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For the Love of Lelia

Marcella Simien (Photo: Jenny Max)

The first words of Marcella Simien’s new album, To Bend to the Will of a Dream That’s Being Fulfilled, are the perfect introduction to the journey that awaits listeners: “May I heal this family bloodline, forwards and backwards through time.” It’s an incantation of sorts, delivered with a devotional energy that sets the tone for what’s to come. Musically, it’s a departure from Simien’s previous recorded work by way of its minimalism, her main accompaniment for this song being a piano, so evocative of New Orleans and Louisiana. That region, of course, is where the Simiens have been for generations, and where any journey into the singer’s family bloodline must take her. 

But while that’s zydeco country (her father Terrance being one of the most celebrated artists of that genre), this is not a zydeco album. Nor is it “swamp soul,” as the rootsy-yet-eclectic sound of Marcella Simien’s band has come to be called. For this most personal of journeys, she’s playing nearly all the instruments, crafting a setting in a kind of synthetic world-building, evoking the sweep of generations with the sweep of electronic filters. 

With the new sound comes a new performance style, as Simien will unveil on Saturday, November 23rd, at Off the Walls Arts. “Yvonne [Bobo] built this structure out of metal,” Simien says, “with a screen on the front, and Graham [Burks] will be projecting visuals on this cylinder. It’s gonna be this really interesting experience for the audience, something new.”

Yet the electronic approach itself is not especially new to Simien. “I don’t even know where to begin with my love for synths, from Kraftwerk to Gary Numan to Gorillaz,” she says. “I always wanted to explore that more. Then we finally invested in a Korg recently.” With the new album, that investment has come to fruition, but in a subtle way. This sculpted audio universe doesn’t wear its synths and drum machines on its sleeve, yet it doesn’t shy away from them, either. 

Other, rootsier sounds do make an appearance. Speaking of a song honoring her late great-grandmother, Simien says, “With the song ‘Lelia’ in particular, which was the guiding light for the whole idea, I intentionally used instruments that Lelia would have heard in her life and in the 1930s, when she was young and building her family.” Lelia is a centerpiece of the album, and the track bearing her name begins with the sounds of crickets in a field at night, then Simien saying, “Recently I’ve been writing with my great-grandmother.” Indeed, listening to the album, it feels as though Lelia is sitting in the room with us, though Simien never met her.  

Nor did her father, Lelia having died when he was an infant. Yet Simien felt a deep bond with her father’s grandmother, and the small town where she helped raise him. “I spent a lot of time in Mallet, Louisiana, a very small community outside of Opelousas,” she says. “And I feel this deep, deep connection to the Simiens. I spent so much of my time around them there, where our family goes as far back as the early 1700s, when they settled on that land.” Simien recalls imagining Lelia when visiting the old family house, where “there was this old photo of her when she was 15, taken on the day she got married. And you can see this beautiful Creole woman with long, dark hair, and these hands of hers reminded me of my hands. I would just stare at that picture, and I think she became a deeper part of me, beyond the DNA.”

Paradoxically, the first word of “Lelia” is “hydrated,” probably not a word used much in Mallet back in the day. Yet that’s also a clue to the power Simien finds in her family past: She came to it through her yogic practice, as a source of strength when she herself was navigating some dark days of her own. It was a time when she struggled with pharmacological dependence. “After a decade of being prescribed Adderall,” she confides, “I decided to get off it. It’s been over three years now, and I don’t miss it at all, but it was scary because I really didn’t trust myself for so much of my 20s, you know?”

Through the struggle, Lelia and others in her family lore were guiding lights. “I started to think about just how challenging her life was,” Simien says. “Giving birth to 15 children, living off the land, making your own stuff, and building a life with next to nothing — I couldn’t comprehend it, but I always thought, ‘If she could handle that, I can handle whatever I’m going through.’ She was tough, and it showed me that there’s so much I can learn from these women. And I want to honor them any way that I can.” 

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Music Music Features

Amber Rae Dunn Is Giving It Her All

Amber Rae Dunn with The Royal Blues Band at “A Tribute to the King” (Photos: Michael Donahue)

If you heard Amber Rae Dunn sing for the first time at the recent “A Tribute to the King,” you might want to know more about her.

The captivating singer filled the stage of Lafayette’s Music Room with her voice and personality at the event held August 11th, featuring headliner Ronnie McDowell as well as The Royal Blues Band with Wyly Bigger on keyboards.

“I am from Schererville, Arkansas,” Dunn says. “I grew up with six siblings and my dad was just a barber and my mom was a stay-at-home mom who took care of all of us. There was not a lot to do, but we had a three-acre garden. Just about every memory of my life, I have it in the garden. My favorite animal is a turtle, and I loved that I got to collect worms off tomato plants to feed to my turtle.”

Dunn also sang. “All the time. Everywhere around the house. I was definitely the loudest kid my parents have.”

Dunn with Leon Griffin

If she wasn’t singing “This Little Light of Mine” in church, Dunn was listening to her mother’s Al Green, Michael Jackson, and Prince albums and her dad’s ’90s country music. “So, I’m sure I was singing those songs as well.”

Like she still does, Dunn worked at her dad’s barbershop, Larry’s Hair Design, in West Memphis, Arkansas. She learned how to cut and style hair when she was in high school. “Other kids go to soccer practice or others take acting. I enrolled in hair school.”

She began singing on stage while attending Memphis College of Art for a degree in sculpture. Yubu Kazungu, a fellow student, invited her to join him at an open mic. She asked Kazungu, who heads Yubu and the Africans, why he thought she could sing. She says he told her, “I can hear you humming in the sculpture room working on a pot. You hum on key, and I feel like you can sing on key.”

Dunn joined Kazungu’s band and appeared with the group at open mics around town.

Kazungu “had been pestering” her to write a song, so Dunn came up with “Arkansas Line.” After some persuading from Kazungu one night at a soul food restaurant, Dunn sang the song in front of an audience while keeping the beat by snapping her fingers.

People at the show told her she was really good, but that she needed to go to Nashville because “that’s not really the type of music we have in Memphis.”

So Dunn got a job at Wayne’s Unisex, a Nashville barbershop. She went to clubs at night to “work tips for the band.” She did whatever she could, whether it was “do handstands” or “pinch cheeks,” to get customers to put money in the tip jars. “Then, finally, at the end of the night when everyone was good and drunk and half the people were gone, they would let me get up and sing two or three songs at 3 in the morning.”

Dunn was realistic about living in Nashville. “My plan was five years. If nothing happened, I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this isn’t the path I’m supposed to get on.’”

But nine months after she got to Nashville, one of her brothers was killed in a motorcycle accident, so she returned home to comfort her parents. “I’m a sucker for family.”

Starting at an open mic at Earnestine & Hazel’s, Dunn thought, “I need to meet people. If you build it, they’ll come.”

Mark Parsell stopped in one night and invited Dunn to check out his venue, South Main Sounds. Singing at one of Parsell’s Friday night shows, Dunn met Andrew Cabigao, who helped her get a job as social media representative at Mark Goodman’s MGP The Studio. While there, Dunn recorded her first album, Arkansas Line. Attending a songwriters workshop at Visible Music College, Dunn met Billy Smiley, founding member of White Heart, a Dove Award-nominated Christian rock group. He invited her to come to Nashville and maybe do an album at his studio, Sound Kitchen Studios.

She was two songs into the album when Covid hit. She released a couple of singles, but the album, I Guess That’s Life, wasn’t released until March 2023.

One of those songs, her popular “Barbershop,” is “just kind of talking about my dad’s barbershop and the type of customers we have. It’s just nostalgic.”

She also began going to workshops in and outside of Memphis in addition to bartending on Friday nights at South Main Sounds and performing with her band, Amber Rae Dunn and the Mulberries.

Dunn is thinking about a new album, but it might go in another direction. “Vocally, there’s a lot of soul and blues to my voice. But there’s also a lot of country. So, I don’t know. I feel like there’s a way to navigate the two.”

She’d like to mix “a Memphis sound” with her “traditional country sound.” 

When she’s not cutting records or cutting hair, Dunn, who is married to Justin Craven, is performing with her band around town. She’s also a guest host with Leon Griffin on Memphis Sounds on WYPL. 

Not forgetting her visual art chops, Dunn, who recently got into mosaics, currently is working on a mural at the Super 8 motel in West Memphis.

But Dunn is primarily sticking with songwriting, which she decided at 25 was going to be her journey. She told herself, “I don’t know what the outcome is, but I’m going to give it my all.” 

See Amber Rae Dunn live at Momma’s, 855 Kentucky Street, Wednesday, August 28th, 7 p.m., with Mario Monterosso.

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Music Music Features

Mark Edgar Stuart: Never Far Behind

Mark Edgar Stuart (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

Some artists ponder making albums, wondering if they have enough material, enough musicians, or enough money. But when you’re a player on the level of bassist Mark Edgar Stuart, always staying busy with one project or another and forever mingling with other musos at gigs and in studios, albums sometimes just fall together. One recording session here, another there, and eventually the whole thing snowballs.

That’s how Stuart’s latest release, Never Far Behind, came about, as the singer-songwriter himself admits. “I didn’t really mean to put out another record,” he says. “I thought I was done for a little bit. And then this record just sort of happened.” 

Things like that tend to occur when you’re part of a crack studio band, as Stuart is — in this case at Bruce Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound studio, where Stuart, as a member of the Sacred Soul Sound Section, plays bass behind artists like Elizabeth King on the Bible & Tire Recording Co. He can also be heard on secular Watson-related projects, some of which end up on Big Legal Mess Records. There’s always music cooking over at Delta-Sonic. And at times Stuart would show up only to find his own material on the menu. 

“Over the past two years, my buddies and I would get in the studio — Will [Sexton] and Bruce and that whole crew. We just slowly recorded tracks,” Stuart says. “I kind of felt like the universe produced it, you know? Will was the official producer, but every session was just last minute. Will would say, ‘Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? Bruce is in town, I’m here, let’s record some songs!’ And I’m on the phone going, ‘Well, who’s going to be the band?’ So it was pretty much whoever was available at any given moment. Then three months would go by, and Will would go, ‘Hey, we’re in the studio now working on your record! What are you doing?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I guess I’d better get down there!’”

That approach made Never Far Behind one of Stuart’s most collaborative efforts, including songs he co-wrote with Sexton, Jed Zimmerman, and, perhaps most strikingly, Greg Cartwright. “That loose approach made for some cool combinations,” says Stuart, “like when we recorded a song that me and Greg wrote together [‘We Better Call It a Day’]. I was like, ‘Greg, you in town?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Come over!’ So he played guitar, and Amy [LaVere] played bass, and Krista [Wroten] played on it, and Shawn Zorn, and Will played the keyboards. In the studio, it wound up becoming a duet. It was just real loose and cool. Amy was going to sing backup, and all of a sudden she sang the first verse and it was like, ‘Fuck it, a duet it is! Keep rolling!’”

That track draws on the wit and musicality of Stuart and Cartwright, two of the city’s finest songwriters, to create a kind of Eastern European lament over a failed romance, made all the more haunting by LaVere’s and Stuart’s swapped vocal lines, wistful mandolin, and atmospheric, Tom Waits-esque percussion. 

Yet another track, “The Ballad of Jerry Phillips,” grew from a would-be collaboration between Stuart and the song’s titular hero, son of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips. “I was hanging out with Jerry about a year and a half ago,” says Stuart, “and he said, ‘Man we’re gonna write a song together, and it’s gonna be called “Don’t Block Your Blessings.”’ 

“You know, we’re always blocking our blessings,” explains Stuart. “It’s like God’s trying to bless us, but we get in our own way. We fuck it up sometimes! Sometimes you’ve just got to let it be and just open yourself up to all the goodness. And Jerry and I were supposed to write that song together, but we couldn’t get anywhere with it. So I just turned around and wrote him a silly song about his own biography, and used the blocked blessings idea for the chorus. It came out perfect, you know?” The party atmosphere of the track, a Memphis cousin to “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” captures Phillips’ rock-and-roll spirit and epitomizes the loose recording style that shaped the entire album.

After many months of such hilarity, an album coalesced. As Stuart describes the process, “A year and a half later, Will was like, ‘Well, we’ve got 15 songs here. … Are you going to put a record out?’ And I was like, ‘I guess we should.’ It was really friendly, you know, and that was cool. I’m really happy with it, probably more so than anything I’ve done in a long time. Nothing against anything else I’ve done, but it’s just that cool! I think this could be it for a while. I think after this I’m just going to get into other things.” Could Stuart really mean it this time? We’ll believe it when we see it. 

Hear Mark Edgar Stuart at the 8750’ Barbecue and Music Festival in New Mexico on August 16th; the Fishstock Music Series in Wisconsin on August 25th; Thacker Mountain Radio Hour in Oxford, Mississippi, on September 5th; the Memphis Songwriter Series at the Halloran Centre in Memphis on September 12th; and the Mempho Music Festival on October 4th.

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Music Music Blog

Hear Memphis’ Sonic Sisters

Suroor Hassan (Photo: Cameron Mitchell)

When we sent our latest cover story, “Sonic Sisters,” to print on Tuesday, we knew we weren’t done with it yet. If you haven’t read it, we won’t judge you — let me rephrase, most of us won’t judge you. Seriously, read it. We worked hard on it, but not as hard as the women in music we talk about in the story. They are producing some amazing stuff at an amazing rate.

That being said, we made a playlist full of music by just some of our favorite women in the scene, and because the Flyer is God’s gift to man, we figured we’d share it. No need to thank us.

Remember, this is only a sampling. A chaotic sampling to be sure. There are so many genres jammed in here, but that’s to be expected. 

As Miz Stefani, founder of Women in Memphis Music (WiMM) showcase series at B-Side, said, “Girls are everywhere here. They’re in reggae, Americana, jazz, hardcore, punk, rock, and hip-hop. And there are some doing genres that I don’t even have names for. … We’re all over the map, and it’s unbelievable. We can’t be pigeonholed.”

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Music Music Features

MonoNeon Gets His Quilt On

MonoNeon (Photo: Logan Schaal)

When I arranged to interview Dywane “MonoNeon” Thomas Jr., the Bluff City’s hardest working bass virtuoso since Duck Dunn, and an auteur in his own right, the plan was to talk about his latest album. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ll give it a listen,” and pulled up the latest release on Bandcamp: MonoNeon on Synthesizer. It’s fantastic! A tour de force of thick Moog sounds, chock-full of inventive harmonies and sonic textures that Tomita himself would envy. There was only one problem: We weren’t supposed to be talking about that new album; it was the other one, due to drop on July 26th, the one featuring both George Clinton and Mavis Staples. “Okay,” I thought, “that new album.”

It’s hard to keep up with such a prolific artist. Since 2010, he’s created at a furious pace, from his trademark YouTube videos wherein his bass mimics found spoken word clips, to one-off singles (like 2016’s “Ruff Enuff,” produced by Prince), to full-on albums — 29 of them, if you count EPs. And if some of those have a real “I built this in my bedroom” quality, the production standards and arrangements have steadily, inexorably evolved over the years.

Which brings us to Quilted Stereo, album number 30. It’s the ultimate expression of MonoNeon’s ongoing evolution and sophistication so far, without sacrificing any of his unpredictability and inventiveness. And several of the tracks have been out there already, including “Quilted,” his single featuring George Clinton.

As none other than IMAKEMADBEATS noted on social media when the track was released in March, “MonoNeon not only just dropped a song with goated funk legend George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic, the whole song is MEMPHIS AF. The hook is literally ‘LOOK AT ME MANE.’ C’mon, bruh. Mane really brought George Clinton to US. THAT’S LEGENDARY. AF. People are really out here putting on for Memphis in innovative ways … both the mainstream and the alternative.”

When I caught up with MonoNeon last week, fresh off a European tour, he spoke of his working relationship with Clinton as a very organic, low-key phenomenon. “I met George two years ago, when I sat in with him at some music festival. And although our relationship is pretty new, I go down to Tallahassee a lot, to hang with him and his family. It wasn’t forced, it just happened in a casual fashion. He’s a pretty chill person.”

The song itself is a perfectly Clinton-esque ode to flying your sartorial freak flag high, even if that means wearing suits made of multicolored quilts. It’s a sentiment that Mr. “Get Dressed” himself can obviously relate to. And yet, as MonoNeon relates, the song, co-written with his longtime producer Davy Nathan and the rapper Wax, was practically an afterthought. 

As he explains, the tune is “about my whole aesthetic right now that I’m on, with my quilted clothes. And it came about when I was doing one of my videos, where I’m just acting up, you know, talking about how clean I am. A friend of Davy’s said, ‘That could be a song!’ His name is Wax; he’s a rapper. And we started writing the lyrics. My idea was to get George to do an intro for it and to feature him on the song.”

Nathan, as it turns out, is a key player in the MonoNeon universe. His home studio in Los Angeles is where MonoNeon does most of his recording these days, but their understanding goes deeper than your typical producer-artist relationship. “I usually always write my own songs,” says MonoNeon, “but when it comes to writing songs with other people, I usually go to him. He’s one of my best friends and a mentor, and I trust him with my vision. He understands me; he understands my little quirkiness. He’s really been helping me, seeing how he works and his way of writing — just being around him has really inspired me.”

Nathan also played a major role in MonoNeon’s collaboration with Mavis Staples on the song “Full Circle.” The title was apt, given the ties between the Staples family and MonoNeon’s own father. “I always wanted to do a song with Mavis, because I grew up listening to her, and she reminded me of my grandma, but also because my dad [Dywane Thomas Sr.] played bass with her and her father Pops Staples. So I’ve always been so in love with Mavis and her singing.

“Before this album, I told Davy, ‘I want to do a song with Mavis.’ I wasn’t sure if he was going to happen or not, but I told Davy, ‘Man, I’m going to let you have this, and I’m going to let you write a song, and hopefully me and Mavis can sing on it.’ So he sent me the song ‘Full Circle,’ and it was great. They sent it to Mavis and she loved it. She even told me that she prayed and prayed about it. And so it came to be. When we met in Chicago to record her vocals, I walked in the room and got butterflies.” 

The song, with its doo-wop-ish vocal bass riff evoking some gospel funk of the last century, is a stylistic home run, but that’s just one selection from an album as eclectic as any MonoNeon’s made. There’s the sing-along jam with Clinton, but also the chugging New Wave pop of “Church of Your Heart,” the jungle beat rap of “Segreghetto,” and what may just be the sparkling sizzler of the summer, “Jelly Roll,” full of glossy synth warbles and bass stabs, its video overflowing with extras seemingly right out of the Crystal Palace roller-skating scene of some years ago. Memphis AF.

It all has MonoNeon excited to be touring with new material, which he’ll soon be doing across the U.S. next month, culminating in his appearance at the Overton Park Shell on August 30th, followed by more European dates in the fall and winter. “I’m happy to be back home, but I’m ready to go back out,” he says. “I just want to be on stage and just continue evolving and continue to leave my little stamp down here before I get up out of this world. That’s all that matters to me.”

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Music Music Features

Elvis at the Shell

Elvis backstage at the Shell in 1955 (Photo: Robert Dye Sr. / Courtesy Overton pPark Shell Archives)

It seems like this should be national news — international, even. We’re talking about Elvis Presley, after all. And the 70th anniversary of his first great triumph as a live performer is fast approaching, although anyone who saw it advertised in the paper beforehand might have gotten his name wrong. Promoting the eighth annual Country Music Jamboree scheduled for July 30, 1954, an ad in the Memphis Press-Scimitar read, “In person, the SENSATIONAL radio-recording star, Slim Whitman, with Billy Walker, Ellis Presley and many others … Tonight at Shell, $1.25 reserved.”

Whoever this “Ellis” Presley was, he shared the Overton Park Shell stage with some mighty respected company amongst country music fans. Pretty good for only the second or third public performance of his life.

As it happened, it was more than pretty good: It was earth-shattering. In Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, Peter Guralnick quotes Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore as saying, “With those old loose britches that we wore, it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mic and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.” They weren’t. After the show, dozens of teens rushed backstage for autographs from this new singer.

That validation was exactly what the young Presley needed, only 11 days after the release of his first single, “That’s All Right.” 

It’s a story that Cole Early knows well, being the content and archives manager of the Overton Park Shell, not to mention curator of the Shell’s excellent Connie Abston Archive & History Exhibition. That short set, Presley’s first live show with just his recording band of Moore and Bill Black, was akin to a big bang of pop music, in stark contrast to Presley’s one earlier attempt to sit in with a band unfamiliar with his style. 

“His first public performance ever was in a honky-tonk on Summer Avenue, and he wasn’t received well,” says Early of Presley’s previous experience. “The country music audience there at the club that night just saw this flashy kid wearing pink, and this was like a dive bar, a honky-tonk place.” Then came his appearance at the Country Music Jamboree.

Knowing that the Shell bore witness to one of rock-and-roll’s great moments, Early wanted to celebrate the memory of Elvis’ performance in style. Since the Shell already offers the Backstage Experience tour of the Connie Abston Archive, it was easy to imagine the Shell stage as the culmination of an even greater tour. What Elvis fan could resist seeing various key locations in The King’s ascension, working east from Downtown, then ending up at the very stage on which Elvis first made his mark, with music by a live band?

Done in partnership with Backbeat Tours and the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, the whole package, billed as The 70th Anniversary of Live Rock ‘n’ Roll, will be available one day only, on Saturday, July 27th. Early says the tour will “originate Downtown at the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum. Of course, they have amazing exhibits down there. Then it’s going to do an Elvis-centric tour of Memphis, though not Graceland.” Expect stops at Sun Studio, the Presley’s Lauderdale Courts apartment, Elvis’ high school, the original Lansky Bros. clothing store, and the like. “And then they’ll come here to the Shell for a custom Backstage History Experience tour with mostly the Elvis points, and then at the end, a live re-creation of that first show, right where it happened.”

Finley Watkins & His Blue Moon (of Missouri) Boys will be playing, and Early says they’re a perfect fit. “You know, Elvis was a teenager when he played at the Shell, he was 19,” he says. “So it’s great having Finley, who’s also a teenager. And yes, he will have a Scotty and a Bill with him as well. That will be super exciting because they’ll have an upright bass, like Bill Black played during the original show. The Shell’s acoustics pick up that slap back really well. So we’re really proud that the Shell is the one venue where that can be realistic, in such a way that it couldn’t be in any other room or venue.” 

For more details and tickets, see the “special events” at backbeattours.com.

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Music Music Features

‘I Am the Cosmos’ at 50

Photo: David Bell

Where the Downtown skyline overlooks the Wolf River harbor and the Mississippi River, cosmic sounds will soon reverberate from the Maria Montessori School Amphitheater, where local musicians will come together to perform the songs of the late Chris Bell at the school’s ongoing River Series. Bell, the mastermind behind Big Star and his posthumous solo record, I Am the Cosmos, was born and raised in Memphis. While he saw little commercial success in his lifetime, neither his still-growing international cult fanbase nor his family have forgotten about his acclaimed body of work. 

One of those carrying the torch for Bell is Brittain Wells, whose mother, Cindy Bell Coleman, is Bell’s younger sister. Wells now helps manage the school’s River Series concerts and wanted to honor the 50th anniversary of Bell recording the song “I Am the Cosmos,” the title track of Bell’s lone solo album. “Maria Montessori School is where our 3-year-old son attends,” Wells says. “How sweet that we can celebrate 50 years of this magical music as a family, a school family, and a Memphis community, while also raising money for Chris’ great-nephew’s school.” 

The concert, set for Saturday, June 8th, at 5 p.m., will feature Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, Van Duren, Greg Cartwright, Adam Hill, Alex Greene, Krista Wroten, and more. The Turnstyles open the show. 

A post-Big Star era Chris Bell performs an outdoor show in 1975 in London. His brother and then-manager David Bell funded the promotional trip to England. (Photo: David Bell)

Wells, 38, was born years after Bell was tragically killed at age 27 following a 1978 car wreck on Poplar Avenue. “It’s amazing. I never knew him, but I feel him all the time through his music and his fans,” Wells says. “Seeing how many people are devoted to his legacy and music makes me happy. I’m thrilled he can live on in so many ways.”

Along with “I Am the Cosmos,” Bell will also forever be entwined with the brick hallways of Ardent Studios in Memphis. That’s where the guitarist/vocalist spent countless nights co-engineering his band’s now-classic 1972 debut, Big Star’s #1 Record (Ardent/Stax Records). On that disc, the original Big Star lineup, which comprised Jody Stephens and the late Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel, crafted pristine power-pop standards like “In the Street,” “Feel,” and “Thirteen.” 

After the LP failed commercially, a distraught Bell tumultuously exited the band and even quit music for a year. But from that dark period came inspiration, and a born-again Bell ultimately landed on his feet inside Shoe Productions, where he tracked “Cosmos,” his melancholy magnum opus. It all started at Huey’s on Madison Avenue, where Bell happened to sit next to sound engineer Warren Wagner, who’d just co-founded Shoe.  

“We were sitting at the bar talking, and Chris said he liked what I put together over at Shoe,” Wagner told me while I was researching my book, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star. “Within the next day or two, Chris calls, and we end up in the studio one night with just him and me. … He made some acoustic recordings, and then we got a band over there with him. We ended up doing ‘I Am the Cosmos’ in one night. We probably didn’t do more than two takes.”

For the “Cosmos” session, Bell enlisted drummer Richard Rosebrough and bassist/keyboardist Ken Woodley of the band Alamo. Though both have since passed away, they were interviewed for There Was a Light and shared vivid memories of recording “I Am the Cosmos.” 

“Chris was fun to work with at Shoe,” the late Rosebrough recalled in 2013, two years before his death. “He always had a smile on his face, a kind of evil grin. The ‘cat that just ate the canary’ expression, but he wouldn’t talk a lot. He was this shining star over in the corner of the room. He was excited to be in a different studio with different people, playing his own songs.”

Woodley, who died last year at 74, also recalled an eccentric, witty Bell. “He was quiet and could sometimes look a bit stern. He could also be a perfectionist,” Woodley said in 2017. “He’d say, ‘I know you can do better than that.’ I’d be like, ‘Chris, I just learned it!’ But we always got along great. I wasn’t a part of the Big Star clique, the people he’d grown up with, so we were friends on a different level.” 

Though often described as introverted in daily life, he was anything but quiet in the studio, especially while tracking “I Am the Cosmos.” “Chris would turn it up just as loud as he could,” Rosebrough recalled. “He’d get this piercingly bright, brilliant sound. It’s all distorting and melting down, but it’s just a dynamite sound.”

The song still powerfully resonates for many, including Jody Stephens, who will play drums on “I Got Kinda Lost” and “Get Away” at the River Series concert. “It just comes in so heavy. Not as people define ‘heavy’ these days, but emotionally heavy — and instrumentally, too.” 

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Music Music Features

Sunset Jazz

Ted Ludwig (Photo: Kelly Hicks)

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.

Visit sunsetjazzmemphis.com for details.

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Music Music Features

Cooper-Young Porchfest ’24 Mixtape

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.

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Music Music Blog

Live at the Garden Releases 2024 Lineup

Goo Goo Dolls (Photo: Courtesy Live at the Garden)

Memphis Botanic Garden has announced the lineup for this summer’s annual Live at the Garden concert series at the Radians Amphitheater.

Country superstar Dierks Bentley kicks off the series on June 6th, followed by ’90s rock band Goo Goo Dolls on July 12th, classic rock legend John Fogerty on August 9th, Grammy-nominated country music singer-songwriter Sam Hunt on August 23th, and a co-headline concert with rock icons Styx & Foreigner on September 20th. 

“The Memphis Botanic Garden provides Mid-South music fans with an engaging entertainment experience unlike any other,” said David May, Memphis market executive for Regions Bank, the title sponsor for the concert series.

This will be Memphis Botanic Garden’s 24th summer of Live at the Garden, said Sherry May, co-director of Live at the Garden, in a press release. “We have a lot of great music planned this season, including a few newcomers to the Live at the Garden series, as well as some of our all-time fan favorites.”

All season passes and individual show tickets will go on sale Monday, April 29th, 10 a.m. Individual show TruGreen lawn tickets start at $65 and can be purchased here.

Season Lawn Passes for Live at the Garden are $345. Also offered is a Season Pit Pass, which is a general admission lawn ticket with access to the standing-room-only Pit located directly in front of the stage. Season Pit Passes are $500 per person. Season passes can be purchased here.

For the concert series, patrons are encouraged to bring lawn chairs, blankets, and coolers. Food trucks and bars are also located onsite, as well as pre-order catering. Free shuttles will run from Hilton Hotel Corporate Headquarters to the venue from 5 p.m. to midnight for each concert. 

For more information on Live at the Garden, call (901)-636-4107 or visit liveatthegarden.com or radiansamp.com.