Tag: New Orleans

The Show On The Road – Anna Moss (Handmade Moments)

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we feature a conversation taped live in New Orleans with Arkansas-born multi-instrumentalist and roots-soul singer Anna Moss, who has criss-crossed the country in recent years with her sonic partner Joel Ludford in their band, Handmade Moments.

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Growing up as a bathroom-singing nerd playing saxophone in the school band, Anna admits that if she could wield any superpower it might be invisibility. Not necessarily the first thing you think of for an openly political, big-voiced folk festival favorite who has made a name for herself sitting in with some of the biggest names in the Americana scene. A recent collaboration with Rainbow Girls bore especially potent fruit — and if you read my Music That Moved Me in 2022 list, you’ll see at the very top was Anna’s thorny “Big Dick Energy.”

Rarely does a song make you laugh and then dance and then follow with a sucker punch about how unsafe many women feel just taking up space in the world. The video also illustrates the song’s deft twist: Women can gang together to mock and minimize the men who for so long have taken away their agency and power. And yet, the song also makes you want to forget it all and just groove to the sexiest flute solo in recent memory. If this is a foreshadowing of what’s to come with Anna’s solo work, call me quite intrigued.

Whether she’s playing crunchy bass clarinet or upright bass, electric or acoustic guitar, or singing with Joel in Handmade Moments or her other jazzy group, the Nightshades, Anna is never shy about speaking her mind in her music. Take a listen to Handmade Moments’ rapidly rhyming, gorgeously harmonized climate-change banger, “Hole In The Ocean,” which wouldn’t feel out of place in a slam-poetry jam. A song on their forthcoming record End Of The Wars (coming in May) directly confronts Trump’s cult-like status, again not pulling any punches. Want to see an early version of the song played with sax in a cave? Sure you do.

The dangers of the road are not lost on Anna and Joel of course. They were hit head-on during a freak accident on a run in Northern California years back and were lucky to make it out relatively unscathed. She’s trying to keep things a bit mellower these days. It was special talking to Anna in her adopted new home of New Orleans, and the soulful sounds that trickle into her living room on Frenchman Street can be heard throughout the songs she’s working on. Fittingly, a slow burn live track she released, “Slow Down, Kamikaze,” is a great reminder to stop trying to do too much and focus on what actually matters.

LISTEN: Acantha Lang, “Ride This Train”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Acantha Lang
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Song: “Ride This Train”
Album: Beautiful Dreams
Release Date: April 14, 2023

In Their Words: “At its core, ‘Ride This Train’ is about never giving up on your dreams. We all get disheartened, and certainly on my journey in music, I’ve had times when I felt like giving up. I wrote this song as a reminder and an affirmation — ‘I’m gonna ride this train all the way to the end and when it stops I’m gonna start all over again!’ My dreams have taken me from my hometown in New Orleans to New York City, and on to London where I live now. I’ve been ‘riding trains’ and chasing dreams for a long time! It’s my love of music that has carried me through. It’s my calling. And I believe that we owe it to ourselves to follow our calling. Life is too short not to. (Also, it doesn’t hurt that the idea for the song came to me when I was traveling on a train to a studio writing session).” — Acantha Lang

Photo Credit: Katy Cummings

WATCH: The Revivalists, “Kid”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Revivalists
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Song: “Kid”
Album: Pour It Out Into the Night
Release Date: June 2, 2023
Label: Concord Records

In Their Words: “‘Kid’ is about capturing the essence of life. We all go through ups and downs. Sometimes, we don’t believe in ourselves. We’ve got skeletons in the closet trying to drag us down. But you’ve got to believe in yourself. You’ve just got to live for the spirit. Nothing good ever comes easy. If you don’t have hope, what do you have?” — David Shaw, vocalist/guitarist

“As you get into new phases of life, you’re always learning, growing, having new experiences, trying to achieve something. Everyone has an inner child, or like many of us in the band, we have our own children now, and this song is just saying ‘hey, you got this’ to anyone in any generation who may need to hear that.” — George Gekas, bassist

“David and I wrote the bulk of ‘Kid’ on January 6, 2021. My wife was one month pregnant with our twins, and I had a fire lit under my ass to write a great song. But also, we were getting real-time updates on the insurrection at the Capitol. There was a lot of intense energy swirling around us that day as we were trying to stay focused on this exciting, beautiful thing we were channeling.” — Zack Feinberg, guitarist

“For this video, we wanted to focus on crafting something artistic and visually engaging, without really trying to tell a story or worrying too much about how it lines up thematically with the lyrics or anything like that. We were looking for ideas that were driven more by art and imagery than literalizing the text of the song. The specific concept came from a member of our management team named Adam Smith, who was inspired by a short video by a group of artists called Sunday Nobody Art where they used a series of stencils along a heavily graffitied tunnel to achieve a flipbook-style effect. We teamed up with director/animator Johnny Chew, who was really excited about the concept and totally understood what we were looking for. We wanted to use the city of New Orleans as a backdrop in order to showcase the character and color of our city. We debated the merits (and legal implications) of making physical stencils and using washable paint, but Johnny was confident that he could achieve the desired look by filming us individually in front of a green screen and then adding the wheatpaste effect in post and planting us on shots of the city. He knocked it out of the park. He took a lot of liberty with those little animations and artistic flourishes, and it really brought the video to life.” — Rob Ingraham, saxophonist

Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

WATCH: Golden Shoals, “Ain’t No New Orleans”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Golden Shoals
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Ain’t No New Orleans”
Album: Treading Water/Ain’t No New Orleans (Single)
Release Date: November 4, 2022

In Their Words: “I think New Orleans is the most important city in the US. It’s the birthplace of jazz, essential to the blues, and is one of the few places where chaos and spontaneity still thrive. It’s below (rising) sea level, and constantly sinking because of the way it was built by the first colonizers and those who came after. For me it’s a place where I get pushed out of my comfort zone, and learn about life, humanity, and American music. I don’t think the people in power are very concerned with protecting a place like this, or the people in it (the response to Katrina point to that fact). I tried to express all of this in four verses and an anthemic chorus. Hopefully the video, made up entirely of public domain clips from archive.org, reinforces these points. Hopefully things will change before the next Katrina happens.” — Mark Kilianksi, Golden Shoals

Photo Credit: Mike Dunn

The Show On The Road – Rebirth Brass Band

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we return to the Crescent City to talk to one of the new leaders of the Grammy-winning Rebirth Brass Band — trumpet player Glenn Hall III, who is part of a deep New Orleans musical family.

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Rebirth will be coming from NOLA to LA to help headline the inaugural Paramount Ranch Sonic Boom on October 15th. It’s a brand new music festival co-created by yours truly and Dustbowl Revival (along with Tiny Porch Concerts and the Santa Monica Mountains Fund) that will celebrate the confluence of American roots music by bringing together diverse acts like Grammy-winning folk-blues master Dom Flemons, and notable local Southern California-based acts the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, string-band Water Tower, Cuban group Yosmel Montejo y La Caliente and singer-songwriter Abby Posner.

Set in the green hills of the Santa Monica Mountains, partial proceeds from the fest will go to restoring historic Paramount Ranch, which lost much of its Western movie sets during a devastating wildfire.

Few bands of any kind can claim an unbroken lineage from their 1983 start. Phillip “Tuba Phil” Frazier, his brother Keith Frazier and renowned trumpet player Kermit Ruffins formed the group out of Joseph S. Clark Senior High School, located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. If you watched the acclaimed HBO series of the same name, you no doubt heard Rebirth as the brassy backdrop to the city as it constantly evolved and survived traumas like Hurricane Katrina. Members of the Frazier family still join the band on tours.

Glenn Hall III takes us through the fascinating history of the group, describing notable shows like opening for the Grateful Dead, recording with John Fogerty, kicking off the Grammys, and recently joining the Red Hot Chili Peppers onstage.

Their 2022 single “New Orleans Girl” shows how they never stop experimenting, lending their big sound to a hip-hop mashup featuring Cheeky Blakk and PJ Morton.

LISTEN: Daphne Parker Powell, “Carry My Cage”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Daphne Parker Powell
Hometown: I’m calling myself bicoastal right now (New London, CT, and New Orleans, LA)
Song: “Carry My Cage”
Album: The Starter Wife
Release Date: October 14, 2022
Label: Pleasure Loves Company

In Their Words: “‘Carry My Cage’ was one of the earliest pieces written for the album. It’s the one-that-got-away song. When I started dating the man I would later marry, I had been playing music with someone truly incredible, and without even really understanding it at the time we fell very much in love with each other. But I was young, impetuous, stubborn and my penchant for the bad boys won out. I hurt him so deeply when I chose my husband and for a long time we didn’t talk. It was then that I realized how deep our connection was. He moved away, pursued other relationships and musical adventures and I settled down and built a home, but after a time we decided to get back together and have coffee. I don’t think we talked more than an hour that day, we mostly just looked at each other the way Marina Abramović searches the eyes of strangers and finds deep familiarity and hidden love.

“After that day, with its strange silences and riptide of feeling, I came away more deeply self-aware than I could have imagined. I knew every stumbling block I had put in my own way, every decision that had caused hurt along the way and that was the beginning of healing the wounds I sustained with my own first experience of abandonment. For the first time I took responsibility, and I was going to be able, tools in hand, to fix what had been broken so long. I knew that I would always carry the confines of my own soul, flaws, and history, but that it could not keep me from flying anyway. From that moment forward, not only would we be ok, but we would find a way to thrive in each other’s care. Now years later, we are as close as we have ever been. I would change so many things, and I would change nothing.” — Daphne Parker Powell

Photo Credit: Jenny Thompson, Rose Gold Visuals

The Show On The Road – Leo Nocentelli (The Meters)

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we dial into New Orleans for a fascinating talk with master funk-guitarist and songwriter Leo Nocentelli. Discerning listeners may known him as the chief groove-creator behind the legendary group The Meters with Art Neville on keyboard, George Porter Jr. on bass, Zigaboo Modeliste on drums. There is no mistaking his soulful dagger-sharp signature sound leading often-sampled treasures like “Sissy Strut” and “Hey Pocky A-Way” (The Beastie Boys were big fans) — or even his slinky masterful backing of Dr. John’s classic Right Place, Wrong Time. But a new generation are learning of Nocentelli from last year’s surprise release of his first and only solo record, the acoustic folk-driven Another Side, which was resurrected and marketed by Light In The Attic Records nearly fifty years after Leo first recorded it.

 

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You don’t usually put your first record out when you’re zooming past your 75th birthday. The story of how Another Side still even exists is quite a yarn (one that Leo goes into great good-humored detail about in the taping) from the master tapes being lost in damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, to a master-copy being found almost impossibly after a storage-unit got foreclosed and the music was traded at a local swap-meet. Hearing him tell it, finding these songs from his younger days, was like finding an essential, lost piece of his soul. The record isn’t polished, but the sense of youthful exploration shines through. He’s searching for his voice in real time.

You wouldn’t think a rock-funk maven like Nocentelli would be inspired by songwriters like James Taylor or Elton John — but in many ways, it was the softer, more yearning, poetic side of rock-n-roll in the early 1970s that intrigued him most when he began writing songs like “Thinking of the Day” in 1972, wondering if his place in the world, his “tomorrow would ever come.” Other standouts like “Riverfront” told the stories he couldn’t tell while penning the Meters’ funky (but often instrumental) dance anthems. With his Meters mates chugging beside him in the studio, he can tell darker, more personal tales about his hard-working friends, like Aaron Neville (who he grew up with in the 7th Ward), and how he used to haul bananas off the boats in New Orleans to get by.

Nocentelli has had his share of ups and downs as a lifer who has rode the tempests of the ever-evolving music industry. It’s a “brutal brutal business” he says at one point — and Leo shares that he had to sell some of his favorite guitars to keep going through the years. The song “Getting Nowhere” leans into the sense of helplessness and frustration many talented session players and touring side-men like him went through when royalties and fame and fortune passed them by as others rose to prominence.

Some things really haven’t changed in fifty years. But only a generational talent like Nocentelli could create sparkling guitar backdrops for artists as diverse as Dr. John, Otis Redding and even Jimmy Buffett, and keep his passion long enough to see new crowds packing houses on tours in 2022. It must be quite the feeling to finally be able to perform his own solo work — a half century after the songs first emerged and were almost lost forever.

BGS 5+5: Andrew Duhon

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Andrew Duhon
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Latest Album: Emerald Blue (out July 29, 2022)
Nickname: “Duhon” … (Du-yaw if you’re Cajun)

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

One recent moment that comes to mind was a gig on Mardi Gras day during the quarantine in New Orleans. Mardi Gras was cancelled, but folks found ways to distance and celebrate. The trio was invited to play a small outdoor gathering on the outskirts of the French Quarter at a place called Jewel of the South. It felt so good to play live and celebrate a little Mardi Gras. Now, I’m mostly an ‘eyes closed’ performer when I’m singing, but I opened my eyes for a moment, and there was this older fella right up close to me, white beard and top hat, dancing and holding a pair of old-time handmade Mardi Gras beads over my head to put on me. I skipped the next lyric to let him put the beads around my neck, my only Mardi Gras beads that year, and I got back to singing the next lyric, eyes closed. When I opened my eyes again, he was gone, like the ghost of Mardi Gras come to visit me, and I wore that pair of beads until they broke and scattered into tiny pieces.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

Certainly literature, short stories, poems, films, modern art, nature, anywhere someone or something tells a story. There’s a lineage in the fact that the way stories are told to me forever informs the way I decide to tell my story. You could say my stories are just a paper mache of scraps of the stories told to me, hopefully in small enough pieces that they resemble my own. To me a good story is good because it offers up some truth that we can share together, but even if that truth was what we really needed, it’s the story that causes us to gather around to hear it, to follow along, and it’s how we remember it for years. It’s not to say that ‘truth’ is the same for everyone. I’d think that’s what’s special about storytelling; it lets the listener find their own truths in a good story beautifully told.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Oh sure, here you go: “We here at Andrew Duhon Music strive to figure out what the hell it is we have to say, mostly through the tradition of song, in keeping with the clever rhymes and double entendres of all those songwritin’ heroes stuck in our head and hopefully in continuation of those very traditions. We strive to share the songs of ours in recording and in person by interweb and by van, and to remember to be a little less precious for god’s sake, and stop and give the flowers a sniff along the way, because the next song could be inspired by a whiff of something that constant grinding would pass right by.”

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

I think the idea imparted by a fellow songwriter, “No one else can write your song” has been empowering and reassuring. I’ve heard so many songs I sure wish I’d have written, or songwriters doing something I do better than I could ever do it, but there’s always your piece and it’s carved out somehow, waiting for you. There’s always your story, and no one else knows it until you decide to figure out how to tell it to them… and hopefully when I figure out the story I’m telling, it’ll be interesting enough to gather around and hear it.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

That’d have to be a river. I think standing in a river moving past me, camping next to a river and seeing it rollin’ on by from the last light of evening and again first light of the morning makes me think of time and my tiny blip in it. I grew up next to the muddy mouth of the Mississippi, wide and treacherous, but from a plane leaving New Orleans, it looks to be doing the same thing a mountain stream is doing, slowly carving at the banks, swaying side to side at a pace my tiny space in time can’t discern. I’m spending my time writing songs and ‘making a record,’ not just the spinning vinyl one, but the one in the fossil record that maybe serves someone after I’m gone. I’d say staring at a river is my favorite way to spend a moment and to see the space it inhabits, long before me and long after me.

Photo Credit: Hunter Holder

LISTEN: The Deslondes, “Ways & Means” (Ft. Margo Price)

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Artist: The Deslondes
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Song: “Ways & Means” (ft. Margo Price)
Album: Ways & Means
Release Date: July 8, 2022
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “‘Ways and Means’ is just a bunch of internal monologues I strung together. I guess it’s mostly about a person’s pursuit of happiness and how money can complicate all of that. Musically this song started out pretty different from how it ended up. It was pretty downbeat and chill and had different chord changes when I wrote it, but the rest of the band had other ideas. Margo Price is a friend of the band and was gracious enough to drop in and contribute some vocal harmonies which tied it all together nicely.” — Dan Cutler, The Deslondes

Photo Credit: Bobbi Wernig

LISTEN: Ever More Nest, “My Story”

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Artist: Ever More Nest
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Song: “My Story”
Album: Out Here Now
Release Date: August 19, 2022
Label: Parish Road Music

In Their Words: “Everything in the music industry these days is about an artist’s ‘story.’ We like to think the music is what draws people in, but over and over, the machine emphasizes that it’s the narrative or the person behind the music that really matters. Bands go to great lengths to craft an image with rags-to-riches tales, histories of musical family dynasties, or recounts of daring escapes from a bad home life. Sometimes artists just overemphasize a single life detail.

“The concept of fabricating some unique struggle always frustrated me. Of course I had struggles — I was a closeted gay teenager in an abusive relationship in the Bible Belt with a Southern Baptist family that was falling apart at the seams. I’m still processing what the song is for me; I do know that it’s a response to the music industry and to the church. It’s also a message that where we come from, what we experience, what we battle and survive — all these things make us who we are and show in our art. You don’t have to fit in by making your story someone else’s. You don’t have to grow up on the ranch or in the woods to sing Americana music. You don’t even have to wear boots. Just be who you are and let your story tell itself.

“The lyrics ‘This is my story, this is my song’ are echoed from the old hymn, ‘Blessed Assurance.’ On the record, Fats Kaplin plays a violin rendition of the chorus of the hymn as the introduction to ‘My Story.’ The sweet sound was beautiful, but in post-production felt a little too reverent. Dylan Alldredge and I threw a tape warble effect on it, which gave it this unclean ’90s vibe to complement the grit and anger in the song and to date it with where I was, and what I was going through in those years. It has a wonderfully chilling effect.” — Ever More Nest

Photo Credit: Greg Miles