafood dinner and playing a concert in Milwaukee, Quindon Tarver is on top of the world. Actually, he’s on top of Reunion Tower in Dallas, sucking down a virgin piña colada at the Antares restaurant and talking about his
BEN KWELLER WON’T BE SEEING THE INSIDE of a high school classroom this year, though he could have penned a pretty nifty “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” essay. The fifteen-year-old is the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and pianist for Radish, an astonishingly tuneful alternative-rock trio that has spent the
LIKE COWBOYS AND INDIANS or steak and eggs, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are a classic Western duo. Roy was raised in Duck Run, Ohio, but Dale is Texas’ own, born in Uvalde and raised in tiny Italy. From childhood she was determined to become an entertainer, and after false
Hot CDsSalt? Fat? Excess? You’ll get none of that from the women of Pork. On their second album, Slop (Emperor Jones/Trance Syndicate), the Austin trio gets maximum results from a minimalist approach. Like a modern-day Modern Lovers, the band has a simple, timeless garage-rock sound that thrives on a patchwork
My parents were jazzers. In 1954 my father was appointed chairman of the music department at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville; my mother sang live on the radio. My first memory of any sound at all was of Miles Davis’ muted trumpet; I came out in my pajamas
Most businesses in the West Texas town of Alpine cater to locals, but one attracts Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Junior Brown, and other musical greats. It’s the modest building where Michael Stevens, luthier to the stars, produces electric guitars—fewer than two dozen a year, at $2,700 to $10,000 plus. “We
East meets Southwest in an unprecedented festival of Japanese culture in Dallas. Plus: Texas rock and rollers shake their Hootie; Lubbock gets down for a four-day celebration of cowboys and cool tunes; the University of Texas Longhorns host the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame—and give one of their own the
WHEN WE LIVED IN RIVER OAKS, three or four boys and I would go down to the creek when it was hot, when the dragonflies were louder than the wind and the air was so still that it felt like it weighed a ton—but you’re seven years old and you
Hot CDs The boys from Bedhead wipe the sleep from their eyes with Beheaded (Trance Syndicate), a volume of 1995 recordings that serves as the band’s second album. The brainy Dallas quintet’s three-guitar setup shimmers and creeps, foreshadowing the hypnotic bursts of woozy but assertive riffs and unassumingly catchy tunesmithing.
AUSTINITE MARCIA BALL’s File Under Blues (Rounder), which she is co-producing with guitarist Derek O’Brien and saxophonist Mark “Kaz” Kazanoff, is in production at Austin’s Arlyn studios. The hardest-tinkling pianist in show business is recording songs like “The Right Tool for the Job” between her more than fifty touring dates
Hot CDsBraver Newer World (Elektra) might well be the record that Jimmie Dale Gilmore has always wanted to make. A radical departure in both instrumentation (the sitar and fuzz guitars of the title track) and arrangements (the overhaul of Joe Ely’s “Because of the Wind”), it’s the closest the Austin-via-Lubbock
THE MAIN EVENTWillie Powerby Erin Gromen This July 4 in Luckenbach, you can get Kinky, start Waylon, and fall Asleep at Willie Nelson’s annual picnic—.When he first sang “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas, with Waylon and Willie and the boys” almost twenty years ago, Waylon Jennings forever linked himself and
Hot CDsGrammy award aside, Flaco Jiménez’s last solo album was a big disappointment, for it showed how far Texas’ greatest accordionist had strayed. After all those studio sit-ins with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Dwight Yoakam and those trips around the globe as the ambassador of Tex-Mex, his
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Jerry Jeff Walker—and now Junior Brown? The former community college teacher is the latest outlaw to hijack Texas country music, and he may be the greatest.
Oak Cliff native Roy Hargrove may not have the depth and seasoning of Wynton Marsalis, but the 26-year-old prodigy could still be one of the great jazz trumpeters of our day.
Hot CDsAustin immigrant Bob Mould made two solo records after the breakup of his first band, Hüsker Dü; now the demise of his latest band, Sugar, has led to a third. Self-produced, entirely self-played, and unassumingly self-titled, the Rykodisc release finds Mould’s somber vocals and crystalline guitar lines meandering from
When the double life of pioneering record producer Huey Meaux was exposed, it was time to face the music: How well did I really know the legend I once called my friend?
summary: From Nanci Griffith to Butch Hancock, the stars will shine at this year’s Kerrville Folk Festival—the kickoff of a year-long twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. Plus: Dead presidents in Austin, Spanish masterpieces in Dallas, a haunting opera in Houston, and tee time in Fort Worth. Edited by Quita McMath, Erin Gromen, and
Austin singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin is at Cedar Creek studios this month completing a new album, to be released by Columbia Records as early as this summer. Some songs will be produced by John Leventhal, who did Colvin’s Steady On, and others by Malcolm Burn, who has worked with the Neville
I had my first dancing lesson in Amarillo with Constance Ferguson. Constance had been out in California studying ballet with Theodore Kosloff, one of Pavlova’s partners, but she came back to Amarillo and wanted to open a dancing school. Up on the very top floor of a great old hotel
Willie Nelson may not be a radio staple anymore, but a new tribute album recorded by some of rock’s coolest stars shows that his music is still moving to them.
Abra Moore likes herself, a revelation that comes as she grooves to the music piping through an Austin cafe. It sounds good to her—the singer knowing and ethereal, the sound a jazzy, ruminative folk-pop with a fragile ache. But wait: It’s the sound of her own recent solo debut, Sing
Computer-aided choreography, professional composers to score the music, mammoth budgets: At high schools and colleges across Texas these days, marking bands are playing for keeps.
