Tag: STAX Academy

Stars Under the Stars: The 2018 Levitt Shell Summer Schedule

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date April 12, 2018

Memphians may anticipate the onset of summer weather with a dollop of dread, but one institution that makes summer downright glorious here is the Orion Free Concert Series at the Levitt Shell, now in its 10th year. Stretching out on the grass with family and friends under the open sky is a time-honored way to beat the heat, since before the days of air conditioning. And the eclectic approach the Levitt Shell brings to curating acts guarantees that there will be something for everyone. Today we announce the full lineup for the summer season.

I asked Anne Pitts, executive director of the Levitt Shell, a bit about the performers they’ve chosen, and one show in particular sprang to mind. “Paul Thorn has been a staple for us at the Shell,” says Pitts. “We love having him. He is a crowd favorite, and he’s also just a really innovative artist.”

The Tupelo, Mississippi, native mixes rootsy rock-and-roll with story-telling that builds an uncanny intimacy with audiences. And now he’s collaborating with some true icons of the South. “He and the Blind Boys of Alabama teamed up last year, and they’ve done a record together as the Mission Temple Fireworks Revival,” says Pitts. “When I heard about that, I thought that would be an amazing live show. The Levitt Foundation, which is the national foundation that helps guide all the different Levitt pavilions across the country, sponsors a Levitt national tour each year. We all get together and we nominate different groups that we would love to see make the rounds of all the pavilions. So we nominated [Paul Thorn and the Blind Boys] and the Levitt Foundation looked into it and the stars aligned.”

Brian Owens

While Pitts notes that picking out one group is like “choosing your favorite children,” there are a few in the lineup that stand out. “Mindi Abair is an incredibly talented artist, a saxophone player, and her band is just out of this world. It’s one of those huge bands. That’s gonna be an amazing show. War and Treaty, we’re really excited about them. Their career is skyrocketing, and they’re getting in all the major festivals. And then Brian Owens and the Deacons of Soul: We actually had them last year, when a band had to cancel for health reasons and we had to scramble, and we found Brian Owens. He put on just a killer show. It’s a great big soul band, with a great big sound, and he has this tremendous voice. And, because he didn’t get the full headline experience last year, being a last minute addition, we wanted to make sure that we gave him a nice spotlight this year.”

Meta and the Cornerstones

Mike Farris

Liz Vice

“Meta and the Cornerstones is one act that I’m really looking forward to. They’re a reggae band I saw in New York six or seven years ago, and we booked them that next year. But they never get down to this region, so it’s very very rare to be able to pull them in. Mike Farris and the Roseland Rhythm Revue is a big favorite here. Ray Wylie Hubbard, I’ve been a fan of his for decades. And then Liz Vice is another one. She’s getting a lot harder to book, so we’re thrilled that we were able to make it happen.”

Harlan T. Bobo

The lineup is also sprinkled with some local acts, thanks to the Memphis Music Series, sponsored by Regional One. Though Harlan T. Bobo now resides in France, Memphis still claims him, and he will surely bring some surprises to his Shell performance. “We love Harlan,” notes Pitts. Other local talent will include the Stax Music Academy, which continues to stun audiences with the professionalism of their students. More locals will be featured in the fall season, yet to be announced.

Along with the music, the Levitt Shell will be enriching the summer concert experience with additional features. Amplify Memphis, for example, exposes the large crowds to different nonprofits from around the city. “We have a wonderful partner with it in Volunteer Odyssey, who have created a network for people to discover nonprofit organizations and how to get involved and give back to those organizations through volunteer service,” says Pitts. “So every Thursday during the summer and fall concert series, we’ll be highlighting a different nonprofit. They’ll range from larger organizations like the YMCA or MIFA or St. Jude, who may have under-recognized programs, to smaller organizations like Dorothy Day House, the Urban Bicycle Food Ministry, Room in the Inn, Clean Memphis, Refuge Memphis, and the Memphis Athletic Ministry.”

“Also,” adds Pitts, “we’re trying to reduce traffic in Overton Park. Their pedestrian-friendly campaign makes it easier for people to cross over Poplar or the Parkway into the park.” To that end, the Shell will continue its Bike Valet service. This year, checking your bike will come with extra incentives. “We’ll have giveaways each night, with free bike helmets and bike lights and fun little things that you always need when you ride your bike around the city.”

Finally, food and drink will have a larger presence this year. “We’re gonna be doing food truck rallies on Sundays, where we’ll have three or four food trucks out during the concerts on those nights. And we work with TapBox with our beer sales every year, and now they’ve expanded, so for the first time ever, you can buy wine and mixed drinks at the Shell.”

The Shell has always prided itself on creating a family-friendly experience. “On Sundays, we have our family series, where we provide extra activities for kids,” says Pitts. “We partner with different organizations like the Memphis Public Library and Carpenter Art Gardens and the Memphis Botanic Garden to provide fun art-related activities for kids before the concerts begin.”

With all of that, not to mention great music, why would you ever go home?

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Levitt Shell’s Summer 2018 Schedule

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Thursday, May 31 Mindi Abair

Friday, June 1 Madisen Ward & the Mama Bear

Saturday, June 2 Banditos

Sunday, June 3 Dustbowl Revival

Thursday, June 7 The War and Treaty

Friday, June 8th The Stone Foxes

Saturday, June 9 Nikki Lane

Sunday, June 10 Brian Owens & the Deacons of Soul

Thursday, June 14 The Iguanas

Friday, June 15 La Misa Negra retro-future cumbia,

Saturday, June 16 Meta and the Cornerstones

Sunday, June 17 Harlan T. Bobo

Thursday, June 21 The Steel Wheels

Friday, June 22 Mike Farris & the Roseland Rhythm Revue

Saturday, June 23 Liz Vice

Sunday, June 24 Ray Wylie Hubbard

Thursday, June 28 Patriotic Pops

Friday, June 29 Paul Thorn and the Blind Boys of Alabama

Saturday, June 30 Stax Academy Summer Grand Finale Concert

Sunday, July 1 No Concert (Rain Date for Stax)

Thursday, July 5 Jonny P

Friday, July 6 Rev. Sekou

Saturday, July 7 Seratones

Sunday, July 8 Yemen Blues Band

Thursday, July 12 JD McPherson

Saturday, July 14 Sammy Miller & the Congregation

Sunday, July 15 Peterson Brothers

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Stars at the Shell 2018 – ticketed fund-raising concerts:

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Thursday, May 10 Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real

Friday, July 13 Robert Cray with Cedric Burnside

Saturday, September 29 Lake Street Dive

Tags Anne Pitts, Blind Boys of Alabama, Harlan T Bobo, Levitt Shell Summer Schedule 2018, Liz Vice, Meta and the Cornerstones, Mike Farris, Paul Thorn, STAX Academy

Music Music Features

Booker T. Jones at the Halloran Centre

Post author By Chris Shaw
Post date September 8, 2016

CREDIT: Piper Ferguson

This Saturday night, Memphis music legend Booker T. Jones will kick off the inaugural On Stage at the Halloran Centre series. Most known as the keyboard player for the widely popular Stax band Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Jones has been the recipient of five Grammy awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Musicians Hall of Fame. In addition to that impressive resume, Jones has produced albums for Rita Coolidge, Bill Withers, and Willie Nelson, and played on albums by Ray Charles and Neil Young.

Joining Jones on stage at the Halloran Centre will be three handpicked horn players from the Stax Music Academy. The players will join on the songs “Mr. Big Stuff” and “Respect Yourself,” and classmates of the students selected to participate will have the opportunity to sit in on the sound check before the show. Stax Musical Director Paul McKinney said this is a great learning experience for the students at Stax.

Piper Ferguson

“Any time our students have the opportunity to interact with original Stax Records artists, it’s like something magical happens,” McKinney said.

“But for three of our students to perform in public on stage with an artist of Booker’s caliber and status in the music world will be life-changing for them.”

Individual tickets are available for $35.00 and can be picked up at the Halloran Centre or by calling their ticket office. Tickets are also available at the Booksellers of Laurelwood and through Ticketmaster. Purchasing tickets in advance is recommended.

Tags Booker T. Jones, Halloran Centre, Memphis Music, STAX Academy, The Halloran Centre

Music Music Features

On Beale

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date July 17, 2014

CREDIT: H. Michael Miley

H. Michael Miley

Beale Street

You can put my name on the list of locals who have casually maligned Beale Street. But I’m here to eat words. Here goes: I love Beale Street.

The stereotype is familiar: Either rock blues played by heavy-set white guys in bowling shirts or throngs of black kids who don’t care to hear any blues. It’s true that there are sub-ideal bands and some nights when not everybody belongs. But this dismissive view of Beale is cheap shorthand and a sad way to miss out on an important part of Memphis’ economy, culture, and good times.

I recently went to Beale four times in 10 days and had a blast every time. Milling through the crowds at B.B. King’s Blues Club on a Friday at lunchtime, you hear accents from all over the world. It’s true that the British, Japanese, and continentals were not hearing Sleepy John Estes or Mr. King in his prime. People get hung up on “authenticity” and miss things like the Stax Academy Alumni Band’s residency at B.B. King’s. I went back to B.B.’s and heard Preston Shannon play his regular Wednesday night gig.

Shannon reminded me of the whole spectrum of a blues performance. I had been guilty of using the cheap shorthand, of using a bad example (Stevie Ray Vaugnabees) to define contemporary blues. Shannon is a moving guitarist and vocalist who’s been active since the 1970s and on Beale for almost a quarter century. He works within a tradition of showmanship that makes each note meaningful: a mix of human spiritualism and worldly desire. At his best, he works himself and the audience into something like a funky, social, religious experience. People come from Japan. Why don’t we come from Collierville or Central Gardens?

I walked down Beale several times over those days and saw throngs of people having good times. I heard music I liked: C-3 Blues Band at Rum Boogie and the McDaniel Band at the Blues Hall.

But there is one thing we should fix: The bars are in an outdoor volume war. Loudspeakers are set up, one after the other, down the street, each playing its own music. There was a moment when I saw a man who had clearly traveled here to listen to music. He was aghast at the cacophony of competing sound systems. You couldn’t hear anything. He was furious. So was I. The music that draws people to Beale did not have giant, solid-state amplifiers. Huge amplifiers are used as weapons by the military and are the worst thing about live music.

Beale, like Overton Square, is on the good foot. Beale Street Landing, the new Orpheum development, the new Hard Rock Café, and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame herald an even better experience for Memphis’ beloved musical pilgrims. We should not treat them like Central American dictators and blast them with unhealthy levels of noise. Put musicians out front, singing and playing unamplified instruments.

The city or merchants association should enforce the noise ordinance’s prohibition against loudspeakers for promotion. We should also amend the current ordinance to allow for drums, singing, and acoustic instruments in the entertainment districts like Beale, Broad Avenue, and Overton Square.

One solution was heard at A. Schwab for the Beale Street Caravan fund raiser, where the Bluff City Backsliders played a mostly unplugged set behind Jason Freeman’s powerful voice. The sound perfectly filled the room. You could hear it if you wanted to listen to every note, but you could also think or say hello to someone. Sleepy John never had a 300-watt amp.

Last weekend, I was in Nashville on Broadway. When you pass a bar like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge or Robert’s Western World, the band is in the window, and you can hear what they are doing inside. It makes you want to go in, or it allows you to go hear something else. But you are not subjected to noise pollution the whole time you’re on the street.

Beale’s energy is so much more fun than Broadway. Beale is rowdy and wrong in just the right way. You can go to Nashville and walk your granny down the street for a cotton candy. That’s sorta fun, but Beale is the place for cutting loose and showing off your soul. Even standing in the deafening and absurd contrast of what is and what it was, I love Beale Street. We should all go more often.

Tags bb-kings, bb-kings-blues-club, Beale Street, blues, Memphis, Preston Shannon, Rum Boogie, STAX Academy

Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Grammy GPS at Stax: Third Man Records’ Ben Swank

Post author By Joe Boone
Post date October 21, 2013

Grammy GPS as Stax Academy

The Recording Academy Memphis Chapter is hosting another GRAMMY GPS seminar on Saturday on October 26th at Stax Music Academy. The Memphis Chapter is celebrating its 40th anniversary. The series brings top-level music industry folks to Memphis for informative sessions on succeeding in music. For more information, go to grammygps.com

This go-round features the CEO and co-founder of Sub Pop, Jonathan Poneman. Sub Pop is closely associated with the Seattle sound as the label for Nirvana. Sub Pop maintains an active roster of bands including the Shins, Mudhoney, and others.

Also on the bill for Grammy GPS is Ben Swank, co-founder of Third Man Records along with Jack White. Third Man settled in Nashville in 2009. The label is home to White’s output with the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, and the Dead Weather, in addition to an impressive roster of new and established artists.

We spoke with Swank about making it in music and loving the music more than the money.

[jump]

Flyer: What advice do you have for aspiring artists and producers?
Swank: I advocate the DIY approach for a record label. I tell people who want to give us a demo, “Why don’t you have a look at pressing your own records and see how you do putting your own record out there. The music industry is like the Wild West. You can make up your own script and your own rules. There are obviously limitations to that, but if you have an interesting sound or approach and you know who you want to sell to, there’s no reason why you can’t be successful with it. You have to temper what your ideas of success are and set reasonable goals. You’ve got to be into it for the love and the pursuit of it.

Flyer: Some have said that White makes music that’s too expensive, given his limited-edition vinyl releases. Is that true?
I really take issue with that. We have a limited-edition component to just about everything that we do. That’s because we know our fan base, and a lot of them are collectors. But every release has a standard black vinyl release. If you just ewant the music, it’s a standard-priced LP or 45. Everything we release we release in a way that anyone that wants it can get it. Digitally or on vinyl. We have a bespoke quality to what we do. For instance, the Great Gatsby limited edition series. But we didn’t make a very high margin off of that: those were hand-fabricated items. We did them in such a limited number, that we didn’t reap a large profit. But it can be a great way to draw attention to what you are doing.

GRAMMY GPS:
A Road Map For Today’s Music Biz
Saturday, October 26, 2013, at 11 a.m.
Stax Music Academy
926 East McLemore Ave

Tags Grammy GPS, Memphis Music, NARAS, STAX Academy

Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Post author By Tim Sampson
Post date October 17, 2013

CREDIT: Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau

First of all, thanks to all of those who came out for the SOUTH MEMFix event this past Saturday at the corner of Mississippi Boulevard and Walker Street. Despite the midday rain, which later gave way to beautiful blue skies, the event proved that people could come together and make things work. Black, white, young, old, gay, straight — it didn’t matter. People from all walks of life came out to see the vision of what that iconic intersection could once again become — alive with retail businesses, pedestrian traffic, artists, live music, and other new life.

Courtesy Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau

It was downright utopian. Even some of the police officers were dancing. There was a hot tamale wagon with the Delta delicacies steaming away in crock pots. There was an art gallery. There was the Green Machine, a bus that services food-desert neighborhoods with fresh produce. There was jazz, hip-hop, hard rock, and soul music. There were neighborhood folks, politicians, community activists, and leaders. There were actors and actresses. There were street banners and fire trucks and barbecue and catfish and on and on and on. But mainly it was the people who made it so much fun and so successful — people with no agenda other than to try to make Memphis better.

Now juxtapose that with the petty, partisan civil war going on in Washington, D.C., between those for universal health care and the Tea Party diehards who, in the “name of God,” care more about their perverse personal agendas than they care about whether people are able to eat and educate their children.

I have purposely tried to pay as little attention to that as possible, even though the shutdown and now the looming default pose threats of whatever kind of potential chaos might happen if Ted Cruz and his ilk don’t pull their heads out of their butts and work things out with those across the aisle. It’s just too much and too frustrating.

But leaving the SOUTH MEMFix event Saturday and watching a couple of minutes of news about Washington gave me mixed feelings — kind of like I wanted to laugh, cry, throw up, and keep my head high (no, not that kind of high!) because if one small community and some hard-working volunteers could make something really wonderful happen, why can’t these religious zealots stop hating Barack Obama long enough to get something done?

Oh, I know it sounds very naive and the comparison is a real stretch, and maybe the tamales had gone to my head, but it really did strike me as odd and ironic and reminded me that sometimes it takes real grass roots to make anything meaningful happen. That’s one of the reasons I love Newark mayor and Senate hopeful Cory Booker so much. He gets that. And I hope he is president one day.

But back to MEMFix. This is a program of the Mayor’s Innovation Delivery Team, which is funded by the Bloomberg Foundation. There have been a couple of previous such events but I missed them. I won’t miss another one. It is now a model that other communities and organizations in Memphis can use to do their own things. And I hope others in Memphis take advantage of it. I know it’s meant to be more of an economic growth tool than a festival or block party, but SOUTH MEMFix definitely had the feel of all of the above. If that could happen every Saturday at different locations around the city and start attracting huge crowds, it would be such a success story for Memphis. And every community in Memphis has a story, some history that is worth noting and celebrating. Similar events have taken place on Cleveland Street in the Crosstown neighborhood and on Broad Avenue in the Binghampton neighborhood. Both had great success and resulted in new, permanent improvements to the streets and well as new businesses moving in to stay. Truth be told, it is much like what the Cooper-Young Festival did for the Cooper-Young neighborhood.

I’m thinking now about blocks on Danny Thomas Boulevard in North Memphis leading from downtown and Uptown into Frayser, where my family lived when I was born and where my grandparents lived for decades. I’m thinking about areas in Whitehaven, where my family lived when I was in elementary school. About Bellevue between Soulsville, USA, and farther south toward Graceland, where there is so much potential and so much character. The goal isn’t to take away that character and replace it with big-box stores; it’s to celebrate that history and character for what it is and breathe some new life into it. Drive down Madison in Midtown, take a look at the blocks where it intersects with Cleveland, and tell me that area couldn’t be the next cool place to be.

In Memphis, it’s all about authenticity. No, we are not Atlanta or Nashville or Dallas and thank goodness for that. People from all over the world come to Memphis because it has soul and feeling and guts and we don’t need any glitzy skyscrapers to make us better. We just need to take what we have and be proud of it.

Tags Soulsville, South MEMfix, STAX Academy