Tag: TX

The Shift List – Mark Buley (Odd Duck, Sour Duck Market) – Austin, TX

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, host Chris Jacobs continues The Shift List’s feature on music and restaurants in Austin, Texas with Mark Buley, chef and partner at Odd Duck and Sour Duck Market.

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In 2009, Bryce Gilmore opened a food truck, the Odd Duck Farm to Trailer, with his brother in South Austin. The trailer featured dishes utilizing fresh and locally-sourced ingredients, which was still something of a novel idea at the time, and it became the cornerstone philosophy behind all of their endeavors moving forward, including the eventual brick and mortar version of Odd Duck and the more casual Sour Duck Market.

Mark Buley, originally from a small town in Wisconsin, journeyed to Austin in 2012 to partner with Gilmore in anticipation of Odd Duck opening as a brick-and-mortar restaurant. The pair have been working together ever since, and in the last decade, the Odd Duck collective has become a staple of the Austin food scene — fun and interesting, not too serious, and done well. Perhaps more than any of the restaurants recently featured on The Shift List, Sour Duck Market is intentionally communal. It’s a bakery, cafe, coffee shop, outdoor patio, and multi-service kind of place that’s designed for customers to stay a while.

Sour Duck and Odd Duck are both open for curbside pickup as things in Austin still move to fully open up during the coronavirus pandemic; listening to this conversation is a reminder of how much we’ve temporarily lost and have been taking for granted, but it also serves as a hopeful promise of what we’ll get back when the time is right.

In the meantime, if you want to bring the Sour Duck ethos into your own home, order a copy of The Odd Duck Almanac, a recently-released, annual cookbook/magazine-style publication that’s as true of a representation of the restaurants as you can get while we wait for everything to reopen.

Laurie Lewis & Friends, “Dear Old Dixie (Live)”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner
This edition of Tunesday turned out to be an oddly circuitous task. We often take this space to highlight our Artists of the Month, pointing out instrumentals from throughout their catalogs and across their careers, but for singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet, frontwoman, and long-distance hiker Laurie Lewis, the tunes are simply in too-short supply. Not because they don’t exist, but because Lewis’ cosmic level lyricism tends to eclipse her virtuosic command of the majority of bluegrass’s titular instruments. You may most often see her with a dreadnought strapped around her shoulders, but rest a fiddle there instead and you’re bound to enjoy some of the best bluegrass fiddling — with an even sprinkling of contest style, West Coast country, and the melody-driven old-time of the Pacific Northwest throughout.
In this clip from a live performance on The Texas Connection in 1992, Lewis is joined by longtime musical partner and bandmate Tom Rozum as well as Sally Van Meter, Alan Munde, Peter Rowan, Peter McLaughlin, and Cary Black on a sleek and stupefying rendition of “Dear Old Dixie.” It’s a banjo number, naturally, so Munde kicks it off with an uncharacteristically normative, Scruggs-like play through the melody. The remaining bandmates each take a turn, but the fire’s really lit when Lewis saws out her own solo, reminding all of us that she only ends up placing herself behind the guitar more often than not because she chooses to. With slippery, deliciously dissonant double stops she capitalizes upon the signature energy and showmanship concentrated within every note, every bow stroke, and every string pluck she issues.
While a quick stroll through her catalog, especially on streaming platforms, may not immediately land you in a pile of recordings of burning Bill Monroe tunes, or contemplative waltzes, or danceable hornpipes, you’ll probably find yourself confounded by the natural imagery, tender emotion, and raw spiritual power of her lyrics instead. That’s understandable. With a little digging, though, that picture of a legendary artist’s work can be expanded to include lifelong rations of indomitable pickin’ like this, too. And it ought to.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Brooklyn Country Cantina 2019 in Photographs

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The crowds turned out all day and all night for last Saturday’s Brooklyn Country Cantina at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Amazing music, delicious food, relaxing hangs, beautiful belts, and adorable puppies all came together to make the day a smashing success. Relive BGS’ third year co-presenting the Country Cantina with these FOMO-preventing photographs.

Lede photo by Jaki Levi