This week’s Alive After Five headliner: Honey Island Swamp Band
Go Listen Boise local opener: Thomas Paul

ABOUT HONEY ISLAND SWAMP BAND

Great music begins with great songs, and great songs are what the Honey Island Swamp Band (honeyislandswampband.com) is all about. The band came together after Aaron Wilkinson (acoustic guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Chris Mule (electric guitar, vocals) were marooned in San Francisco after the levee breaches following Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and had a chance encounter with fellow New Orleans evacuees Sam Price (bass, vocals) and Garland Paul (drums, vocals) at John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room on Fillmore Street. They knew each other from having all played together in some form or another in various New Orleans bands, and with the great unknown regarding their return to their underwater hometown looming in the distance, they decided to put together a band and get some gigs going. Fortunately, the Boom Boom Room’s owner Alex Andreas offered the band a weekly gig on the spot.

Sunday nights at the Boom Boom Room soon became a favorite of Bay Area roots music lovers, who have a long-standing affinity for New Orleans music and musicians. Two months into the residency, sound engineer Robert Gatley approached the band with a rare opportunity — he wanted to record a Honey Island Swamp Band album at the legendary Record Plant studios in Sausalito, where he worked. The recording came together beautifully, with Wilkinson and Mulé both contributing favorite originals, and was received so well that they all decided to continue the band upon moving back to New Orleans in early 2007.

Honey Island Swamp Band‘s sound has been described as “Americana on the Bayou”, with timeless songs from Wilkinson & Mulé, highlighted by Mulé’s searing guitar, Wilkinson’s sure-handed mandolin, and 4-part vocal harmonies, all anchored by the powerful groove of Price & Paul’s Louisiana stomp rhythm section. Their music draws from a variety of influences in the world of roots music, including artists such as Lowell George & Little Feat, Jimmy Reed, Taj Mahal, Jerry Garcia, Gram Parsons, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and New Orleans’ own “Night Tripper”, the legendary Dr. John.

In April 2009, HISB released its first full-length album – Wishing Well – produced by Tom Drummond of Better Than Ezra. Throughout the rest of 2009, the band toured relentlessly in support of Wishing Well, on the strength of such songs as “Natural Born Fool”, “Till the Money’s Gone”, and the album’s title track. In January 2010, Wishing Well was named 2009′s “Best Blues Album” at OffBeat Magazine’s BEST OF THE BEAT Awards, where the band was also honored as “Best Emerging Artist”.

The newest offering from HISB – Good To You – was released in April 2010, and has quickly become a staple of most DJs on the Crescent City’s legendary radio station WWOZ, as well as on Sirius/XM satellite radio’s Bluesville and traditional stations from coast-to-coast. OffBeat Magazine nominated Good To You as 2010’s “Best Roots Rock Album” at this year’s BEST OF THE BEAT Awards, in addition to the band winning the prize as 2010’s “Best Roots Rock Artist”. Featuring the southern strut of songs such as “Be Good”, “300 Pounds” and the album’s first single “Chocolate Cake”, Good To You illuminates the mix of country-inflected rock and New Orleans funky blues that makes Honey Island Swamp Band‘s music so familiar and unique at the same time.

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This week’s Alive After Five headliner: Girls Guns and Glory
Go Listen Boise local opener: Neo Tundra Cowboy

ABOUT GIRLS GUNS AND GLORY

“I’ve been going wild, like the river runs. And I’m afraid that this rambling has only just begun.” So sings Ward Hayden, singer/songwriter of Girls Guns and Glory (girlsgunsandglory.com), on the band’s new album Sweet Nothings (Lonesome Day, 2011). These words, found in the song “Snakeskin Belt,” are an apt introduction to the band itself. Girls Guns and Glory is a celebration of sweet and tasty, fun lovin’ and hard timin’, honky tonk music that is simultaneously casual and complex. The band combines elements of early rock ‘n’ roll, country, and rhythm & blues to deliver its own brand of American Roots music that satisfies like homemade apple pie.

Girls Guns and Glory is the brainchild of Lonesome Day recording artist Ward Hayden. His original compositions conjure the palpable ache of a crushed heart; they touch on themes of love lost and hope found, and their words alone could be published in anthologies of poetry. Hayden recalls that once he got on stage with GGG, he found he had never felt more comfortable doing anything else. Performing quickly became an addiction, and it is due in part to his efforts on and off stage that GGG is now an internationally touring band, named Independent Artist of the Year at the French Country Music Awards, and two-time winner of both the Roots Act of Year (Boston Phoenix Awards) and Americana Act of the Year (Boston Music Awards). GGG is also the only band of its genre to ever take home the top honors of Act of the Year (Boston Music Awards) and to win the legendary WBCN Rock ‘n’ Roll Rumble.

Hayden, who originally hails from Scituate, Mass., leads the band on vocals and acoustic guitar. Helping him to create their sound is a group of Pennsylvania transplants who made their way to Boston to further their musical pursuits: Chris Hersch on electric guitar, Michael Calabrese on drums/vocals, and Paul Zaz Dilley on upright/electric bass. They are a well-trained group: Hersch and Calabrese went to the New England Conservatory of Music and Dilley attended Berklee College of Music. With the demands of a heavy-touring lifestyle, this is a group that cut its teeth on the road, and their resulting chemistry on stage is enjoyably electric. Hayden is quick to mention that, not only do these guys play their focal instruments with mastery, appreciation, and—on occasion—spirited abandon, each one of them is a multi-instrumentalist.

In another life, Hayden might have become a fisherman or even a marine biologist. He loves the outdoors and has a special affinity for aquatic life and for the solitude that being out on the water, alone with his thoughts, can bring. His other main interest is in collecting vintage clothes and decor. As a boy, he spent a lot of time with his grandmother, who was a flea market vendor. To this day, looking at the objects he has amassed in his personal collection fills him with a sense of nostalgia. It’s really no wonder that Hayden says he feels most at home surrounded by things from another era, as you get the sense listening to some of his songs that he was transported to his current residence in Cambridge, Mass., from another time and place where long-fringed leather jackets and white-tailed deer foot lamps were the norm.

The idea of survival, sometimes conveyed by quiet presence, at other times more in-your-face, pervades Hayden’s personal interests and his music. The ocean can be churned up and swirling on one day and calm and placid the next; but every day when you rise, it is there. Your oldest possessions may be scuffed and worn and maybe even a little worse for wear, but their mere presence asserts that they are still here. Likewise, even Hayden’s most gut-wrenching songs about heartbreak have a triumphalist flair. To any of the girls out there that this may apply to: you may have given him something to sing about, but you didn’t get him down for long.

According to Hayden, the band has just begun to scratch the surface of what they can do with their fourth full-length studio release, Sweet Nothings. Hersch stretches out on baritone guitar and Fender Six, Calabrese contributes harmony vocals and a myriad of percussive instrumentation, and Dilley rocks the mellotron. And listen for Sarah Borges (Sarah Borges & the Broken Singles) as she lends her voice to the Hayden-penned duet “1,000 Times.”

For a band that spends much of its time on the road, the up-shot is they love what they’re doing. This is a band that has John Prine sing-a-longs in their primary tour vehicle, a Ford E-350 dubbed “The Road Hawk.” For new fans looking for a conversation-starter: each of the band members has a hawk nickname, which they will probably explain to you if you ask them nicely. Hayden states, “One of the greatest joys of the road has been meeting so many people from so many different walks of life,” and he credits the hospitality of GGG’s fans with helping them to get from square one to across the Atlantic Ocean. Hayden says, “Music has been our ticket to see the country and beyond. It’s largely due to the kindness of people we’ve met who’ve housed and fed us and taken us in for the night that’s enabled us to continue our pursuit of creating music and being touring musicians.”

Hayden speaks about the release of the Paul Q. Kolderie (Radiohead, Uncle Tupelo, Lemonheads) and Adam Taylor (Sarah Borges, Portugal. The Man) produced Sweet Nothings as a rebirth of sorts. For him, it is a reconnection to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll for which he exhumed influences of the past including Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard. The album, which has songs both quick and catchy about the simple pleasures in life and slow and sentimental about—what else?—getting your heart ripped out, chewed up, spit out, and pieced back together, is a masterful follow-up to the band’s earlier endeavors, Inverted Valentine (2008), Pretty Little Wrecking Ball (2007), and Fireworks and Alcohol (2006).

What would drive someone to leave the comforts of home and the stability of a 9-5 job with a steady paycheck? For Hayden and the other men of Girls Guns and Glory, it’s the pursuit of artistic expression. They hold the goal of creating something that’s at once accessible and full of depth. Who hasn’t stayed too long at the dance hoping that special someone would look their way? Who hasn’t called one last time, even though they knew it was the wrong decision? When Girls Guns and Glory takes the stage, they’re there to play their hearts out and capture in song those experiences with genuine honesty and naked emotion. Give Girls Guns and Glory a listen and come see these boys when they’re out on the road. This party has started and this is your open invitation.

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This week’s Alive After Five headliner: The Brothers Comatose
Go Listen Boise local opener: Sarah Sample

ABOUT THE BROTHERS COMATOSE

Ben Morrison and Alex Morrison are brothers. They have been making music together from birth. Ben’s first word was “front-man” and Alex’s was “moustache” (see band photo). Joe Pacini and Gio Benedetti met Ben and Alex in high school. They shared many a living room jam session, many a raucous music party, many a front-stoop hoedown, but there was no band.

After years of studying, vision quests in far off lands, moving about, relocating, and the occasional intermittent music party, the young and now much hairier fellows found themselves in San Francisco with Alex, Ben and Joe living in a vibe-steeped flat on Haight Street, playing music (Ben on guitar, Alex on Banjo — both of them singing — and Joe on mandolin and cigarette breaks) at parties and open mics across the fair city. They needed a bassist. Gio happened to be a bassist. He also happened to live nearby.

The, now quartet continued their tradition of stoop-and-living-room-esque performances, but moved them public. The dive bars of San Francisco became inspired, momentary homes, as friends, fans and music lovers rallied around the snug honesty of the band’s barroom shows. All they lacked was a brilliant fiddler with tremendous soloing skills, and with feet and soul firmly planted in the legacy of old-time, bluegrass musics. Oh where, oh where could such a person be?

Philip Brezina — graduate student in classical violin at the nearby Conservatory and recent transplant from Pennsylvania — knew good roots music, knew how to play it and, best of all, knew how to play it on the fiddle. He wandered into the quartet (answering an ad posted in the Conservatory halls), and the long lost Brother Comatose was found.

Doors began opening. Performances at such legendary places as San Francisco’s Fillmore Poster Room, the Great American Music Hall, Strawberry Music Festival and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival followed, supporting such acts as The Devil Makes Three, Justin Townes Earle, Hillstomp, Greensky Bluegrass, John Doe and the Sadies, Yonder Mountain String Band and others.

Now touring in support of their recent debut full-length, Songs From The Stoop, The Brothers Comatose aim at converting the entire West Coast into their Living Room Music Party. Their shows exude a foot-stomping, shout-along, drink-along ease that was once a staple in every music-playing, front-stoop-possessing home in the land. Their shows can’t help but remind folk that music is collective, is for dancing, is for sharing, and for whatever else you might do with friends and family in your own living room.

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This week’s Alive After Five headliner: Grupo Fantasma
Go Listen Boise local opener: Oso Negro

Known as the funkiest, finest and hardest working Latin orchestra to come out of the United States in the last decade, Grupo Fantasma has garnered critical acclaim worldwide for their adventurous albums, prudent songwriting and unprecedented live shows. “Grupo Fantasma is as tight as one would expect from a band that routinely backs up Prince,” exclaimed LA Weekly, and the Washington Post affirmed that “the ten members represent a new generation of Latin music.” Their 2008 effort, the Grammy nominated Sonidos Gold, further trademarked the ensemble’s innovative sound and scored a cover feature in Pollstar Magazine, radio spots on NPR’s “Day to Day” and PRI’s “The World”, top ten status for several months on the CMJ radio charts and extensive press coverage throughout North America and Europe.

“We’ve been around through two so-called ‘cumbia revivals’ and a renewed DJ interest in the music of Fania Records,” notes guitarist and producer Adrian Quesada. “On El Existential, we feel like we have moved past any retro or novelty tags to explore even more timeless musical and lyrical themes, and multiple members of the band stepped up to contribute to the writing process. It’s clearly our strongest lyrical effort to date with concepts based around the album’s title in addition to tales of betrayal and deceit, surreal dreams, growing older and wiser, and of course women and relationships.” Without sounding too pretentious, Quesada states: “There was a lot of pressure to deliver after the success, critical acclaim and Grammy nomination of our last album, but I feel as if we have overcome any expectations and made our best record yet.”

In so many ways, their music is a bundle of contrasts and contradictions. It is art made on the hyphen, a hybrid Latin-American beast of many dancing legs, hearts and minds. Nostalgic sounds recombine and morph in novel ways, lyrics touch on subjects seldom broached in today’s commercial salsa or cumbia, traditions are revealed like forgotten treasure only to be refashioned into a New World gerrymander, a skill that seems unique to the resourceful children of Neo-Colonialism. Grupo Fantasma knits together the rural with the urban, melds Anglo, Afro and Latino with such expert carefree abandon you barely notice it — it’s so natural seeming. It’s not until you try to describe all the song genres (futile) or unravel the strands (too intertwined) that you realize the music is actually quite a complex web of artifice, with the ultimate revelation that you have been witnessing a sublime collective consciousness at work and a group that finishes with something that sounds both intentional and whole.

The band’s incendiary live show has also stockpiled rave reviews across North American, Europe and beyond. After catching Fantasma at the third annual Fun Fun Fun Fest in their hometown of Austin, Texas, Dead Milkmen frontman Rodney Anonymous noted on his blog that “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen these guys come out of a Tex-Mex drum solo into Led Zeppelin’s ‘Moby Dick.’” Highlights from the past few years include the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Bonnaroo, Jelly NYC Pool Party, Montreal Jazz Festival, North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, the horn section performing with Prince at Coachella, London’s 02 Arena and the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” and two ten-day engagements to entertain troops stationed in Kuwait and Iraq. Grupo Fantasma was also selected to perform at WOMEX, the exclusive world music expo, in Copenhagen, Denmark, this past October.

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This week’s Alive After Five headliner: David Lindley
Go Listen Boise local opener: Like a Rocket

Multi-instrumentalist David Lindley performs music that redefines the word “eclectic.” Lindley, well known for his many years as the featured accompanist with Jackson Browne and leader of his own band El Rayo-X, has long championed the concept of world music. The David Lindley electro-acoustic performance effortlessly combines American folk, blues, and bluegrass traditions with elements from African, Arabic, Asian, Celtic, Malagasy, and Turkish musical sources. Lindley incorporates an incredible array of stringed instruments including but not limited to Kona and Weissenborn Hawaiian lap steel guitar, Turkish saz and chumbus, Middle Eastern oud, and Irish bouzouki. The eye-poppingly clad “Mr. Dave’s” uncanny vocal mimicry and demented sense of humor make his onstage banter a highlight of the show.

David Lindley grew up in southern California, first taking up the banjo as a teenager, and subsequently winning the annual Topanga canyon banjo and fiddle contest five times as he explored the American folk music tradition. Between 1967 and 1971, Lindley founded and lead what must now be seen as the first world music rock band, the Kaleidoscope. In 1971, Mr. Dave joined forces with Jackson Browne, serving as Jackson’s most significant musical co-conspirator until 1981. In 1979, Lindley had begun working with old friend Ry Cooder on Bop Till you Drop and The Long Riders soundtrack, a musical collaboration that lasts to this day, and has spawned many recording projects and several world tours as an acoustic duo.

In 1981, Lindley created his own remarkable band El Rayo-X, which integrated American roots music and world beat with a heavy reggae influence on El Rayo-X, Win This Record and Very Greasy. Lindley and guitarist Henry Kaiser went to Madagascar for two weeks in 1991 and recorded six albums of indigenous Malagasy music (including two collaborative CDs, A World Out of Time volumes one and two on Shanachie), which proved to have a major impact on the world music scene, both for the quality of the Grammy nominated music recorded, and the fair and ethical way the Malagasy musicians were dealt with. Throughout this long and distinguished career, Lindley has been one of Hollywood’s most in demand session musicians, lending his skills to the recorded works of Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby and Nash, Warren Zevon, and many others.

In 1990 a chance meeting of Lindley and Jordanian born percussionist Hani Naser led to an impromptu jam and an instant decision that “we should take this on the road.” David and Hani toured the world for the following six years. The duo recorded two self-released “Official Bootleg” compact discs, Live in Tokyo Playing Real Good and Live All Over the Place Playing Even Better on Pleemhead Audio. At his expansive and eclectic live performances, David Lindley consistently gives one of the most unique concert experiences available to adventuresome music listeners.

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