Sketches for costume designs by Jennifer Gillettecapture Beale Street, circa 1915. (Illustration: Courtesy Opera Memphis)
If you’re an opera lover, you may think you know La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece about life in 19th-century Paris. After all, it’s not only one of the most-performed operas in the world, but the most popular work in the 68-year history of Opera Memphis.
Think again.
When Opera Memphis presents its latest version of La Bohème at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center this Friday and Saturday, you’d best discard any preconceptions before the curtains rise. For, while the music will be performed as the classic score dictates, complete with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, the mise-en-scène will be both unfamiliar and, for Memphians, eerily familiar. Rather than being set in bohemian Paris in the 1830s, this version unfolds on Beale Street, circa 1915.
Dennis Whitehead Darling (Photo: Andrea Zucker )
“I wish I could take credit for this inception of it,” says stage director Dennis Whitehead Darling, “but it’s actually the brainchild of [Opera Memphis general director] Ned Canty. It’s been a pet project of his for many years, and the original idea came from a book that Ned read called Beale Street Dynasty.”
Nearly anyone with an interest in our city’s history knows that book well, subtitled Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, wherein Preston Lauterbach vividly evokes the bustling urban milieu, both creative and destructive, that made Beale Street ground zero for Black America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Because Paris in the 1830s was a place where artists and musicians and philosophers and writers came together, it was a cultural center for its time. And the same thing was happening here in Memphis. I think that’s what sparked the idea for setting La Bohème on Beale Street,” says Darling.
Indeed, the similarities between the two cities of different eras were so profound that the original opera slotted neatly into the new setting. “Originally, we were going to write something new, or Ned was, but we moved away from that and have kept most of the original text the same,” says Darling.
Jeri Lynne Johnson (Photo: Vanessa Briceno)
As conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson points out, that maintains the integrity of Puccini’s original vision. “Audience members who are fluent in Italian may realize that a couple of things have changed,” she says, “but for the most part, we’ve done this without actually changing the text, which the singers have grown up learning for years and years in the Italian language. Of course, Puccini’s music is so tied to the language, so in order to avoid changing too many actual words, and making sure they stand with the music, there are just a couple of word changes, and some of those are simply within the subtitles.”
Meanwhile, the stage set is similarly subtle. “We’re doing something a little bit more abstract,” says Darling, “using projection screens. It’s minimal but effective. With projections, we’ve layered photos of different buildings and businesses that were part of Beale. Reimagining this in a very minimal way is always challenging, but things that are challenging also allow you to be more creative — oftentimes the things you find challenging are actually opportunities.”
And yet in one regard, there will be plenty of striking visuals, as Darling points out. “We have beautiful costume designs by Jennifer Gillette. That’s been the icing on the cake as we enter tech week because we initially created this show without seeing all of our visual elements. We didn’t have the projections, lighting, or costumes until much later. And it’s always amazing when I see these actors wear their costumes. Another level of character development happens almost immediately, where they just embody these characters, wearing these costumes that Jennifer has designed. They really transform our modern day actors and singers into these period characters.”
The impact of that visual element is deep, as Johnson points out, addressing a whole culture that’s so often rendered invisible. “I’ve done world premieres for the Santa Fe Opera and for the Chicago Opera Theater that had a predominantly African-American casts, having canonical works reimagined with African Americans in the roles. But what makes this particular production so interesting is, it isn’t just the casting, it is really transplanting that bohemian lifestyle into a uniquely Memphian historical period on Beale Street. The setting and the cast together really give you a sense of African-American life at that time. It adds an element of questioning what art is, and who makes art, where moral judgments are embedded into the aesthetic ones.”
The Fugees at the inaugural RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
After it was discovered that the RiverBeat Music Festival‘s social media accounts posted a clumsily-Photoshopped image that inflated the apparent crowd size (which the festival organizers copped to, blaming the photographer and removing the image), many in the online-iverse ramped up their complaints about the festival, dissing the lineup, the attendance, and even the lack of chain link fencing along the river shore (believe it or not).
Yet, as a musician, a music fan, and journalist embedded in the actual RiverBeat experience, I witnessed throngs of happy listeners and had more than a few magical encounters myself. In the end, that’s what will stay with us. Here, then, are a few personal, highly subjective moments that make a celebration of music on this scale worth the while, complemented by the Memphis Flyer‘s own mixtape.
Charlie Musselwhite The magic began before I even entered the festival gates. Walking along the perimeter toward the entrance, I heard the sound of pure liquid gold ringing out over the river. It was the blues harp of Charlie Musselwhite, known as “Memphis Charlie” in his youth, his family having moved here from Mississippi when he was a toddler, though he was based in Chicago as his career accelerated in the ’60s. To this day, he’s criminally under-booked in Memphis venues, making this moment a rare one indeed. This octogenarian and the melodic flow of his harp are national treasures.
Charlie Musselwhite at RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
Lucky 7 Brass Band Seeing this group in the charged setting of the festival brought home what a tremendous font of creativity and groove the Lucky 7 can be. As I walked into Tom Lee Park, I heard the familiar strains of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but far groovier and brassier than the original. It was quickly followed by Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name,” Victor Sawyer’s singing full of the original’s fury, but layered over the forward momentum of a second line groove. An utter revelation.
DJ’s at Whateverland The Memphis gem Qemist took DJing to new artistic heights, weaving together disparate tracks into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s about to get real Black real fast!” he announced at one point. The crowd gathered in the shade of the fanciful tent shimmied and swayed along with him…even the staff walking past. “I see you, Security! Get your strut on!” he exclaimed. On Saturday, WYXR’s Jared Boyd, aka Jay B, aka Bizzle Bluebland kept up a similar vibe with some fine disco-tinged vibes, puffing on a jumbo cigar as he manned the wheels of steel.
Durand Jones & the Indications I’d never heard this old school soul and R&B vocalist live, but certainly will again after the scorching set he delivered last Friday afternoon. The very on-point band formed over a decade ago at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, but a distinctly more Southern flavor of soul springs from Jones’ roots in Hillaryville, Louisiana. “I feel like I’m an ambassador of the rural South,” he quipped at one point. “I’m just a boy from a town of about 500 people, and our land is being taken away from us. It’s about time we saw what is going down.” Midway through their cover of Irma Thomas’ “Ruler of My Heart,” Jones spoke wistfully about a young man who came to Memphis “with just a guitar” and made Thomas’ song his own, bringing the house down with Otis Redding’s version, “Pain in My Heart.”
Talibah Safiya We just profiled this neo-soul/hip hop auteur, and, armed with fresh new tracks from her new album and a tight live band featuring MadameFraankie on guitar, she held the Stringbend Stage last Friday with aplomb. Even in the group’s tight execution of beats there was a playful looseness, exemplified when, seeing a few sprinkles in the air, they launched into an impromptu take on “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” That soon gave way to more of Safiya’s originals. “Look to your right,” the singer called out to the audience, pointing to the Mississippi River. “Let’s honor that body of water,” she said, and then launched into perhaps her most popular track, “Healing Creek.”
Carla Thomas at the RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
Take Me to the River Having written about the group assembled by Boo Mitchell in last week’s cover story, I knew this would be a special moment, but it exceeded all expectations. Lina Beach, the young guitarist for Hi Rhythm, rocked her originals with verve, Jerome Chism delivered soul standards like “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You” with passion, and Eric Gales delivered some scorching guitar work that was both virtuosic and soulful on “I’ll Play the Blues for You.”
While Mitchell is naturally grounded in Royal Studios and Hi Records, that latter song’s provenance in the Stax catalog confirmed that Hi Rhythm was the perfect vehicle for all stripes of Memphis soul. That was especially clear when Carla Thomas took the stage, cradling a crutch in her right hand but looking spry as she exhorted the crowd to do some classic straight-eighth note “soul clapping” while the band vamped on the intro to “B-A-B-Y.” She followed that up with the song her father Rufus put on the charts, “Walking the Dog,” whereupon Chism appeared with a small pup wearing ear protectors. That in turn was followed by the inimitable William Bell delivering stone classics like “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” making the Take Me to the River set a festival highlight.
No Blues Tent, Plenty of Blues As if to make up for the lack of a blues tent, always a fixture at Beale Street Music Festivals, the blues seemed to crop up everywhere at RiverBeat. Kenny Brown brought the Hill Country Sound on day one, laconic and completely at ease as he unleashed guitar licks with his trio. On Sunday, the Wilkins Sisters brought their unique gospel-blues straight out of Como, Mississippi, just as their late father, Rev. John Wilkins, and their grandfather, Rev. Robert Wilkins, did before them. As lead singer Tangela Longstreet said, “We lost our daddy in 2020. But I can still hear him telling me, ‘Don’t stop singing, baby!'”
And there was more of that sanctified blend from Robert Randolph & the Family Band, as the master of sacred steel guitar delivered a sermon from the church of good times. In his hands, the pedal steel guitar became an engine of squeaks, squalls, and heavily distorted riffs. Indeed, their finale of “It Don’t Matter” was the weekend’s personal highlight of unfettered abandon, and, judging from the way Boo Mitchell and Lina Beach were dancing, they felt the same. Such high energy blues were also apparent in Southern Avenue‘s fiery set, wherein the humble acoustic guitar played by Ori Naftaly on most of the tunes presented country blues riffs amped into overdrive, adding a new grit to their sound.
Yet there were blues in more unexpected niches. Lawrence Matthews‘ latest work draws heavily on sampled blues in the Fat Possum Records catalog, and his anti-hype attitude, sitting calmly on a stool as he delivered his rhymes was only underscored by the bare-bones country blues guitar underpinning much of his work. Al Kapone has also taken to blending his hip hop vision with the blues, and that was on full display in his Saturday set, especially on the dread-laden “Til Ya Dead and Gone (Keep Movin’).”
Al Kapone and Mayor Paul Young at RiverBeat Music Festival. (Photo: Chris McCoy)
And finally, bringing it back full circle to classic soul revivalism , there was plenty of blues in a groovy set by Rodd Bland and the Members Only Band, the horn section’s evocation of his father Bobby “Blue” Bland’s classic take on the minor-key “St. James Infirmary” giving this listener chills. Some of those same great horn players appeared with the Bo-Keys as they backed up singers Emma Wilson and John Németh in a stomping soul set. Are players like Jim Spake, Marc Franklin, Kirk Smothers, Tom Clary, and Tom Link becoming the new de facto Memphis horns? Their presence on the RiverBeat stages, and so many records cut here, suggests as much.
Memphis is a Star Perhaps the most striking pattern of the weekend was the way that the biggest stars of the event expressed their gratitude for playing our city. Of course, that was to be expected of Memphis-based mega stars like 8Ball & MJG, who made their set ultra-topical when they announced, “We’re going to dedicate this to the mayor!” then launched into their hit, “Mr. Big” in honor of Mayor Paul Young. Fellow hip hop star Killer Mike also got very specific in his love of the Bluff City, paying homage to both Gangsta Boo and Jerry Lawler in one breath.
There were plenty more tips of the hat to our city. Black Pumas singer Eric Burton called out the city many times, but his greatest tribute was perhaps through his vocal style, which one friend described as “Al Green without the horns.” Their psychedelic soul fit the riverfront crowd like a glove.
The Fugees‘ electrifying set also embraced our city in very musical ways. The crowd went mad as Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean (sans Pras) performed “Zealots,” with its distinctive sample of The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You,” but no one could have expected them to shift that beat into a shuffle for a lengthy bridge, wherein their crack ensemble sounded like nothing so much as a consummate Beale Street blues band. Aside from the mere fact of their appearance at the festival, quite a coup for RiverBeat’s organizers, they showed their love of Memphis in myriad small ways, as when Hill sang “killing me softly in Memphis,” or turned the line “embarrassed by the crowd” into “embarrassed by Memphis’ crowd.” Naturally, the crowd ate it up.
Jelly Roll at the RiverBeat Music Festival (Photo: Joshua Timmermans/courtesy RiverBeat Music Festival)
And yet, fittingly, the most involved embrace of the Bluff City came from Tennessee native Jelly Roll, who closed out the weekend just before Sunday’s second downpour descended. As the set was still warming up, the Antioch, Tennessee native shouted, “It feels so good to be back in my home state!” Later, he quipped “Since we’re in one of the birthplaces of rock and roll, I figured we’d play a little rock and roll,” before launching into “Dead ManWalking.”
But then he got more personal. “When I was growing up, my family would drive down to for Memphis in May, to be right here in front of this river,” he said. “I feel like this is God’s exact fingerprint on the bible belt, right here.” He noted his disbelief at now being on the festival stage where his musical heroes once played, then added, “I cant express how honored I am that you people are out there standing in the fucking rain for this!”
Then he began to reminisce: “When I was 13, we were all listening to rap. I’d go up to my brother’s room, looking for whatever smelled like skunk. And someone gave me a mixtape from Memphis, Tennessee labelled Three 6 Mafia.” As the night wore on, he displayed his formidable rapping chops, even calling out his old friend in attendance, Memphis rapper Lil Wyte. It peaked when he described his influences as “somewhere between Hank [Williams] and Three 6 [Mafia],” then launched into his mega-hit, “Dirty South.” The multiracial crowd went wild in the drizzle, celebrating the hybrid confluence of the many musical styles that typify Tennessee, Memphis, and the RiverBeat Festival itself.
As many music lovers savor memories of hearing their favorite bands on the Mississippi’s shores at last weekend’s RiverBeat Music Festival, another such experience is just heating up: the Sunset Jazz series at Court Square. And while the performances, taking place once a month from May through October, may lack strobe lights, flame cannons, or the feeling of a weaponized kick drum rattling your chest, they will offer their own kind of fireworks: the sheer virtuosity of the series’ featured artists.
The musicianship is top-notch partly because the series’ producer and curator, Deborah Swiney, is a seasoned jazz singer herself. After she released her 2017 album, I Remember Rio, there were precious few jazz-friendly venues in which to promote it — so she took matters into her own hands.
“I had been wanting to do something at Court Square Park forever,” she recalls. “It’s a beautiful park, with the gazebo there to use as a stage. So I contacted Penelope Huston at Downtown Memphis and threw the idea out there, and she loved it. We did a pop-up event and had a great turnout, far beyond what we would have ever imagined. So I did a couple more.”
Pivoting from her own work to the likes of Chris Parker and Kelley Hurt, who had only just premiered their stunning No Tears Suite in Little Rock, those other 2018 pop-ups set a tone of eclecticism and quality that has continued to mark the series, now in its fifth year (after a two-year break during the worst of Covid). “I try to do something different each time,” Swiney says.
Ted Ludwig This year’s lineup carries on that tradition, while keeping the focus firmly on Memphis-based artists. Season opener Ted Ludwig (appearing on Mother’s Day) has become a fixture at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts, for instance, with his trio often backing talent visiting from elsewhere (as in this Wednesday’s performance with New York saxophonist and composer Jim Snidero). “To me, he’s one of the top guitar players around,” says Swiney, “and we have a bunch of great guitarists in Memphis. He grew up in New Orleans and won the Louis Armstrong Award in high school there, then studied with the great pianist Ellis Marsalis.”
Ekpe & the African Jazz Ensemble June’s concert will feature the more international side of Memphis jazz with percussionist Ekpe Abioto’s African Jazz Ensemble, one of the few local groups who pursue the sounds of contemporary Africa. “Ekpe also has a great resume, and he does a lot of studio work,” says Swiney. “He played on my Rio album and if someone needs a percussionist here it’s likely to be either Ekpe or Felix Hernandez.” While Abioto’s ensemble is often known to delve into Afrobeat territory, Swiney says, “he’s likely to focus more on the jazz part for this series.”
Stephen M. Lee While many parents and aspiring young players know of Lee as a teacher, some may not realize that he’s a world-class pianist in his own right. He studied under fellow Memphian Donald Brown in his college years, then went on to develop a career in New York for over a decade. When he received the Steinway and Sons Top Teacher Certificate Award in 2017, he returned to Memphis and founded the Memphis Jazz Workshop to fill in gaps in public school music education here. The program has been a great success. Swiney sees his July performance as a chance to showcase “more straight-ahead jazz.”
Soul Ingredient After Lee’s July performance, the following month will present the best of what his educational efforts have wrought. Soul Ingredient collects some the Memphis Jazz Workshop’s finest young players into a powerhouse ensemble. “Have you ever heard these guys?” exclaims Swiney. “I heard them at an event last year, and had I been in another room and not seen that these were kids, you couldn’t have convinced me that they were so young. Of course, all their instructors are professional musicians and you can just tell they’re getting taught by some of the best top players.”
Soul Ingredient (Photo: Elizabeth Fitzgerald)
Patrice Williamson Memphis doesn’t see enough of the singer featured in the September Sunset Jazz show, possibly because she teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston. But Jazz Times magazine wrote that “Patrice Williamson isn’t a singer, she’s a one-woman jazz sampler. She is a woman of many voices, each distinctly intriguing, all distinctly her own.” Growing up in Memphis, Williamson’s father introduced her to both gospel and the music of greats like Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, and Lena Horne, and that blend influences her singing to this day.
Patrice Williamson (Photo: D&D Pro Imaging)
Brian “Breeze” Cayolle Further cementing the close ties between New Orleans and Memphis, this Crescent City-native has been a fixture in Memphis since Hurricane Katrina nudged him northward. “He brings a bit of New Orleans wherever he goes,” says Swiney of the clarinetist and saxophonist, who held down Wednesday nights at Lafayette’s Music Room for years. “He’s played with a bunch of people and he’s quite celebrated,” Swiney adds. Cayolle will wrap up this year’s Sunset Jazz series on October 13th.
Little Baby Tendencies at Cooper-Young Porchfest ’24 (Photo: Chris McCoy)
Last Saturday, April 20, 2024, was the fourth annual Cooper-Young Porchfest. More than 100 bands played on porches, in driveways, and on lawns all over the neighborhood. The weather was cool, and it was a little cloudy, but the tunes were hot all over the Coop.
I was there with a camera trying to see as many sets as I could, which was just a tiny fraction of the talent on display. In the “Cooper-Young Porchfest Mixtape” you’ll see performances from Bluff City Vice, Cloudland Canyon, Dead Soldiers, Little Baby Tendencies, Above Jupiter, and the Walt Phelan Band, with a little bit at the end featuring Moth Moth Moth’s front lawn drag show. Settle in for some of the best music the Memphis scene has to offer.
We all know it takes a village — to raise a child, tend a garden, or create art — but first someone has to make the village. Talibah Safiya, the Memphis singer-songwriter with a recording career now spanning almost a decade, is one of those people, drawing scores of collaborators around her by dint of her vision and voice, pulling disparate threads together to craft her unique neo-soul/trap hybrid music.
That sonic identity seemed to arrive fully formed with her 2015 debut single, “Rise,” and is just as powerful today, her collaborations only growing deeper and wider. Not only does her 2024 album, Black Magic, feature some notable co-producers, she’s worked with even more since its release in February, as several remixes, the latest of which dropped last Friday, have shown.
And, as she points out, she’s been “working mostly with producers who have Memphis roots, even if some of them don’t live here anymore,” proving that you can still go big while going local. One case in point: “I worked with Brandon Deener, who is from Memphis but based in L.A. He’s actually an incredible visual artist who is currently working on a solo show in Paris that’s happening this summer. But he’s a producer as well.” Indeed, his painting was the focus of The Guardian’s profile of Deener last year, where he was called the “former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Lil Wayne … now known more as a visual artist.”
Black Magic, the latest album by Talibah Safiyah.
Yet the album’s title song proves Deener is still in the music game. A bold opening shot, it builds on a vintage loop of stinging, soul-blues guitar before Safiyah’s voice decries, “We come from a Black-ass city/Black Magic … We said our pledge of allegiance/To the capital of Egypt!” It’s an anthem of sorts for Safiyah’s hometown, and the vintage soul stew loop only puts a finer historical point on it.
Deener also worked on “Jack and Jill” and “Have Mercy” (the latter featuring Marcella Simien), and both also play with locally-derived samples of roots guitar. Those flavors were very intentional, growing, Safiyah explains, from her time as artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year. “The Rudi Scheidt School has the High Water Recording Company catalog, and I did a deep dive into some of that music, singing along with my guy Brandon Deener at Ari’s studio.” That would be producer/engineer Ari Morris, profiled in these pages last year as “Memphis music’s secret weapon,” who was also deeply involved in Black Magic.
“That was when I first met Ari, and how Ari and I ended up locking in,” Safiyah adds, “but I found myself really inspired by, firstly, R.L. Burnside’s ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song had me really immersed in the sound of R.L. Burnside’s voice — it sounded to me like he was improvising the song, and I loved that. It sounds like he was just making it up on the spot. And it got me thinking about Memphis. So I was super inspired by ‘Bad Luck City,’ which we sampled for the single ‘Black Magic,’ and that’s how the whole project got that name.”
Another High Water artist that Safiyah found inspiring was Jessie Mae Hemphill, though her music was not sampled for the project. “She was my guiding light for the energy of the composition of music,” Safiyah says. “My husband Bertram and I were at A. Schwab’s and he bought me a book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Y. Davis, which talks about how Black women have freed up the way we tell our stories through the blues.”
Hemphill would be a prime example of that process, but she has modern-day analogs. As part of her village, Safiyah enlisted a current feminist hero of the local neo-soul/hip-hop scene, MadameFraankie, for the track, “Papa Please!” Even that was touched by R.L. Burnside.
“For ‘Papa Please!’ specifically, I played Fraankie ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song is such a huge influence on a lot of the songs on the project, even if everything didn’t sample it. So I told Fraankie about a friend of mine and her relationship with her dad. I gave her a whole visual story and played her ‘Bad Luck City,’ and she went off and made the beat for ‘Papa Please!’ And when sent me that track, I was inspired right away. I wrote the song immediately, sang it for her, and that was the first one that we composed for the project.”
The track features MadameFraankie’s trademark liquid rhythm/solo guitar, but that’s not all. “She played the bass. She played the drums. She did everything on that song, there’s nobody else playing,” Safiyah enthuses.
Meanwhile, there are still more collaborations going down as Safiyah issues remixes of the album’s key tracks. The first was a brilliant reimagining of “Jack and Jill” by another soon-to-be-iconic Memphis figure, Jess Jackson, aka DJ BLINGG, who originally built a name with her sisters in the band JCKSN AVE. And as of Friday we have the album’s closer, “Delicious,” remixed by A.N.T.E. “He plays the keys and he’s done a couple other remixes for me,” notes Safiyah. “It’s really fun, and has a soulful, jazzy kind of vibe. But it feels totally different than the other version.”
True to form, “totally different” is something Safiyah will always be pursuing as she taps into her very disparate networks. “My theme throughout has been genre-bending,” she says. “I grew up listening to a lot of different types of things, and I love a lot of different types of music. I don’t think that they should be separate.”
There’s something about James D. Gish that evokes Elvis.
He gets that from people. But especially since he began playing the dashing love interest, Fiyero, in Wicked on Broadway. “I’ll slick my hair for this show,” says Gish, 28, who is appearing in the musical through April 21st at the Orpheum Theatre.
Offstage, Gish’s hair has resembled the pompadour Elvis sported in his early movies. “Not on purpose. It’s sort of the way my hair sits.”
He isn’t trying to emulate The King on or offstage. But, ironically, ever since Gish was a child, Elvis was part of his life. “My family are such obsessive Elvis fans. When I was growing up, I had a dog named Elvis. And after he passed away I had a dog named Presley.”
And, Gish says, “Let’s just say, the garage was full — every wall — [of] Elvis memorabilia that my parents, especially my father, collected over the years.”
His family still watches Elvis movies and “Elvis CDs are playing throughout the house.”
Images of Gish also are included at their home. If his face appears on a poster at a venue or if his name is printed anywhere, his dad wants it. It then gets added to the “Elvis and James D. Gish Shrine.”
His dad still calls him “Presley” or “Elvis.” As in “I’ll see you later, Elvis,” Gish says. Or “Oh, have a great night, Elvis.”
That actually translates to “rock star,” Gish says. “He’s very proud. And I’m very fortunate that he’s proud.”
Born in Las Vegas, Gish was raised in Bullhead City, Arizona. His family is related to the famous silent screen actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish, he says. “I know that my grandmother knew Lillian quite well. She said she would always attend the family reunion. She passed away before I was born.”
But, for Gish, it was singing “as a very young kid” before acting, Gish says.
He reluctantly joined the choir in high school. Then the guy who was playing the Beast in the school production of Beauty and the Beast had to drop out. “He had issues with family, school, or something. And they asked me to do it. And I ended up falling in love with it.”
Gish’s first Memphis visit was with his parents when he was 20 to participate in the United Professional Theatre Auditions. “Of course, we toured Graceland and went to Sun Studio.”
Like other tourists, Gish’s dad paid to have his son make a little recording at Sun Studio. “Most people sing ‘Hound Dog’ or ‘Viva Las Vegas.’ And I, of course, sang ‘Music of the Night.’”
Gish remembers looking at his proud father. “You just see him crying. With his son singing show tunes at Sun Studio.”
In 2017, Gish recorded an EP, So in Love, which rose to number six on the iTunes Classical Chart. It was “sort of a mishmash of a few different genres.”
The EP included an Italian aria as well as “soaring symphonic arrangements” of show tunes. And, he says, “We took Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ and adapted it into an up-tempo swing jazz number like a big band.”
Gish toured with the EP off and on for about a year before focusing on acting. “I missed having a full cast around me.”
He majored in business at Arizona State University, but at night he would audition for the Phoenix Theatre Company. “I just kind of took to it like a fish to water. It just felt right.”
Gish eventually moved to New York. “There’s no book on how to become an actor in New York City.” It’s just “falling on your face until you start to crawl and then walk and then run.”
From a small role in Les Misérables, Gish went on to appear in leading roles in plays, including one of his best known — Fabrizio in The Light in the Piazza.
Gish landed the role of Fiyero in Wicked on Broadway. “I love Fiyero because you get to play two very different people in one night, which is really cool. It’s fun to come on stage and get to be a ‘big shot’ — this cocky little punk who thinks he’s God’s gift.”
Then, in the second act, Fiyero’s character changes and he becomes more human. “He comes to know empathy, sympathy, and caring for other people.”
As for roles he’d like to play some day, Gish says, “I would really like to play a very quirky awkward character who lacks all self-confidence. I think I would do a character like that justice. I never get the opportunity. I sort of just get typecast as a Fiyero. A lot of cocky jerks or leading man types.”
When he’s not on stage, Gish likes to write young adult fiction books. He hasn’t tried to publish any yet, but, he says he’s currently working on a “young adult fantasy novel” that is “almost a historical allegory with fantastical elements.”
For now, Gish is taking care of business pursuing his work in the theater. He’s happy “the cards have fallen the way they have.”
When the band Snowglobe was most active in the Memphis scene, back in the aughts, they had a run of albums and live shows that any group would envy, culminating in 2010’s Little More Lived In, their sixth release. After that, it seemed the core players — Nahshon Benford (trumpet, flute), Jeff Hulett (drums), Brad Postlethwaite (vocals, piano, guitar), Tim Regan (vocals, piano, guitar), and Brandon Robertson (bass) — went their separate ways. Yet there was never a definitive breakup, as their sporadic reunion shows through the teens proved. Indeed, though band members moved around and their live performances grew less frequent, they began recording new material soon after Little More Lived In, though those tracks would not emerge until 2016’s Snowglobe was released. By then, the band had grown to include Luke White on guitar and John Whittemore on pedal steel.
Now, with a similarly long gestation period, and extra time thrown in for health issues and a pandemic, their eighth and ninth releases, The Fall (an LP) and The Climb (an EP), will both drop this Friday, courtesy of Regan’s Nine Mile Records, based in Austin, Texas.
And while many bands now assemble whole albums from parts recorded in the members’ home studios, these new tracks were generally created the old-fashioned way, with the band convening in a studio. “This happened over plus or minus five years, maybe?” says Regan. “Like, we’re all always writing stuff, and we’re all buddies. So we would just get a weird text from Brad saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got the studio booked for this time, let’s go do something!’ Then I’d come to town and whoever was around would go in there and start messing on stuff. It was all done in Memphis. I mean, I probably did a handful of overdubs from my house, but most of the stuff was cut in a studio with engineers.”
(above) The Fall and The Climb (below) by Andrew Kosten
Those engineers, Regan is quick to point out, were almost always Toby Vest and Pete Matthews of High/Low Recording, though some recordings were done at American Recording Studio when Vest and Matthews operated in that space, before renovating a dedicated building of their own. As Regan explains, working with professional recordists helps the band focus. “I think one of the benefits of getting in the studio is not coming back to find out that Posty [Postlethwaite] put 68 tracks on something. Which happens a lot. He’ll put everything and the kitchen sink in there. So it helps to be working with Pete and Toby and Kevin [Cubbins], who will tell you, ‘We don’t really need six guitars on this.’”
That said, the new tracks are, like much of Snowglobe’s output, rich with layers of ear candy. Though often grounded by chords on an acoustic guitar or piano, the arrangements fill out from there with all manner of harmonies, synthesizers, or electric guitar riffs and hooks. That’s partly a result of the many cameos by friends of the band, invited into the studio sessions over the years. There are so many appearances like this that Regan and the band lost track of who plays what.
“Talking with the guys, it’s like, ‘Who played on this? I don’t remember.’ That’s kind of how it goes. There are two or three where you can tell it’s Paul Taylor playing drums. I think I’m playing drums on one, and Jeff’s on a lot of stuff. It’s just whoever was there, whatever needed to happen.” Other guest players, according to the press release, include Mark Edgar Stuart, Ken Stringfellow, Jonathan Kirkscey, Krista Wroten, and Jana Misener.
“There’s a song of mine on the EP called ‘Need to Know’ that I actually got Kat Brock from Dixie Dirt to sing because I realized that I’d written and recorded it out of my vocal range. We said, ‘Oh, well, we can either re-record this or get someone who can sing better than me to sing it.’ So I called up Kat for a favor and she knocked it out — it sounds damn cool.”
Yet Regan makes it clear that what sounds the coolest to him is a song that stands as a milestone of sorts in the Snowglobe catalog for guitarist Luke White. As the Memphis Flyer reported in 2019, White had a seizure that year that revealed a cancerous brain tumor. While he’s been on a roller coaster of medical treatments ever since, he’s mostly hopeful about that process. “He’s in pretty decent spirits,” says Regan, adding that “his song ‘Willow Tree’ is so damn beautiful. And it’s also the first one that Luke’s written [with Clay Qualls] for us. Not that he hasn’t been a big part of our recordings before, but with this one, he brought it to the table and said, ‘I’ve got a song.’ We were all like, ‘Let’s do it!’ It’s his first writing credit with Snowglobe.”
It’s a challenge for this reporter to write objectively about an old friend like Misty White, but any time she returns to Memphis is news. The rarity of such occasions contrasts sharply with her ubiquity in the city’s underground culture when she lived here — before moving to Toulouse, France, a decade ago — as noted by none other than Greg Cartwright, a well-known fan of her music who, in a 2022 interview with the Memphis Flyer, noted that he met Alicja Trout through White, back in the ’90s. “That’s how we got to know each other: [me] teaching [Alicja] songs for Misty White’s band. So there you go, Misty White is the Kevin Bacon of Memphis!”
Indeed, at the end of the last century, the characters who orbited around her sprawling rental house on Harbert were a veritable who’s who of Memphis rock auteurs, including Ron Easley, Suzy Hendrix, Tav Falco, Amy LaVere, and Alex Chilton, all drawn to a Bohemian atmosphere there thick enough to cut with a knife (but not before inhaling deeply). Along the way, the onetime Deadhead became a garage auteur herself, writing songs and forming groups that were all sparked by the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Her drumming powered those pioneers of all-female garage rock, the Hellcats, before their breakup around 1990, and then she blossomed as a songwriter, sharpening an approach that might best be termed “campfire rock-and-roll,” reminiscent of Jonathan Richman if he were high.
After resettling in Cooper-Young, she met the love of her life, French musician and indie label owner Phillipe Lombardi, and he became an ardent fan of her music. They married and moved to Toulouse, where she lives as Misti Lombardi to this day, preserving her husband’s memory since his unexpected death in 2016. They recorded her songs together in the years leading up to that tragedy, releasing an EP and her first album on his Bang! Records imprint, and she’s carried on ever since.
Now she’s releasing her third LP on Bang!, Dis-Moi, already out in France, and some of which she’ll perform during the three public appearances she’s making this week. The first will be this Thursday, April 4th, as the Zippin’ Pippins, last active about 15 years ago, take the stage at Bar DKDC.
“The original lineup was me, Kristi [White Witt, Misty’s twin sister], Amy LaVere, Suzy Hendrix, and Diana Powell was on keyboards,” White says. “For this show, we’ll have me, Kristi, Amy, and Suzy,” plus two Hellcats, Su Hartline and Lorette Velvette.
The group sprang from her activist days with Save Libertyland, an alliance of Quixotic citizens bent on dissuading the city fathers from dismantling the beloved amusement park and its vintage roller coaster, The Zippin’ Pippin, which Elvis Presley famously enjoyed. In the end, the citizens were thwarted, as documented in the Mike McCarthy short Destroy Memphis, but the band named after the fair ride lived on somehow.
“One of Kristi’s songs is ‘Mid-South Fair,’ about riding the Ferris wheel and falling in love. So many did at the Mid-South Fair. One couple even got married on the Pippin,” says White.
The band will also feature White’s song “Sex Talk,” written well before the group had formed, though it’s only now being featured on White’s solo album. Yet that LP is primarily marked by its newer material. “With this album, I didn’t have a whole album’s worth of old songs that hadn’t been recorded yet. I wrote songs for the record, and that was really interesting, to not have songs I’d played a million times. But yeah, I can still write songs! That’s what that proved.”
It’s fitting that the Zippin’ Pippins are incorporating some Hellcats in the mix, as that group will also be active in the days to follow. On April 10th, superfan Cartwright will moderate an album event and discussion at the Memphis Listening Lab centered on the Hellcats’ full-length LP, Hoodoo Train, produced at Doug Easley’s backyard studio before he moved into the former Onyx Studio building.
After the listening event, various Hellcats will perform their songs in the round at the Lamplighter Lounge. “They all know the Hellcats in France because we were on New Rose,” White says. “Anybody that was on New Rose is kind of held in a higher light because it was such a great label.”
(l-r) Liam O’Dell, DeAnte Payne, Martin Carodine, Charles Pender II, and Kurtis Gray (Photo: Steve Roberts)
Sometimes the best way to champion the music of today is by looking to some milestone from the past. Take the experience of David Less: Having worked in and around Memphis music for half a century, writing dozens of articles and the bookMemphis Mayhem, promoting shows, producing records, he’d known about an especially rare Memphis jazz LP for some time. “Fred Ford had told me about it in 1975 or ’76,” he says, “and told me what a great record it was. I always wanted to hear it, but it was very hard to find.”
So potent was the album’s music that when Less finally got a copy, he was motivated to produce one of his own.
The legendary album in question? Young Men from Memphis: Down Home Reunion, released in 1959 on United Artists Records, for which the groundbreaking producer Tom Wilson assembled a band that reads like a Memphis jazz who’s who: on alto saxophone, Frank Strozier; on tenor, George Coleman; on piano, Phineas Newborn Jr.; on guitar, his brother Calvin; on bass, Jamil Nasser; on drums, Charles Crosby; and on trumpet, Louis Smith and Booker Little.
“It featured the great Memphis jazz players when they were young and just getting to New York,” says Less. “That group of people later became very well-known, but at the time they were not, so the record went into obscurity.”
Other Memphians also knew of the album. “Johnny Phillips, whose father owned [record distributor] Select-O-Hits and later bought my record company, Memphis International Records, had heard it,” recounts Less. “In fact, Johnny kind of grew up listening to it. So when I found a copy, Johnny and I and his son Jeff, who owns the label, started talking about doing an updated version of this.”
This April 2nd, at a Memphis Listening Lab event from 6-8 p.m., the world will first hear the full realization of that thought, Playing in the Yard by the Jazz Ensemble of Memphis (J.E.M.). (It will be officially released on CD and vinyl three days later.)
Just as Wilson had done, Less set out to recruit a band. “First of all, we approached the teachers, where it all comes from,” he says. “We called Sam Shoup, Gary Topper, Steve Lee, Michael Scott … you know, the guys! And we found these five players. Some of them knew each other. Most of them didn’t.”
As the sessions for the album unfolded, the players developed a powerful group chemistry. Tenor saxophonist and flautist Charles Pender II, a University of Memphis alum, was the senior member of the group, 26 at the time. His grandfather, E.L Pender, taught such greats as Maurice White, David Porter, and Booker T. Jones. Keyboardist and vibraphonist DeAnte Payne, 25, a standout member of James Sexton’s band, plays the vibes with a breathtaking, playful dexterity. Bassist Liam O’Dell, 21, is an Arkansas native and University of Memphis graduate who made a splash locally before pursuing a master’s of jazz performance degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Trumpeter Martin Carodine,19, came to the sessions from the University of Miami. And drummer Kurtis Gray, 17, is, in Less’ opinion, “an absolute savant.”
On the title track, there’s a notable cameo from the old guard. “Jim Spake is on the first song, playing soprano,” says Less. “I brought Jim in because I was afraid that they would not know where we set the bar for this record. I wanted them to understand that this is the best saxophone player in town. I wanted to put them with him, playing at that caliber, from the very first song. And so we cut ‘Playing in the Yard,’ which is by Sonny Rollins.”
The bar clearly set, the ad hoc quintet shines through the rest of the album. The Ellington staple “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” also featured on Down Home Reunion, is the clearest echo of that 20th-century predecessor, while other tunes, like Willie Mitchell’s “The Crawl” and Dan Penn’s “The Dark End of the Street,” situate the album squarely in Memphis. Payne’s vibraphone casts a spell on “When You Wish Upon a Star,” a tune that’s reprised at the end as a pensive arco solo by O’Dell. The album feels like an instant classic.
While clearly delighted, Less is not surprised by the results. “Memphis is a jazz city,” he says. “Jazz is just as good as it ever was in Memphis.”
Few musicians are as familiar around town as the indefatigable Graham Winchester, the drummer/multi-instrumentalist who plays with the Sheiks, Jack Oblivian, Turnstyles, Devil Train, the MD’s, and a few others. Along the way, he founded Blast Habit Records with Lori McStay and her late husband, Jared, and is now producing other artists — like Cheyenne Marrs — in his home studio. Yet that last achievement, ironically enough, was only made possible by the quarantine years of Covid, when Winchester was forced to relax the furious pace of his gigging schedule and delve into himself more, writing and recording songs entirely on his own. Now the product of that time is emerging as an LP, Nobody Waters the Flowers, on Red Curtain Records, and Winchester’s gearing up for a record release show at Bar DKDC on March 22nd.
The album has been available on streaming platforms since December of 2022, and, given the album’s provenance, it’s understandable that he was impatient to get it out in the world well before it could exist on vinyl. For this record is a document of another time, the lockdown prompted by Covid and those trepidatious months that followed it, from 2020-2021.
“I think that in the isolation of the shutdown era of the pandemic, anything I was writing was for me. I didn’t even know if there was going to be a future of playing on stage with my friends anytime soon,” Winchester says now. “The songs came from an intimate, personal place and most of them were written and recorded between 2020 and 2021. And a lot of them come out of a place of self-reflection, and reflection about the world we live in. Not being able to be busy made me meditate and think about my own life more.”
Song titles like “Quietly,” “Coming Down,” and “I’ll Be Sad With You” evoke Winchester’s frame of mind at the time. “It was a necessary slowdown for me, personally,” he says. “Obviously, I wish there was no Covid and no isolation, but I made the most of it, I guess.”
Indeed, many families untouched by Covid directly found more quality time during lockdown, and the Winchesters were no different. “There’s a song on the album called ‘From the Start’ that I’m singing directly to my children. And that was inspired from being around my boys all day every day for the first time. Since they’d been born, I’d spent any waking moment I could with them, but I’m a busy guy, a busy dad. To be able to just sit in the backyard on a picnic blanket with my sons brought us so much closer to each other.”
Other songs are not as bound to Winchester’s own life, but spring from his penchant for the pure craft of writing. “‘Nobody Waters the Flowers’ is more of a story song,” Winchester says. “That’s me trying to get into that old country music storytelling zone. ‘Can’t You See?’ as well — sort of like The Band’s approach, or even Creedence Clearwater Revival’s.”
While the album does include the odd garage stomper like “Lab Rat,” listeners who largely associate Winchester with the amped-up sounds of Jack Oblivian or Turnstyles may be in for a surprise. Yet he’s actually been cultivating his quieter side for some time now, often leading songwriter nights at Bar DKDC. The way Winchester tells it, the less raucous approach is really at the core of his compositional style.
“I’ll usually even write Turnstyles songs on the acoustic in sort of a folky way,” he says. “And then I’ll bring it to Seth [Moody] and go, ‘I need help rocking this up.’ So we might put a more aggressive beat on it, he puts his distorted, Jaguar guitar surf-ness on it, and then it becomes this rock song. But when I approach songwriting I think, ‘Is this a song that can be played in any style? Do the lyrics and the chords stand up on their own, to where anybody can adapt it?’ I’m not a huge riff songwriter. I like to start with melodies and chords. And a lot of times I’m writing on piano. I’m really coming at it from a songwriting standpoint, where the song can be taken any kind of way.”
