Blogowitz » san francisco

Pistolera: Party at the Border

blogowitz — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:17:45 +0000

Pistolera front woman Sandra Lilia Velasquez dishes on San Diego slow pokes, fierce New Yorkers, and how to make it without a record label.

Destroying submission, one band at a time

blogowitz — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:13:34 +0000

Skerik stands outside San Francisco’s famous blues club, the Boom Boom Room. A saxophone player from Seattle, Washington, he’s playing here tonight with one of the dozen or more independent, underground or alternative bands he either fronts or is a key member of. He kicks ass on his instrument, and he is the horn player in demand among the new school of young, jazz-influenced improvisational bands. The place is packed.

Friends on the sidewalk call out inside jokes to him while fans look on. His black, unzipped hoodie covers a black Southern Lords death metal T-shirt. A thin, vertical strip of dark facial hair lines his chin. His piercing eyes glance at his phone to see who the last missed call was.

“I’m a big fan of doom rock,” Skerik says with a shit-eating grin as he fidgets with his cell phone. “I use distortion to help create a similar feeling, but I don’t segregate music by genre. It’s all the same to me. It’s like Thelonius Monk said, he ‘listened to ALL music’ and people wanted him to clarify, and he would repeat, ALL music.”

There is no other horn player as prolific as he is in this music scene. He has performed with Buckethead, the enigmatic thrash metal, funk and electronica musician who wears a white plastic mask and a KFC bucket on his head. He’s played with Primus’ Les Claypool in his Frog Brigade band and New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore and his new school funk band Galactic.

The full story at Oh Dang!

Hip hop gets a symphonic mash-up

blogowitz — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 12:08:50 +0000

It’s an hour before the show, and violist Charith Premawardhana is bowing and plucking his way through rigorous music arrangements that he’s just now seeing for the very first time. Pushing dark-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, he leafs through a thick stack of sheet music labeled with song titles like “The Girls of Capp Street” and “Boogie Symphonette.”

Charith, 28, is a classically-trained, full-time professional musician. He pays rent by performing weekly gigs with regional symphonies in places like Fresno, Carmel and Berkeley. In less than 60 minutes, he’ll be playing viola with a wickedly talented ensemble in front of an audience, just as he’s done a hundred times before. But tonight’s show is completely different from any other. Tonight he’s performing live hip hop for the first time ever, with the Shotgun Wedding Hip Hop Symphony.

“This stuff is not easy,” Charith says as he scrambles to organize his sheet music. “I’m out of my comfort zone, but I dig it. I definitely dig it. Classical music is all about expression, but this is all about the band being tight as fuck.”

The full story at Oh Dang!

Teenage East Bay rockers embrace punk’s do-it-yourself ethos anew

blogowitz — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 23:40:22 +0000

Some musicians call it East Bay thrash core, others call it punk or hardcore.

Livermore area teens who play and listen to loud, aggressive, fast music don’t much care what you call it. They’re not trying to create a big music scene. For many of them, the music and its accompanying lifestyle are about being independent, self-aware, motivated and, above all, social.

Scott Goodrich is one of those teens. His efforts to record music quickly and cheaply are helping foster a small scene. And at 16, Goodrich has become a sort of punk rock entrepreneur.

He taught himself how to record music in his parents’ Livermore garage about two years ago. Charging about $20 a session, he’s saved up enough to buy a 16-input mixing board and 10 microphones. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. The bands he records play music at fast tempos with the amps turned all the way up. The guys in the bands are usually his friends, and most of them have never recorded before.

“They’re garage bands,” Goodrich says nonchalantly.

The Goodrich family’s two dogs meander around the garage during recording sessions, and Scott’s younger sister usually hangs out and watches, too. Since Scott’s parents get up early for work, bands have to stop playing by 7 p.m. — that’s the rule.

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle.