Author: Joe Boone

Marking its 31st year, the International Blues Challenge gets underway Tuesday. The yearly global blues showdown brings wailers and stompers from all over this earth to revel in the music that W.C. Handy codified here and which ran rampant over 20th century popular culture in the form of jazz and rock-and-roll. We are always thrilled to hear the accents and see the bands, solo acts, and youth acts who flood downtown in hopes of taking the big win back home.

Things get rollin’ and tumblin’ on the evening of Tuesday, January 20th with an international showcase. The quarter finals are Wednesday and Thursday, and the semi finals are on Friday and Saturday. The acts perform throughout the Beale Street Historic District in anticipation of the finals at the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, January 24th.

They call it an international affair for a reason. No one can enter this contest directly. Contestants must be sponsored by their local affiliate of the Blues Foundation. Once they have conquered the homeland, acts trek to the Bluff City to see who’s got the gutbucket goods. Let’s have a look at some of the far-flung entrants.

Since our Memphis In May Festival has chosen to honor Poland as its partner for 2015, we should introduce you to our Polish guests. The affiliate in Poland is the Association of Blues & Rock ’70, which sends us Romek Puchowski in the solo-duo category and Two Timer in the band competition.

Krakow to Memphis: 8328 km

Puchowski tunes a steel string acoustic guitar down a step, which adds some chunkier bass and slappier fret noise. He also has an affinity for the Dobro, a steel guitar invented by the Dopyera Brothers in L.A. in the 1920s. The name Dobro is a portmanteau of Dopyera Brothers and also means “goodness” in Slavik languages. Puchowski renders a dark goodness from it with a brass slide. Two Timer has a song called “Ginger Chicks.”

Manila to Memphis: 13,580 km

The Glass Cherry Breakers are literally in it for the long haul. Their sound speaks to a love of Ann Peebles and Chicago-style band work. They know about the dynamics curve of turning a song from a whisper-like ember into a run-down-the-street-with-a-can-of-gasoline act of musical arson. It’s interesting to see what styles, techniques, and signifiers make the trip around the globe and into music lovers’ hearts. But we live in the flat, global environment. The Phillipine Blues Society has a dog in this race.

But don’t count out the Blues Asia Network, a society representing groups from Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and other Asian countries. The Brat Pack is another act making the trek from Manila. Find their Soundcloud page and listen to “Brattitude,” described as “the signature song of our band, heavily arranged with exciting breaks, and energetic build ups!” Lord, I feel so unnecessary. The Brat Pack has a jumpy, piano-driven sound that could move a room in any hemisphere.

Jerusalem to Memphis: 10,628 km

After the Ori Naftaly Band made their home in Memphis following a semi-final run a few years back, the Israel Blues Society is back with two acts. Papa Blues is a tight band that keeps things moving. Mean Machine will play in the solo-duo section.

Oslo to Memphis: 7,232 km

The Markus Lovdal Band conquered the Norsk Blues Union to get here. So look out for them. They have a jazz-influenced sound that lets the vocalist do the work. There’s a little Gregg Allman. There’s a little Harry Connick Jr. too. This is a versatile band that could adapt to the competition. So save some of your wagering budget for them. There are not many blues guitarists named Bjørn Ulvik Blix Lein. This is your chance.

Ed Fringe Pictures

John McNamara

Melbourne to Memphis: 15,150 km

John McNamara has a real voice that has a natural grit to it. There is no clownish accent. (Judges, please penalize bad “southern” accents.) His acoustic work is true accompaniment: His playing dances behind the lyric like a trickster. Somewhere between Jason Isbell and Harlan T. Bobo, McNamara is a song stylist. You can’t separate the blues from what he does. But he’s not hidebound to form. He may lose points for some notion of “authenticity,” but he’s really good.

“I have a lot of stuff coming up,” Alexis Grace says.

She’s not kidding. This month, Grace will release Kiddo, her first EP of original music since her run at American Idol in 2009, when she was the 11th finalist in the competitive-singing television juggernaut. If she seems like she has been fired from a cannon, it would make sense. In the past year, she got married and made the switch from mass-market entertainment phenomenon to the hectic world of an indie music artist. Grace was set on this trajectory since birth.

“I’ve been singing since I came out of my mother’s womb,” Grace says. “I’ve been loud ever since. It all really started when I was in elementary school. I went to a private Christian school, so I wasn’t doing Guys & Dolls and stuff. There were the Christian musicals, which were hilarious. I don’t even know who writes them. But I got into them anyway, because they had music and you could sing. That’s what I wanted to do. That got the bug in me. I told my mom I wanted to go to Overton because I knew it was the music school. When I did that, it was one of the best choices ever. Seriously.”

Grace credits her time at Overton High School’s Creative and Performing Arts program for her ability to succeed in music.

“I had an amazing teacher,” Grace says. “He was smart in so many ways. He taught us theory and the fundamentals of music in a smart way. Even if you aren’t a good singer, it’s very good knowledge to have. He was very encouraging and realistic. You should take this seriously and do it well. Don’t half do it. If you’re passionate about it, don’t fake it. It definitely inspired me. I was like, ‘Well, hell yeah, this is what I’ve been wanting to do for years.”

Then Grace set her sights on the University of Memphis. The birth of a daughter at that time found her back in the fold of her family, especially her father, Randy Middleton, a bassist who had played for Ann Peebles, among others. The logical thing to do was keep playing music.

“[I’m] a total Memphis girl,” Grace says. “I was always surrounded by music in my family. My father was a professional musician. He never stopped me from doing what I want to do. You’d think a musician would be like, ‘Don’t go into music. It’s a terrible thing to go into.’ He told me it was, but he was like, ‘You can still do it.’ It was such a great experience. First you get to hang out with your dad and talk about music. You get to hear all of the crazy hippie stories from days of old. But it was my first time being in a band: practicing, rehearsing, playing in clubs.

Grace credits her Aunt Lala for the idea that set her on her road to notoriety.

“It really wasn’t my decision either. It was my aunt’s decision. She called me up and said, ‘They are auditioning.'”

What came next was the adventure of a lifetime. American Idol winners have met a range of fates. Some, like Kelly Clarkson, have turned the opportunity into stardom. Others, like Taylor Hicks, have found themselves in contractual limbo after they did not see eye-to-eye with the show’s producers and entertainment-industry attorneys.

“If you make it into the top 10, you have a different deal,” says Grace, who finished 11th in the shows eighth season. “But I was 11. If you win, you better be a megastar, because it’s going to be hard for you to be marketed as a Top-40 act. That’s what they want. They’re not there to market indie artists. So, once I got off the show, the only thing I had to worry about was the exclusivity thing until the show ended, which would have been in May. I couldn’t really do a lot until the show ended. I was a free agent.”

But Grace will always marvel at the home-town response to her success.

“It was so amazing, Grace says. “That’s just how Memphis is. You see it with everything that happens here. It’s a small town, but it’s a city too. When we get something like that, like with the Grizzlies, people get so crazy, and they connect. Memphis loves to have a reason to connect with one another. They do it so well, when they have a reason. It is wild. I don’t know how big it was. To me it was a big deal because people in your town are talking about you … like the news stations, because that had never happened before.”

Grace spent time touring, which is where she met her husband, Thomas Bergstig, of the Swedish band Jeerk. They met at a show in Branson and were married in March of last year. Bergstig and bandmate Nikke Karlsson produced Kiddo, Grace’s new five-song EP. They recorded tracks in Memphis and in Gothenburg, Sweden. In Memphis, Heather Trussell played violin.

The new songs occupy an interesting space. There are commercial aspects to the sound, and the arrangements do all of the smart stuff: stop-times, instruments entering and exiting, crescendo. However slickly produced the songs may be, this record manages to avoid the cliché that haunts our state’s capital. You are not alone if you assumed this record would reflect the overproduced groupthink of a contemporary Nashville record. It does not. It’s interesting to think of Sweden and Branson, Missouri, in the same thought. But Kiddo combines the tightness of serious, contemporary musical professionalism with the more traditionally aesthetic sounds of European instrumental music. “Will You Miss Me” opens with an ethereal set of harmonies that materialize like an aurora borealis before a taut acoustic band introduces an earthy dimension. Grace wrote the song for her father, who passed away last summer.

“I wasn’t intending on writing this song for the EP at all,” Grace says. “It just kind of happened. I just felt like it was so appropriate. Knowing that we had such a musical past. He was such a cool person, too. I felt like he had such a cool life. That definitely inspired me, and it’s one of my favorite songs on the album. I wrote it with my dad inspiring me, but really it’s a song a lot of people could relate to. Not to be deep or anything, but it’s more about how are you going to make your mark on the world after you’re gone.”

The video for her first single, “I’m So Done,” will debut on January 12th. On January 17th, Grace will perform at Playhouse on the Square. Her band includes drummer James Sexton and Playhouse actresses Claire D. Kolheim and Carla McDonald singing background vocals. Kiddo will be available on iTunes and Spotify on January 20th.

After a rollercoaster 2014, Grace looks back on a year for the books and on the challenges of the year ahead.

“It’s been a lot of work, but I’m really excited,” Grace says. “It’s obvious that this is what we should be doing.”

2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Gentrys’ hit “Keep on Dancing.” The Gentrys spawned two enduring Memphis characters: wrestling titan Jimmy “the Mouth of the South” Hart and Larry Raspberry, leader of the Highsteppers. Raspberry plays Lafayette’s on Sunday, December 28th.

The wrestling trickster and the wildman bandleader have a similar way of behaving in public: Look them up on YouTube to witness the manic, messianic urge to rile people up. Dewey Phillips had it. Jerry Lee Lewis had it. Where did the two Gentrys get it?

“Jimmy and I were actually roommates when we would stay in hotels on the road,” Raspberry says. “He was always a rabid and avid fan of wrestling. I have to give him propers, that if there was any kind of methodology or anything to pick up, he picked it up. For me, mine was the rhythm and blues, Solomon Burke-type delivery that went on in between songs. I heard an interview with Sam [Moore] of Sam & Dave, and he made the comment that they would — he called it ‘preach.’ I very much resonated to that. I don’t think I can tell you that Jimmy and I pulled that from the same well. But I accept the similarities. They are kind of raving, aren’t they?”

Raspberry played the old Lafayette’s. His voice-in-the-wilderness song set-ups made an enduring impression on one film director.

“Terence Malick came to a gig in 1976,” Raspberry says. “We shot some gigs in Austin. [He] remembered one of these ravings for all these years. That song ‘Pee Wee’ is a spoken-word song. And it is one of those set ups. He remembered and asked if I could do it still. He asked me to send him a tape to prove it. I did, and that’s what he wanted. No rehearsals. Just show up on that day and do it.”

— Joe Boone

Larry Raspberry plays Lafayette’s on Sunday, December 28th. With the Joe Restivo 4 opening.

Christopher Protagonist

The City Champs

Lists: Pfffff. Throwing shade at lists: Equal amounts pffff. In the age of YouTube and Spotify, you don’t need to know what anyone else thinks. Everyone online is saying the same thing anyway. Check the Flyer music listings and look the stuff up like a grown-up. But this is Memphis. There’s a lot to be excited about.

On the totally subjective front, Alvin Youngblood Hart‘s self-titled 7″ on Big Legal Mess is the record that I most enjoyed this year. Side-A’s “Helluva Way” has a speeding-ticket-inducing tempo, a properly placed cowbell, and thrilling bass lines from “Mr. Everywhere,” Mark Stuart. Hart leads the band on a pirate raid through ZZ Top’s abandoned compound. B-side, “Watching Brian Jones” —  is an existential YouTube-junky blues — Tesla coils burst out of his amp into the night. If you follow Hart on Facebook, you know that he’s is a serious luthier. You can hear it in his tone. Is it punk, rock, or blues? Exactly.

A pretty girl playing bass okay and singing okay is, well … okay. But Amy LaVere focused her laser this year with Runaway’s Diary. The timid experimentation is gone. She found a strong footing with her songwriting. There’s a new confidence in her voice. The theme is compelling, and the lyrics are moving. Now, the players follow her, and the result is an artist in full. This is a great Southern story record for any year. “I’ll Be Home Soon” has been stuck in my head since the day I heard it.

Graham Winchester jumped onto this list at the last minute. His dues were paid at Newby’s and the Buccaneer. He distinguished himself as a sideman for the old timers. It makes sense that he could pull together a crack band and a set of masterful instrumentalists. But this is Memphis, and people pull together hot-personnel bands all the time, and they don’t always work. Winchester raised the bar on songwriting in this town.

Madjack Records has a long history in Memphis’ sonic soup kitchen. This year, the burners are hot. The Memphis Dawls are an inspiring, evolving trio of musicians. Rooted In The Bone covers a lot of ground without the strain of an act covering bases. Holly Cole, Krista Wroten-Combest, and Jana Misener are naturally comfortable working in several American grains. Engineer Jeff Powell also worked on American Fiction‘s debut with engineering titan Larry Kramer. Powell and Madjack have loaded barrels for 2015. Can’t wait.

The rerelease of Sid Selvidge‘s In the Cold of the Morning on Omnivore Recordings is the most important release of the year. The songs and the sound of Selvidge’s voice are mesmerizing. The instrumentation may be the best example of Memphis’ madcap 1960s generation at work. They are their nutty selves, but they don’t get too carried away. Perfect record.

As for live music, Big Ass Truck’s reunion was the highlight of the year. Just kidding; we stunk. The best live band in town is Marcella & Her Lovers. It takes courage to sing like Marcella René Simien. The emotional flood gates open up with every note. Her rhythm section can split hairs and topple buildings with equal panache. And guitarist Dave Cousar is sublime. His atmospheric, harmonic style lends an otherworldliness to her earthy vocal. This is one magically idiosyncratic band.

Conflict of interest? Sure. It’s gotten to the point that it’s almost as crazy as Graceland tour guides having to ignore Aunt Delta’s escaped little dog that we haven’t addressed Flyer intern Chris Shaw, who fronts the ascendant punk band Ex-Cult. All of the digital titles (Pitchfork, Stereogum, and the ones geezers don’t know) are on board. Guitarist JB Horrell is something of a punk Cousar: There is a kooky wizard dust in his playing. Horrell’s guitar sets Ex-Cult apart from countless young punks who simply opened the manual to page one. Shaw is also writing for Noisey, Vice Media’s music thing. After a truly epic editorial internship, we are pleased to announce that he will become a staff music writer starting … now.

On December 26th, Marcella & Her Lovers will open for the City Champs at the Hi-Tone. The City Champs are a perfectly distilled essence of Memphis music. Their sound is a combination of power and restraint that really has no competition. They tastefully nod to the past without bowing in servitude. They are good enough to inhabit the space on their own. Go see them. Support the Hi-Tone. Tell important geniuses that you love them. Send me your records: boone@memphisflyer.com.

The Kickback reboots at the Hi-Tone on Saturday, December 20th. The classic hip-hop music appreciation class/get-down is the work of DJ Devin Steel.

The first Kickback started out as a DJ-driven effort to focus on hip-hop’s formative cuts from the 1980s and ’90s. Then they added some curveballs and a live drummer. And it was good.

“It ended up being a jam session.” Steel says. “We’ve added a little more band.”

Steel will perform with DJs Hou Hefner, Chris Superman McNeil, and Suzie. They form a full apocalyptic foursome of working DJs whose roots run deep into these sounds.

Courtesy of Devin Steel

Devin Steel and Chris “Superman” McNeil

“This is music we grew up with, and Memphians aren’t exposed it to when they go out,” Steel says. “We don’t get to play a lot [of this] at normal gigs. You’ll get Outkast and Run DMC, but Hall & Oats and Rick James [too]. It’s a nice mash-up of a capellas and instruments. Its easy to play, but to do it with a group of DJs who have the ability to go deep and a four turntable set up, there’s no better feeling.”

About that feeling … if you need more if it, you should tune into “Rapper’s Delight.” Former Flyer writer Andria Lisle hosts the new WEVL show that mines the golden age of hip-hop.

Lisle, a music journalist, label impresario, and communications ninja for the Brooks, has long been captivated by Memphis rap and hip-hop. After a lifetime of listening, she noticed a gap in the WEVL schedule and jumped into it.

“There was this dark underground element that reminded me a lot of punk rock,” Lisle says. “It had a very similar energy. The rap scene here reminds me a lot of the wrestling scene. You’ve got band guys and good guys, and there’s so much mythology. That always made it really fun.”