Music

RUNNING OFF TO THE TROPICS

Running with Sally invites us to storm St. Croix with them

If a video camera had followed Running With Sally from the moment the first cocktail was poured in the back of their super van on the way to the airport until they returned to DIA seven days later with no luggage and a missing lead singer, it would have been footage worthy of Almost Famous II.

Boulder-based quintet Running With Sally set off on their “Island Sally” to St. Croix just in time as an impending Colorado cold spell snapped at their heels. I was lucky enough to be invited along.

With about 1,000 lbs. of band equipment dispersed among approximately 20 pieces of luggage, the band boarded the first plane to Miami. Avery attentive and impressionable flight attendant kept the beverages flowing freely and by the time the plane landed, best wishes for the band were being broadcast throughout the cabin along with the “Please remain seated” announcements. No hotel reservations? Luckily, no problem. Although checking into the hotel room was reminiscent of seeing how many college freshmen can fit in a VW bug!

Feeling tired and a little rough, the plane ride to St. Croix that next morning was a lot quieter. This was what many refer to as the calm before the storm. Almost as soon as their feet hit the tarmac, the promotion push began.

“Our attitude is; the first day we need to make sure we get everything taken care of,” lead guitarist Doug Miers said. “How do we do it? We don’t know, but let’s just figure it out with open minds. Everybody working together and not nit picking at each other, because you are close like brothers and sisters, you know?”

It paid off tenfold. “People were like ‘holy shit—there is like a live band on the island,’” said bassist Brad Wilbur. The next day there were write-ups in the local papers, and drummer Chris Sheldon and lead singer Trevor Clendenin were off to the radio station for an interview and live performance. “Going to the radio station was fun and hearing our ad (later) on the radio while we were down at the beach was exciting,” Sheldon said. Joined by keyboardist David Miller, the band was ready for the real fun to begin.

The epic gig of the tour was a late night show at Club 54 set up after the band arrived on the island. This show had everything, including a couple of the band members being felt up by groupies while on stage, and a green room to rival that of any national touring act. “Saturday was my personal favorite day,” Wilbur said. “It was just real low key at the Kings Alley. Not many people showed up ‘cause, well, I think they were all waiting for us at 54 and that was just pure debauchery.” He laughed. “That was fun. Every gig should be like that. Girls jumping on stage with all of the extracurricular activities that make life fun.” It seemed everyone on the island showed up for that show. The band went on at midnight and by 3:30 the bar had run out of beer and all but about 12 bottles of liquor.

Down time during the trip, if you could call it that, included friendly games of coconut football, snorkeling and mooning fellow swimmers, usually with a rum drink and a camera somewhere close by.

“It was awesome,” Miers said. “Laying on the beach knowing that I didn’t have to think and knowing that I had plenty of alcohol, that there was plenty of social opportunities and checking out every situation. Full of relaxation, soaking up absolute nothingness.”

“The type of people there, they are the same kind of people that are here,” Sheldon said. “I sat on the beach with a dude that was at the same show as me at Tulagi three weeks earlier. It’s the same crowd basically just traveling around.”

“Sunday was just kind of the wind down but a lot of people showed up, you know, just to have a good time and say goodbye or whatever,” said Wilbur. “Everything was good. I had a good time.”

By Monday, the last day, the band knew many of the locals by name and people were asking for autographs and offering them places to stay. The plane home didn’t leave until around 4 p.m., and it was a morning of snorkeling at Buck Island for those who still had the strength.

“The coral reef—it was like you were sitting in an enormous fish tank. Then they dropped us on this postcard-perfect beach on the other side, where there were no people at all. It was really cool, and it was cool that was the last day; like later that day we were back in freezing cold Denver.”

Well, most of them would be back in Denver. As smooth as the trip out had been, the trip back was a bit rougher. A couple of hours stuck in the airport, rerouted flights and being placed on standby resulted in Clendenin and the luggage being left overnight in San Juan, Puerto Rico with a set of needed car keys! In typical Running With Sally style, Sheldon summed up the band’s reaction: “Stuff is going to go wrong and the whole idea is just to be able to say, ‘Okay, that went wrong. Lets just move on,’ and just try and have fun and remember that you [were] in the Caribbean.” Next time— I’m taking a video camera!

—Jessica Vogelgesang

DENVER UNDERGROUND MUSIC AWARDS

It was one of those nights in local music history: the house was jam packed, the music was damn loud, and the atmosphere was all about the love, baby. The second annual Undergound Music Awards went off without a hitch, featuring several stellar performances and a host of well-deserved awards (including, much to our surprise, a nod for Go-Go’s reporting on the music scene). At left DJs from Club Onyx and the Wreck Room pick up trophies, while on the right Christoph proudly bestows on honor upon Blister66, arguably this town’s most popular rock band du jour.

—Chris J. Magyar

photos by Anthony Seminara

BEAT DIET

It has been a while, but Saturday, November 25 saw the welcome return of Yellow 69 Productions. “Way Down Deep,” the first Yellow 69 party since “Glass Elevator” back in April, went down at Dance West, the unofficial Pearl St. homebase of Humble Souls (Boulder deejay collective).

The party featured sets from a dozen local DJs including Sante (deep progressive house/Vortex), Chandler (dark progressive trance/Mole 33), A-tak with MC Curious (atmospheric drum & bass/Roofless), Nutmeg (deep house/Soulflower ooh), U4ik organism (live pa duo/Odd-E-O Netwerx), Whitsitt (tech house/Humble Souls mEss), Scott Everett (deep house/Humble Souls mEss), The Coffin Brothers (tribal/ Humble Souls & MHHP), Tara (techno/Yellow 69 Vortex), Michael Morris (progressive deep techno/Little People Vortex), and Chance (house/Vortex). And, unlike most other parties where the music is the end-all-be-all, “Way Down Deep” also featured Kosmikaos fire dancing, Giant Dig interactive visuals, and Aquasylum, a blacklit sea creature puppet show presented by the one and only Puppetrators.

If you haven’t experienced the insanity of the Puppetrators yet, then you haven’t experienced insanity period. With characters like Customer Service (three-headed sea monster), Brotha Love (masturbating frog), Tori Spelling (Miss Piggy the seahorse), and the Virgin Larry (you get the picture), quality family entertainment is always 420% guaranteed.

--orange peel moses

For more information on Yellow 69 Productions, give their info line a buzz at 720- 406-3440.

Kantorei takes a lifelong friendship and sets it to music

High school is probably the strongest formative experience of our youth. Unfortunately, when we look at the life-shaping experiences we had, we tend to remember the bad things—the classmates who taunted us, the gym teachers who tortured us, the initial lovemaking efforts which have prevented us from enjoying a normal sexual relationship ever since. But digging deep reveals other, more pos-itive influences. Here’s one:

A group of friends in semi-formalwear—red dresses and blazers—laughs and clowns around in a large rehearsal room with portable risers and an old beatup baby grand, where two people sit hammering out “Heart & Soul” for the millionth time. The conductor, an impish man with a broad smile framed by a wooly beard, strides through the door and brings the chaos to order. The students assemble on the risers and sing through warm-ups by rote. Then the whole group forms a circle around the piano, holds hands, listens to a few words from the conductor, and thinks for a moment about the packed theater down the hall, the international tour a month away, the tough aleotoric section in the fourth song. A warm silent moment—then a performance that brings down the house.

Some people would spend their entire lives trying to duplicate the perfect harmony of such a moment. A group of friends from Cherry Creek High School took action and recreated it in the form of Kantorei, Denver’s best up-and-coming chamber choir.

It’s been many years since these members sang under Dick Larson with the CCHS Meistersingers, but each one took the experience to celebrated choral colleges and returned to Denver to teach or perform music. Melissa Menter, a St. Olaf graduate (you may know the school from its annual PBS Christmas Concert), moved here with her husband, one of these CCHS alums. They poked around the choirs existing here and found most were too big or too narrowly-programmed for their tastes, so they pulled together a group of six old friends and began rehearsing in a friend’s living room with the idea they’d perform at nursing homes and small private parties. After meeting only twice, Larson—who had left CCHS for a private school in Hawaii, but recently returned—called the fledgling choir out of the blue and offered to direct.

“We really don’t know how Dick found us,” Menter said. “That’s still a mystery.” Whatever the connection, he knew of eight other former students in the area looking for an opportunity like this, and folded them into the group. Just six weeks after that, Kantorei performed its first concert. Not long after, the group swelled to its current size of 32 singers.

A RICH TRADITION

Kantorei continues the strong Midwestern choral tradition which has saturated the Denver area. Midwestern choirs are known for per-forming populist music that’s easily accessible to the audience, sung with a deep rich tone that relies heavily on a rich bass range and muscle-voiced soprano section—think spirituals and motets. Recent incarnations of the Midwestern choir have put a strong emphasis on multicultural programming and twentieth century music, and a few conductors (notably René Clausen and Dale Warland) are pushing the Midwestern tradition in a more avant garde direction.

Larson’s biggest strength as a music director is a keen sense of programming, mixing difficult (but inevitably glorious) pieces with crowd pleasers and high-volume, raise-the-spirit-to-the-rafters arrangements that can make a group of 32 sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He’s assembled a group that’s very familiar with this style: “Virtually every member has at least some connection to the state of Minnesota,” Menter said, referring to the members’ roots as graduates of St. Olaf, Concordia, Augustana, Whartburg, Luther, and host of other Minnesota colleges known for their strong choral programs.

What Kantorei is really hoping to accomplish, though, is not a rehash of Midwestern tradition that you can hear from virtually any choir in Colorado. “I think we have our own niche,” said Menter. “Ars Nova and the St. Martin’s Chamber Choir both tend to do very focused concerts. We prefer to present a broader survey of music.”

This broad survey will be on display in March, when the choir puts on a program of strictly international music, singing in ten different languages. One piece from Australia uses overtones to create a sound much like a digeridoo just by using the human voice.

A LIVING SOUND

December 1, Kantorei put on its annual concert with the (current) CCHS Meistersingers at Bethany Lutheran. Larson was in true form, warning the packed house in his patented, meandering way that the John Paynter “Exultet Coelum Laudibus” is contemporary choral music at its most contentious. To open with such a difficult piece clearly had both the choir and the audience intimidated: the singers were a bit timid when attacking the initial chord clusters and had some trouble holding pitch. They quickly regrouped, however, and stretched their faces in a mixture of effort and anguish to rein the notes in. To be completely fair, “Exultet” is an 8.3 on the Richter scale of musical difficulty; Kantorei didn’t make it look easy, but they made it nonetheless.

When they settled into Howell’s lilting “Long, Long Ago” there was palpable relief, both from the singers and the listeners. Kantorei relaxed and found its unity, floating feather-like from chord to chord. With the chaos of Paynter over with, the choir’s blend came through more clearly: not perfect, but strong and obviously practiced. The tenors occasionally overpowered the altos (but they wouldn’t be tenors if they didn’t do that from time to time, now, would they?) and the sopranos thinned out in the tip-top register. Otherwise, Kantorei is well on its way to a magnificent sound.

The Meisters sang between sets, providing a pleasant echo to Kantorei’s music— not as rich, strong, or precise as the leading voice, but a recognizable copy all the same. They lacked confidence in all the ways you’d expect a high school choir to lack confidence (you can clap louder, guys), but did have one near-upstage of Kantorei with a surprising and flawless performance of Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.”

Kantorei closed the pre-carolling section of the concert with “Hope for Resolution,” an odd but effective piece which pairs a medieval chant with an African song. The singers clearly enjoyed performing this one, throwing passion into the medieval section and bounce into the drum-backed African part. There was a tangible shiver in the room when the piece came, as promised, to a rousing resolve.

Choral music, more than any other form of Western art music, plants images in the audience’s mind. When a choir has done its job well, the music opens up, and you can hear 32 people up on stage, speaking to you. What Kantorei speaks between the lines and inside the blend is a narra-tive of comraderie, a pulse of unity that is the place where music begins and ends. It’s a pretty picture, even idyllic enough to make you forget all that other crap you learned in high school.

—Chris J. Magyar

CD Reviews

A good CD reviewer doesn’t know anything about intimidation until he or she has learned just a little about jazz. Not to say that I’m even a good CD reviewer, but I’ve learned just enough about jazz to be very afraid of its labyrinthine culture and history, and blown away by its highly technical play on the formulas of music theory. Normally, when I encounter a jazz musician aside from the few I’ve managed to digest (Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderly, Clark Terry, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald), I run and hide like a great big pussy-wimp.

So when The Flow, a band I confess I haven’t heard of before now, opens its live CD with a two-minute jazz intro that flutters and meanders like any good cut off the Starbucks-ready-made rack, I put my running shoes on. Just as I’m on my way out the door to a jazz-free sanctuary, a funny thing happens: “Bisco.” The second-track jumps head-on into a disco beat with pop-friendly lyrics and a hip-swinging theme; the sax improvs don’t scare me quite so much.

The Flow is aptly named. After leaving the world of traditional jazz behind, they hit the following genres, in order, one-per-song: disco, calypso, reggae ballad, samba, ‘70s funk, hillbilly bluegrass, Belafonte island, and back to (somewhat) recognizable jazz. This I can handle: there’s no post-bebop modal harmony structures to deal with or Coltraineish solos with impossible subtleties to discern. Nope, this is just damn fun jazz.

Ted Moss’ lead vocals aren’t suited to all the above genres—”Bisco” is one stand-out failure vocally (even though it has the guts to combine musical styles that, on paper, mix as well as soy milk and grape-fruit juice). The instrumental work is all impressive, however, and Moss does pull off some of the tunes admirably. Besides, you can’t ask too much of a vocalist on a live recording ... it’s not like The Flow is trying to resurrect Billy Holiday. If you like your jazz super-charged with excitement, The Flow is for you. Check our concert calendar; they’re playing all over the place this month. I’ll be there, and without my running shoes. B

—Chris J. Magyar

It’s no secret that we’re crazy for jam music in Colorado. Naturally, several music venues have catered to this taste, but none so prominently as Quixote’s True Blue Cafe in Aurora. When Quixote’s features a band for several nights in a row at relatively high ticket prices (as they’ve done for such jam champions as Stir Fried on numerous occasions), fans and phans alike perk their ears. This month, Gregg’s Eggs—a Greg Anton creation featuring some tunes by Grateful Dead alum Robert Hunter— takes the stage for three consecutive nights at Quixote’s.

Unfortunately, if this live CD is any indi-cation, these eggs are as raw, slimy, and lifeless as the title promises. The musi-cianship isn’t bad necessarily, but if one could catch salmonella from boredom, this band would be leaving a Superfund site in its wake. More Floyd than Dead Head, the music plods along at a tempo so relaxed the songs (unlabelled on the promo copy we received) could have all been titled “Counting Sheep.” Normally I’d allow that bands this skilled yet unen-gaging make for, at the very least, good background music; however, one spin of this CD turned our offices into Sleeping Beauty’s castle. (A few staff members request that a Prince Charming rectify the situation ... send a head shot first, please.)

Now, if you’re a fan of music that stays out of the way, merely creating a texture of noise over which you can dream up new ways to make bongs, then Gregg’s Eggs will do you well. Those of us who enjoy listening to music will continue searching elsewhere. C-

--Chris J. Magyar