Tag: Levitt Shell

After opening for Emmylou Harris at the Levitt Shell last year, the Memphis Dawls — Holly Cole, Jana Misener, and Krista Wroten — received an open invitation to headline their own show for the venue’s next spring/summer concert season.

The Dawls could have played their typical set at the Shell, but, instead, according to Wroten, they wanted to “take advantage of the space” to put on a special show.

“We wanted to spread our wings a bit,” Wroten says. The result is a USO-themed concert the trio will preside over at the Shell this Saturday, June 29th. “The Saturday before the Fourth of July was open, and we thought that would be perfect,” Wroten says.

“We had liked the Andrews Sisters, and I mentioned to [Wroten and Misener], let’s do a Fourth of July show of Andrews Sisters. We could do the harmonies, and it would be so much fun,” Cole says. “But the band was also working on string arrangements for our own material, and it grew into something bigger.”

The USO — United Service Organization — has provided entertainment and support for U.S. troops from 1941 to the present, but the Dawls will take their inspiration from the classic WWII USO shows, the era of the Andrews Sisters and Bob Hope. Local actor G.B. Shannon will emcee the show and do comedy sets in between the music and in the spirt of Hope.

The Dawls will perform two sets. The first will showcase original material alongside an eight-piece chamber orchestra and recruited-for-the-show rhythm section Mark Edgar Stuart and John Argroves. The Dawls will return for a second set, in full Andrews Sisters attire, for ’40s-era songs alongside the Memphis Doctors big band.

During the show, care-package items will be collected for distribution to U.S. troops stationed overseas. A “wish list” of desired care-package items can be found via the band’s website at thememphisdawls.com.

“We’re hoping this will go well enough that we can do it again,” Wroten says.

Concert Film Series

While the Shell’s summer concert series is winding down, music in the park will continue this summer with a weekly concert film series presented by Indie Memphis. This six-film series begins on July 12th with Queen: Live in Budapest and continues through August 24th with Big Star: Live in Memphis, a 1994 reunion concert. In between, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Paul McCartney & Wings will be among the featured bands. See indiememphis.com or levittshell.org for more info.

Bobby Bland 1930-2013

One of the key links on the road from blues to soul, Bobby “Blue” Bland, passed away Sunday, at age 83.

A Rosemark, Tennessee, native, Bland first rose to prominence in Memphis as a member of the Beale Streeters, a group that also featured such future luminaries as B.B. King, Junior Parker, Johnny Ace, and Rosco Gordon.

Bland started making his solo mark in the late ’50s for the Duke label, which had relocated from Memphis to Houston, scoring R&B hits such as “Farther Up the Road,” “Little Boy Blue,” and “I Pity the Fool.”

Lending his smooth but grave baritone to material that paved the road from blues and R&B to the emerging, gospel-fueled form known as “soul,” Bland was an artistic rival of such seminal figures as Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, if not quite a commercial one. Bland’s 1961 album Two Steps from the Blues remains one of the towering achievements in any of those forms and perhaps one of the most underrecognized classics in all of pop music.

Bland remained a traditionalist, uncrossed-over hit-maker in the ’70s, a period perhaps best remembered now for his “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” later prominently sampled on Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint.

As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, Bland settled in as a fixture on the “chitlin circuit,” signing with venerable Mississippi label Malaco and remaining a regional attraction among soul-blues partisans.

It was a career that landed Bland in multiple halls of fame: The Blues Hall of Fame in 1981, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and, most recently, as an inaugural member of the Memphis Music Hall of Fame last year. Bland performed with gravitas and grace at the Cannon Center last November for the Memphis Music Hall’s first induction ceremony, sitting onstage and signing his classics “Goin’ Down Slow” and “Stormy Monday Blues.” Near the end, Bland surveyed the crowd, held up one hand, smiled, and said, simply, “Thank you.” But the gratitude was all ours.

Patrick Dodd Back on Beale

Beale Street stalwart Patrick Dodd will perform on Beale with his band this week for the first time since Dodd’s run earlier this year on the television series The Voice. The performance, on Saturday, June 29th, at Rum Boogie Café, will be a benefit for the Memphis Blues Society and will also serve as a release party for Dodd’s Future Blues Live, now available on iTunes and via Dodd’s Bandcamp site, patrickdoddtrio.bandcamp.com. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.

In what has to be one of the most unusual local concert events in memory, Oklahoma pysche-rock stalwarts the Flaming Lips will play an afternoon show at Handy Park on Beale Street on Wednesday, June 27th.

This Memphis show will be the first of eight attempted concerts over the course of a day and night as the Lips attempt to break the Guinness World Record for “Most Live Concerts in 24 Hours (Multiple Cities).” (The record is currently held by Jay-Z.)

The Lips will leave Memphis for Mississippi where they will play shows the same night in Clarksdale (Ground Zero Blues Club, with Gary Clark Jr.) and Oxford (Lyric Theater, with Grace Potter & the Nocturnals) before continuing on to Jackson, Hattiesburg, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.

The concert series is a kickoff for the MTV “O Music Awards” and will be filmed and covered online (that’s what the “O” stands for) as part of the awards presentation.

Dallas rockers New Fumes will open the Memphis concert, which is set to begin at 4:30 p.m., with the park opening at 3:30 p.m. As of press time, there were still tickets available. Tickets are $21 and can be purchased via Ticketweb.com.

Booker T. at Rock for Love

The annual Rock for Love festival, which benefits the Church Health Center, has been growing every year, but the festival gets a boost this year with the announcement of Booker T. Jones as a headliner.

Jones, the organ master and leader of Booker T. & the MGs, will headline Rock for Love 6’s concert at the Levitt Shell on September 9th. This will be the culmination of a four-day series of events that will include concerts at the Hi-Tone Café on the three preceding nights and a day-long street festival on Overton Square on September 8th.

Saturday’s Overton Square street festival will serve as the public celebration of the Church Health Center’s 25th birthday and will include outdoor staging, pop-up shops, a bike rodeo, valet bike parking, food trucks, booth space, and more. The festival will also celebrate the comeback of Overton Square.

“Rock for Love has grown every year, because people love the Church Health Center and love great Memphis music,” center spokesman and concert co-founder Marvin Stockwell says in a release announcing the Booker T. booking. “A healthy and thriving Midtown community is healthy for all of Memphis, so expanding the show to Overton Square and the Levitt Shell just made sense.”

Sponsors, so far, include Sun Studios, Methodist Healthcare, Action News 5, Clear Channel Radio, Serving Memphis, Huey’s, and Fat Possum Records, but Rock for Love is looking for additional sponsors. To become a sponsor, call Jeff Hulett at (901) 272-0010, ext. 1304 or visit www.ChurchHealthCenter.org/rockforlove. To sponsor the Booker T. Jones concert at the Levitt Shell or other concerts at the shell, call Debra Czestochowski at (901) 272-2722 or email her at debra@levittshell.org.

Memphis Bands on Paste List

Three Memphis bands were highlighted in a recent piece from music magazine Paste titled “12 Tenneesee Bands You Should Listen to Now.” Meant to draw attention to Volunteer State up-and-comers, the piece lists rapper Cities Aviv (the only artist on the list who isn’t indie rock/folk) at 10th. Cities Aviv has a Memphis show this week, on Thursday, June 21st, at the Hi-Tone with Houston indie rapper Fat Tony and semi-local duo Dark Sister. Number seven on the list is the Memphis Dawls, the roots/folk trio of Holly Cole, Krista Wroten, and Jana Misener, who are on the upswing of late, with the widespread release of their initially local eponymous debut EP and a couple of dates opening for Jack White. Topping the Paste list of emerging Tennessee bands are folk-rockers Star & Micey, who have a new EP for later this year.

Two years ago, Jimbo Mathus celebrated the 50th anniversary of Alan Lomax’s trip through Mississippi. In the late 1950s, folklorist Lomax recorded Mississippi Fred McDowell and Muddy Waters, along with church choirs and prison groups, ensuring that the mid-century folk and rural blues forms would be documented. “Any cat from around here, if they know what they’re talking about, the Lomax stuff is their roots,” Mathus says. “That’s our bible.”

To mark the occasion, Mathus and Justin Showah, the studio engineer at Mathus’ Delta Recording Services and bass player for his backing band, re-read Lomax’s 1993 book The Land Where the Blues Began and made pilgrimages into the Mississippi countryside to look for old towns and churches visited by Lomax and his crew. “We were already embedded in this stuff, but we took it to another level,” Mathus says. “We’d go out in the van, grab a beer, and drive around these crazy back roads and find these old places that weren’t even supposed to be there anymore.”

The project was revelatory for Mathus, inspiring his latest album, the genre-jumping Confederate Buddha, released on the Memphis International label. It has deepened his strong attachment to all sorts of Mississippi music, whether it’s blues, country, folk, jazz, or anything in between. Magnolia State musicians invented most of those genres, Mathus, says, “and what they didn’t invent they stole. The South has a rep for being close-minded, but when it comes to music, we generally accept each other and learn from each other.”

Outside of Mississippi, Mathus may be best known as a founding member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the North Carolina-based outfit. Unfairly lumped in with the superficial swing revival of that decade, the Zippers were actually sophisticated stylists, blending hot jazz, ragtime, string-band, and any number of other styles. The group went on hiatus in the early 2000s and regrouped later in the decade, but Mathus has remained busy with other outfits, including his Knockdown Society and the South Memphis String Band (which includes Luther Dickinson and Alvin Youngblood Hart). Mathus has been nominated for Grammys for his work with Buddy Guy and the late producer Jim Dickinson.

As a solo artist, Mathus never toured much beyond the state lines, favoring local and regional one-offs instead of treks across the country. “I had all that shit many years ago,” he says, “and I got tired of it.” His tenure as a strictly Mississippi and Mid-South performer proved highly instructive, however, teaching him to adapt to different rooms in different locales:

“I was doing gigs at juke joints — dances and stuff. You have to keep it to one or two chords, the fewer the better. It needs to be open-ended stuff … dance-oriented stuff so people could keep moving and buying a lot of beer.”

Without that experience, Mathus would not have been able to make Confederate Buddha, his first album with the loose, agile backing band the Tri-State Coalition. Listeners expecting the uptempo, urbane jazz of the Zippers may be surprised to hear the hangdog country of these songs, for which Mathus’ deep, sad voice is ideally suited. But Southern honky-tonk is only the foundation for these songs, which draw equally from Marty Stuart, Jimmie Rodgers, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Charley Patton. Mathus even reworks Patton’s 1929 composition “Pony Blues” into “Leash My Pony,” a postmillennial country blues so deliriously slack it sounds like it was recorded in one take with no rehearsals.

Working at Delta Recording Services in Como, Mississippi, Mathus strove to capture the loose spontaneity, which he credits to the Tri-State Coalition. The band has the chops to follow him through all of Mississippi’s music, from the country blues of “Aces & Eights” to the Band-style folk rock of “Kine Joe” to the lowdown honky-tonk lament of “Cling to the Roots,” a flood narrative that will have special gravity for Memphians. “I try to take as many disparate things and make them sound like a whole piece — not like you’re jumping from one type of band to another,” he says. “I feel like there’s nothing I can throw at the Coalition that they won’t understand, and that’s pretty amazing considering all the music I like to do.”

For this album, Mathus is looking to tour outside the state, with Wilco’s Ken Coomer on drums. “I decided to go legit again and get a label and an agent,” he explains. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but let’s go for it again.”

Many of these songs were debuted only recently at the Beale Street Music Festival and will be further road-tested at the Levitt Shell. After that, he’s planning a larger-scale tour that will take the music of Mississippi to new listeners. “I think we have something to offer and I feel like we should take it out to the people again,” he says. “The songs and the band are good enough to merit shaking some bushes.”