Wednesday night’s highlights in New Orleans include guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer at Three Keys in the Ace Hotel. Ulmer’s guitar can go a lot of directions. He adopted Ornette Coleman’s theory of harmolodics to straddle the blues/jazz/rock divides, and different projects slant the components a little more one way or another.
[I was sad to wake up this morning and learn that Dave Rosser’s battle with colon cancer has come to its inevitable end. My thoughts are with his family, friends, and all the people he touched along the way. Here is an encore presentation of the story we ran in 2014 when he played The Circle Bar with his own band, The Get Busy.]
{Updated] I expect to leave the David Bowie beat shortly, but today Greg Dulli released his largely acoustic cover of “Modern Love” for download. As is so often the case when Dulli covers a song, he changes the emphasis to see what that shift produces. In this case, the roughly strummed acoustic guitar is a time zone removed from the Bowie version—so much so that I wasn’t sure at first the track released wasn’t a mislabelled file.
Our highlights for a busy week that also includes a Black and Gold kickoff party, the Felice Brothers, Richard Buckner, Real Estate, and a free tribute to David Egan in Lafayette.
The Afghan Whigs can bring a steely drizzle to any romance. The band’s classic Gentlemen—which will be reissued next month with 17 previously unreleased tracks—dramatizes the slow dawning that the relationship isn’t coming apart; it’s done, and it's your fault.
This Week's Soundtrack includes new music from The Afghan Whigs, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, and Down, as well as previews of shows by tUnE-yArDs, Little Dragon, Lydia Loveless and Prince.
For me, reuinion gigs often fail to satisfy, not because the band can't play anymore but because they're too excited that they can. There's a low, giddy buzz onstage as the band realizes, "We can still do this!" that takes the edge off. Rock 'n' roll's not about smiles. That wasn't a problem for The Afghan Whigs at Tipitina's. Friday night, they went to work with characteristic intensity as if they hadn't stopped.
